George Meikle Kemp (25 May 1795—6 March 1844) was a self-taught Scottish architect who designed and built the Scott Monument in Edinburgh, Scotland. The poorly educated son of a shepherd, but showing talents in woodworking as a child, he was apprenticed to a joiner and millwright. Kemp travelled and worked as a millwright for several years and, exercising a childhood fascination for Gothic architecture, took the opportunity to study many of the most important Gothic buildings in Scotland, England and France. As a result, he was said to have had a first-hand knowledge of Gothic architecture which was unrivalled in Scotland. Settling in Edinburgh, Kemp won a competition to design a monument to the Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott. He supervised its erection on Princes Street in the city but at the age of 48, before the building was finished, he drowned in the city's Union Canal. On its completion the monument was acclaimed and, despite his lack of formal training and with only the one building known to be for certain to his design, Kemp came to be revered as an architect. Disablingly shy and socially awkward, while able to memorise exact details of buildings and measure precise distances by eye, Kemp is considered to have been high on the autism spectrum. Childhood and education George Meikle Kemp was the second of six children of James Kemp, a shepherd, and his wife Jean Mowbray. He was born on 25 May 1795 at Hillriggs Farm above the town of Biggar in Lanarkshire. When Kemp was a child his father moved from farm to farm, wherever he could find work. The family were frequently on poor relief. Kemp was known to have lived at Newlanddale from just after his birth, moving to Ingraston in 1802 and Nine Mile Burn in 1805 before his father settled at Moorfoot, southeast of Penicuik, in 1807 when Kemp was 12. Kemp's education, at parochial schools, was brief before he became a herdboy at the age of 11. At around this age, while on an errand, he visited the 15th century Rosslyn Chapel. The building awakened in Kemp an almost fanatical appreciation of Gothic architecture. Kemp's artistic talents had already shown themselves in his childhood when he learned to carve local bog oak into trinkets and quaichs finished with intricate ornament. He also built miniature watermills in the hillside burns. His parents recognised his talents and