National Monument, Edinburgh

The National Monument, Edinburgh is Scotland's memorial to those who died in the Napoleonic Wars.

The monument is on the top of Calton Hill, just to the east of central Edinburgh. It was designed by Charles Robert Cockerell and his collaborator William Henry Playfair and is modelled upon the Parthenon in Athens. Construction started in 1822.

The monument is famous for being only partially complete.Fact|date=September 2007 According to documentary evidenceFact|date=September 2007, the monument was intended to be a full replica of the Parthenon, but money ran out midway through construction and only one side of the structure was completed. The city of Glasgow reportedly offered to cover the costs but Edinburgh was too proud to accept the other city's charity.Fact|date=September 2007 As a result, the monument is often given the nickname "Edinburgh's Disgrace" or "Edinburgh's Folly".

However, some of the surviving plans for the monument by Cockerell and Playfair depict only the existing twelve columns, suggesting that the monument never reached an advanced stage of planning due to the lack of funds and political will.

Subsequent attempts to "complete" the National Monument have never borne fruit for reasons of either cost or lack of local enthusiasm. A proposal in 2004 [http://edinburghnews.scotsman.com/edinburgh.cfm?id=445492004] was met with a very mixed reception.

External links

* [http://scotland.archiseek.com/edinburgh/caltonhill.html Archiseek - National Monument]
* [http://www.edinburgharchitecture.co.uk/national_monument.htm Edinburgh Architecture - National Monument]
* [http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/autumn_05/articles/fehl.html 'A Building from which Derived "All that is Good": Observations on the Intended Reconstruction of the Parthenon on Calton Hill' by Marc Fehlmann in the online-art magazine Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide]