Browse Items (658 total)

In 1845 Hugh Ralph noted that one family in the parish belonged to the Roman Catholic Church, but it was not until 1971 that a RC congregation returned to Aberdour. The church was built in the Hillside area of Aberdour, close to the local school. It…

St Serf’s Roman Catholic Church was built in 1922 after the opening of new pits at Valleyfield and Blairhall in the early twentieth century saw a large increase in the population of Culross and the surrounding villages. It was located in High…

There is some debate as to when the Episcopal Church congregation was founded in Aberdour. In 1845 Hugh Ralph noted that there was one Episcopal family in the parish, but did not mention a church. It was certainly there by 1854 when it appears on an…

During the late Middle Ages the Chapel of St Thomas of Seamylnes was located near the coast in the Newport-on-Tay area. In the 1440s the local ferry across the Tay paid the chapel of St Thomas an annual rent of ten merks. The exact site of the chapel…

The church of St Serf in Dysart first appears in the documentary record in the 1220s, although it is clear that it had existed long before then. In the fifteenth century, it was expanded into a large and impressive structure, including the…

Although Culross only enters the written record in the 1200s, it is clear from archaeological evidence that a community had existed there long before that date. The burgh’s early religious history is associated with St Serf, an important local saint…

St Serf’s Cave in Dysart has been connected to that important local saint since the early middle ages. Serf had dedications across Western Fife, Kinross and Clackmannanshire, and his relics could be found in Culross. The main source of information on…

Dysart, Panhall, Shore Road, St Serf's Church

St Saviour’s Episcopal Church stood on the main road through Guardbridge. It was built around 1900 and was designed by C.F. Anderson. The church closed in 1999 and is now a private house.

St Salvator’s College was established in the 1450s by Bishop James Kennedy. The new university college was dedicated to Christ the Saviour, and was intended to resist heresy and increase understanding of ‘divine wisdom’. Kennedy wished to create a…

The building now known as St Rule’s Church originally served as St Andrews Cathedral. The church was probably built on the orders of Bishop Robert during the early twelfth century, as part of his effort to modernise worship in St Andrews. Indeed,…

In 1899 the bishop of St Andrews, Dunblane and Dunkeld was successfully petitioned for the foundation of an episcopal mission church in Inverkeithing to cater to the community in nearby Jamestown. In 1902 a site in Witch Knowe Park was purchased from…

We do not know exactly when St Peter’s Chapel was founded. However, in 1212 there was a reference to ‘two houses by the sea beside the chapel of St Peter’ in a legal dispute between the archdeacon and cathedral of St Andrews. A later document from…

Permanently closed/derelict.

The parish church of St Peter is first documented in the twelfth century and by the later middle ages it was a large and impressive building containing eight separate altars dedicated to different saints. An elaborately carved baptismal font dating…

In 1913, nearly four centuries after the Protestant Reformation, a Roman Catholic congregation returned to Inverkeithing area with the foundation of the Church of St Peter-in-Chains in Jamestown. The development of the Royal Naval Dockyard at Rosyth…

The hospital of St Nicholas was founded as a refuge for lepers in the twelfth century. Because of fears of infection it stood a little to the south of the main built-up area of St Andrews, near the East Sands. As the prevalence of leprosy declined in…

St Monans Parish Church has a lengthy history of Christian worship. The site may have been a place of pilgrimage long before the construction of the current church during the High Middle Ages. In the 1360s King David II had a fragment of an arrow…

A walking trail to see the Geology of St Monans.

St Monans has a number of fossils including corals and also a coal seam. The rocks here have been folded and tilted since they were deposited.

In 1901 a Church of Scotland ‘chapel at ease’ was established to serve the inhabitants of Buckhaven. Constructed in St Michael’s Street, it became a full parish church in 1929, and was known as Buckhaven Parish Church until 1972 when there was a…

The ruins of the medieval church of St Mary’s on the Rock (also called St Mary’s Kirkhill) stand on the cliffs looking out over the North Sea. This headland has been a place of importance since prehistoric times, and several Iron Age graves have…

The site of St Mary’s College on South Street has lengthy associations with religion and learning. In 1419 Robert de Montrose (one of the priests who served at St Mary’s on the Rock) donated a plot of land for ‘a College of Theologians and Artists in…

During the early nineteenth century the parish church of Holy Trinity on South Street became too small for the growing population of St Andrews. To address this problem, St Mary’s Church was built on the south side of what became known as St Mary’s…

St Mary’s Chapel in West Wemyss was connected to the parish church in East Wemyss, as a dispute of 1527-28 noted that offerings at the chapel should be paid to the patrons of that church. No record survives of when the chapel was constructed,…

St Mary’s Church was built in the 1880s by Newport’s growing Episcopalian community. The building was designed in a Gothic style by Major Thomas Cappon. The original interior was relatively plain, but became increasingly decorated over the course of…

The parish church of St Mary in East Wemyss, first recorded c.1230, belonged successively to the Hospital of Soutra and the Church of the Holy Trinity in Edinburgh in the Middle Ages. The church was largely rebuilt in the 1520s, and considerable…

Little is known about the medieval chapel of St Mary Magdalene. Sixteenth-century property records indicate that it was located within the cathedral precinct, probably a little way to the south of what we now call St Rule’s Church (then more commonly…

The placename Eglismartin (the ‘Church of (St) Martin’) in Easter Aberdour was first recorded in the fourteenth century. Names with the Eglis or Eccles element, short for Latin Ecclesiastes or Ecclesia (church), tend to indicate religious…

James Douglas, earl of Morton (d.1493) founded St Martha’s hospital in Aberdour in 1474. However, by 1486 this project had not been realised, and the earl granted the lands and building to four Sisters of the Third Order of St Francis, Isobel and…

James Douglas, 1st earl of Morton (d.1493) founded St Martha’s hospital in Aberdour in 1474. It was located close to a holy well dedicated to St Fillan whose water was believed to cure nervous ailments, blindness, and deafness. The location of the…

Tayport Episcopal Church was established in the 1890s. The church is dedicated to St Margaret of Scotland and was designed by Major Thomas Martin Cappon, who worked on a number of churches in North-East Fife. The church has a late nineteenth-century…

The parish of St Leonard’s has its origins in the Middle Ages. However, the congregation has only worshipped in the current St Leonard’s Church on Hepburn Gardens since the early years of the twentieth century. From 1761 until 1904 the parishioners…

St Leonard’s Chapel has a long and varied history. The Culdees may have had a pilgrim hospital on this site in the Early Middle Ages. In the 1140s the hospital and its property were given to the newly founded St Andrews Cathedral Priory. An…

There were some Episcopalian families in Newburgh in the eighteenth century. However, they do not appear to have had an official place of worship. In the 1890s a small Episcopal Chapel was built on the corner of Abbey Road. In the 1920s a peal of…

For several centuries St Katherine’s Church (which was formerly located on the north side of the High Street) served as Newburgh’s parish church. The church is first recorded in 1470 when it was described as ‘the chapel of St Katherine the Virgin’.…

St John’s was founded in 1752 following a split within the congregation of St Peter’s parish church over the choice of a minister by right of patronage. 127 parishioners left the Church of Scotland, acquired a yard with houses on the north side of…

Following the Reformation the authorities in St Andrews (like many other Scottish towns) prosecuted Roman Catholics. This meant that for several centuries there was no official Catholic congregation in St Andrews. As religious toleration increased in…

At the Great Disruption in 1843 a large group of the congregation of East Wemyss parish church broke away and joined the Free Church. They began building a church in Main Street the following year and it opened for worship in 1846. In 1929 the…

Aerial view of St Fort sand and gravel quarry

St Fort disused sand and gravel quarry on the Wormit esker.

The parish church of Aberdour first appears in the records in the twelfth century when it was the subject of a dispute between a local lord, William de Mortimer, and the Augustinian canons of Inchcolm. Substantial sections of the current building…

St Fillan’s Roman Catholic Church in Newport-on-Tay is a rare surviving example of a so-called ‘tin tabernacle’ – in other words a church built out of corrugated iron. Tin churches were popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as they…

St Fillan's Church, Aberdour, Fife, Scotland. View from the south.

Early Christian hand-bell formerly kept and used in St Fillan’s Church, Struan (near Blair Atholl), Perthshire, and possibly associated with that place since the eighth century. It is made of wrought iron, coated in bronze. From the collection of…

The priory of May was founded by David I, sometime around the year 1140. It was dedicated to St Ethernan, and was affiliated to a mother house located at Reading in Berkshire. The monks were initially Cluniacs, followers of a reformed and stricter…

The Isle of May was an important early Christian site which included a chapel and shrine from at least the ninth century, and probably earlier. The chapel, as well as a monastic site at Kilrenny and the Caiplie Caves are connected to two saints,…

By 1869, the congregation of the United Presbyterian Church on Buckhaven Links took the decision to construct a new, larger, place of worship on Church Street. The new building, called St David’s, was capable of seating 860 people and built at a cost…

Towards the end of the 1840s the Free Church congregation in Crail built a church on the road then known as Jockeys Port (now called St Andrews Road). The original Victorian building was demolished near the beginning of the twentieth century, and…

Following the Great Disruption in 1843, the minister of Dysart, John Thomson, and a large part of the congregation joined the Free Church. Their first church was opened the following year (1844) on the corner of West Quality Street and Fitzroy…

It is thought that a medieval chapel, possibly dedicated to St Bonach, once stood not far from the current site of Leuchars Parish Church. The chapel may have survived into the sixteenth century. In 1908 a number of long cist burials were unearthed…

Anstruther Easter was part of the parish of Kilrenny until 1634, but by the later middle ages it was home to a growing fishing community. At some time in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries, a chapel-at-ease was constructed to serve…

During the late Middle Ages a chapel dedicated to St Anna (the grandmother of Jesus) stood on the north side of North Street. St Anna’s Chapel was probably a chantry – an institution where one or more priests regularly prayed for the souls of the…

Carboniferous volcanic vent, Kinkell Ness has at its centre the Rock and Spindle