Letter: Burns neglect

While not wishing to disparage the Scottish Government's announcement of an extra £1.084 million towards the completion of the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum project in Alloway to achieve an "integrated Burns experience" (your report, 7 September), I am troubled by the blind eye that appears to be turned to other Burns-related treasures.

I recently had a "disintegrated Burns experience" in Bathgate. It was of a once-beautiful marble statue of Burns and Highland Mary. This statue, gifted to Bathgate Town Council in the 1950s and wantonly vandalised 20 years later, still awaits restoration.

A small group of dedicated people in Bathgate have been pleading for funds for two years now. But, apart from support from local MSPs and a few other worthies, they've be crying in the wilderness. No one in Holyrood seems in the least bit interested.

The Bathgate statue deserves to be regarded as a national treasure. It is the only marble statue of Burns/Mary Campbell in the world. If Patrick McCarthy carved it before 1879 – as well he might have – it would also emerge as the oldest marble statue of Burns to have been sculpted by a Scot, as it would predate William Grant Stevenson's marble statue of Burns in Kilmarnock.

I am staggered to think that Scotland has become so dismissive of many of its heritage artworks at an official level. The trashing of Scotland's treasures is being perpetuated by a failure in high places to rally to the cause of an artefact as significant as this statue.

Gordon Ashley

Ringwood East

Australia