Robert Paterson (1716–1801), known as "Old Mortality", was a stonemason who took it upon himself to travel around lowland Scotland carving inscriptions for the unmarked graves of Covenanters martyred in the 17th century.

Walter Scott made him a principal character in his novel Old Mortality (1816).

Through the patronage of Sir Thomas Kirkpatrick, whose cook he had married, he obtained the lease of a quarry at Gatelawbridge, but in 1745 his house was plundered by the retreating Jacobites, and Paterson himself, a pronounced Cameronian, was carried off a prisoner.

He died in poverty at Caerlaverock in 1801, and a stone to his memory was erected by Scott's publishers in 1869 in the churchyard.

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