set. The City of Edinburgh Music School commissioned him to write Mackay's Memoirs for the school's centenary in 1999. It was a piece for chamber orchestra featuring Great Highland bagpipes and harp. Mackay's Memoirs was played at the celebrations that took place in Princes Street Gardens, alongside the opening of the new Scottish Parliament in July 1999 and at the 2004 Mòd He was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma in November 2000. Over the following eight months he received both chemotherapy and radiotherapy. In the following years his treatments would also include several major operations. After this diagnosis, he recorded his fourth album Glen Lyon which was first released on the Foot Stomping' label in 2002. It was a cycle of Gaelic songs, his mother singing and he accompanying her. Woven into this is a sample of Peter Stewart, his great-great-grandfather singing in 1910, taken from a wax cylinder recording. He married Kirsten in February 2002. Following a relapse and an unexpected splenectomy in January of that year, Bennett proposed; the ceremony took place in her mother's kitchen. The couple moved back to Mull. Illness left him feeling disconnected from his music and one day, in a fit of rage, he destroyed many of his instruments − pipes, fiddles and whistles. Horrified at what he had done, he was unable to bring himself to speak to anyone for the following two days. The final album that he recorded, Grit, was released in October 2003 on Real World Records. It had been recorded while he was ill, and he was unable to play his instruments. He brought together samples of unaccompanied traditional Scottish folk singers, his own bagpipe and fiddle playing, with and electronic drum beats. For Move, the opening track, he sampled a recording of traditional singer Sheila Stewart performing the Moving On Song, Ewan MacColl’s song about travellers; she was delighted that he was taking it to a new audience. His song Liberation featured Michael Marra narrating an English translation of psalm 118. The album has been "credited with starting the musical evolution of Celtic fusion". On 10 December 2003 BBC Two Scotland aired an ArtWorks Scotland documentary titled Martyn Bennett: Grit. Death and legacy Bennett died at the Marie Curie Hospice, Edinburgh from cancer on 30 January 2005, aged 33. News of his death spread among revellers attending the last night of Celtic Connections. The news was held back