ABSTRACT
The two monuments examined here under the rubric ‘Aberration’ – Hamilton Mausoleum and the McCaig Tower – in some ways give us a retread of the themes offered up earlier as ‘prototypes’. Just as in that chapter, the first of the monuments here is in ‘Roman’ rather than ‘Greek’ style, and the other is an idiosyncratic, or at least, unresearched and eclectic version of medieval/Gothic. The major difference in the case of these two later buildings here – Hamilton Mausoleum in mid- and the McCaig Tower in Oban in late-nineteenth century – is that they are built in the period when a tradition of hero buildings has already been established, and therefore their relation to that tradition is necessarily more complex.
