Enagh Cemetery
Alexander Gilfillan: A surgeon of the Arctic – who carried a secret in his coffinHidden within the leafy, overgrown plot of Enagh graveyard just outside Derry lies the grave of Alexander Gilfillan, a naval surgeon who sailed with Sir John Franklin on an ill-fated voyage in search of the North Pole. Returning home a broken man, he carried with him a mysterious bundle of deep-brown planks – wood he declared held a secret he would never reveal.
Born in 1793 in Gorticross, Gilfillan trained as a doctor and joined the Royal Navy by 1813. In 1818 he served as an assistant surgeon aboard HMS Trent, part of Franklin’s polar expedition. But the journey ended in disaster – stranded in icestorms and struck by snow blindness, he returned home with sight lost in one eye and health in decline.
By 1830, he arrived in Derry looking gaunt and ill, carrying not only his surgeon’s trunk but those strange wooden planks. Instructing a local carpenter, he had made his own coffin from this wood – lignum vitae, known as the “wood of life” – and claimed it held a secret too personal to share. When his wife later passed, the coffin was exhumed: still in immaculate condition, as if newly sealed.
Gilfillan died in 1838 at age 45, on the same day as his father (who foretold of this bizarre occurrence), and was buried together with him – his final secret still hidden within the wood of life.
In a tranquil corner of Enagh Lough Cemetery lies a tale of ambition, tragedy, and an enduring mystery. Sometimes, the greatest stories are those that remain untold.