00:00Hello everybody, my name is Peter, I am one of the site assistants at the Low Parks Museum
00:10and welcome to the Hamilton Mausoleum.
00:12This was the final resting place of the Duke of Hamilton and his ancestors and for his
00:17predecessors and for his descendants.
00:20Unfortunately the building is now free of Dukes because of the subsidence, the bodies
00:25were removed from the building in 1921-1922.
00:28The building itself is now remarkably standing 18 feet lower than when it was completed but
00:35has stayed intact because one of the reasons is there is actually nothing holding it together.
00:39This is the finest Lego set as we see on the tours.
00:42It is a remarkable building, we have various people requesting to film in it, we have various
00:50people requesting to record in it.
00:52A lot of people really enjoy using the sound within the chapel, the upstairs area which
00:57is open today because of the acoustics in there.
01:01We have an 18 second echo, 9 seconds of sound and then the 9 seconds is the echo reverberating
01:08after it which is why we have had people from Tommy Smith to Francis MacDonald recording
01:16within the building.
01:17We have visitors from all over the world come to the mausoleum and are always bowled over
01:23by the engineering, the incredible sight and sound of the building.
01:28The doors that are now on the chapel are the wooden doors, the replacement doors installed
01:33in the 1920s.
01:34For the same reason that the body is being removed, they removed the original doors into
01:39the chapel.
01:40They were bronze.
01:42They are inspired by the gibbety doors in Florence at the 15th century baptistry.
01:48Three panels per door, they each weigh three quarters of a tonne and when the bronze doors
01:54were in place, that is when the mausoleum reputedly had its echo of up to 30 seconds.
01:59It is not just the finest private mausoleum you will set foot into, it is also one of
02:03the finest, if not the finest, masonic temple you will set foot into.
02:08The lot of the mausoleum you have got to preface by saying, so the story goes, because there
02:12are so many tales and legends built up about this place.
02:16You are looking really at a 20 year project down here, from when Duke Alexander prepared
02:21his own original sketches, because he was very much inspired by the Pantheon with a
02:25bit of Hadrian's tomb thrown in for good measure.
02:27He did his sketches and then gave them out to the various architects of the day.
02:32David Hamilton was the architect, a very very distant relation, who won the contract, however
02:39he died quite soon into the project itself.
02:43So you are basically starting around 1840, you start then getting to 1842-1844, the original
02:48planning and working getting done.
02:50Hamilton dies, a couple of other architects come in and go.
02:54It is David Bryce, a Burnham Bryce architect in Edinburgh, who comes in and sees the building
02:59through to its bitter end.
03:01The downstairs level, the crypt, was ready for the bodies to be brought over from the
03:07old collegiate church beside the palace in 1852.
03:11Duke Alexander himself died not long after that, and was installed in a sarcophagus in
03:16the chapel behind me at the upstairs level.
03:18Unfortunately the building is still not finished, we get some sources saying 1856, some saying
03:231858, until the building is actually fully completed, and the final build I have seen
03:29from Burnham Bryce architects in 1860 is around 28, 28 and a half thousand pounds.
03:34The story we hear about young Duke William about the building is, he basically said,
03:39look, get them in, get it finished, that's my inheritance that's getting spent.
03:43Which is why the building was actually never finished, or completed to the way probably
03:47Alexander wanted it to be.
03:49So whether there was going to be statues, frescoes going on in the building, or was
03:52it going to be a full proper replica of the Pantheon, who knows?
03:56It was all in the mind, as it were, for Duke Alexander.
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