John Lennon Memorial Garden in Durness, Scotland

The John Lennon Memorial Garden is part of the grounds of Durness Village Hall in Sutherland, on Scotland's north coast. The village gardening group made it in 2002, and three stone slabs in the garden carry lines from "In My Life". It marks the summers Lennon spent in Durness as a boy, from about the age of nine.

Why Durness has a Lennon garden

Lennon's aunt Mater married Robert "Bert" Sutherland as her second husband. He was a dentist and owned a croft at Sangomore, above Sango Bay. From about the age of nine, Lennon went north with his cousin Stanley Parkes to spend the summer holidays there. Sources disagree on when the visits ended. The village hall gives only the starting age, and the Northern Times says the trips continued until he was 15.

Parkes died in 2016. Looking back, he said his cousin loved the wide open country and the crofting way of life. They fished and hunted, and they walked in the hills.

The croft house no longer stands. The replacement house has a plaque on its gable saying Lennon spent many childhood holidays there. It isn't at the garden, so it's worth a second stop in the village.

The garden and its three stones

The local gardening group laid out the garden beside the village hall, and in August 2002 BBC's Beechgrove Garden broadcast the work. The main feature is a set of three large stone slabs cut with lines from "In My Life". The village hall says further Beatles lyrics sit among the plants, and benches look out toward the mountains. Eirian Evans photographed the stones for Geograph in July 2022, so the garden was still there then.

No one is named as the designer or carver in the sources we found. No opening ceremony is recorded either.

"In My Life" and Durness

The song came out on Rubber Soul in 1965, and the Durness link is a story rather than a documented fact. As Wikipedia and the Northern Times tell it, the song grew out of a poem about Durness that Lennon wrote as a teenager on holiday there. Most of the poem is said to have been lost once he and Paul McCartney worked it into a song. It is the reason the garden uses this song, but it rests on recollection, not on a surviving manuscript we could find.

The 1969 return

Lennon came back to the Highlands in the summer of 1969 with Yoko Ono, his son Julian and Ono's daughter Kyoko. On 1 July 1969 he drove his Austin Maxi off the road. Wikipedia and the Northern Times place the crash by Loch Eriboll. Lennon, Ono and Kyoko were stitched up at Lawson Memorial Hospital in Golspie, and Julian was treated for shock. Afterwards Lennon gave up driving.

Durness kept the connection going. In 2007 the village held the John Lennon Northern Lights Festival. According to the Northern Times, Lennon wanted to buy the Durness Estate shortly before he was killed in 1980.

Other places tied to Lennon's life are on the map and in the memorials list. They include his childhood home at Mendips in Liverpool.