Front and back cover caption, volume 38 issue 6MOURNING THE QUEENThe death of Queen Elizabeth II left a potent absence, not only in the United Kingdom but also in the 14 other Commonwealth realms and fourteen British Overseas Territories of which she was head of state.From Hocart to Graeber and Sahlins, anthropological theories of kingship have drawn attention to the significance of separation from royalty. Social distance grants a sacred quality to the Crown, conferring on it a transcendental power, but one can abstract it so far from everyday life that it becomes an irrelevance.The long reign of Elizabeth meant that she was an everyday presence intimately engrained in the lives of a mass of people while nevertheless maintaining this social distance. Following her death, the ritualization of people queuing to pay their respects, and the mass observation of the transportation of her coffin laid out with the symbols of state, showed this absent presence at its most intense.In this issue, Richard Irvine gives an ethnographic account of the cancellation of National Day celebrations and political events in Gibraltar in the wake of the Queen's death – a particularly poignant mourning, given the sense of separation from a queen who was prevented from visiting Gibraltar for over half a decade for fear of poisoning Britain's diplomatic relations with Spain.What does it mean to express loyalty to the Crown? Here, the Queen's absent presence seems to make possible a form of intentional political identity and self‐determination, allowing Gibraltarians to declare Britishness on their own terms.SMASHED TABERNACLEThe celebrated modernist architectural ruin, St Peter's, Cardross in Scotland, was built as a seminary for priests in the mid‐1960s, a time of optimism for the minority Catholic population. It was completed just as the Second Vatican Council changed the regime of preparation for the priesthood, in place since the Counter‐Reformation. The building's simple, yet radically modern design reflected the architects' interpretation of the older rule of St Benedict.The chiefly Irish working‐class Catholic population underwent profound changes throughout the following decades, becoming more secular and seeking integration into mainstream, predominantly Scottish society. The heavy industries that characterized central Scotland experienced a decline, and a pernicious drug culture haunted working‐class communities.Meanwhile, the building's dereliction mirrored the decline of the faith and optimism of the Scottish Catholic community. Its uncompromising modernity was its downfall. It did not work, leaked throughout and was impossible to live and work in. Its staff was riven with factions, could not afford its upkeep and could not demolish it because of a preservation order. The Catholic Church priesthood was also on the threshold of a sexual predation crisis. Scholarship indicates that this culture had its roots in the seminary as an institution.Dominic Martin, seeking to understand the phenomenon of ‘emptiness’, reflects on the emblematic trajectory of this remarkable building and the mythopoetic insight it provides into the absent future of the Scottish Catholic experience. His analysis draws upon the classic anthropological theory of ritual and recent political and philosophical writing. He concludes by chronicling the unexpected transfer of political allegiance by Catholic Central Scotland to the ascendant Scottish National Party, previously seen as nativist and anti‐Catholic.