St Martin’s Church, Aberdour

St Martin’s Church, Aberdour

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 foundations dating back to the Pictish era (pre-900AD). By the later middle ages, when the place-name was recorded, there was no church on the site, and no other contemporary records survive to confirm its existence. However, tentative evidence that this had been the site of a church can be found in the Ordnance Survey Name Book of 1853-1855. In that survey, Mr Barr, the factor for the Inch Marton plantation, noted that a stone coffin and human bones had been found at the site some years previously.

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tt27@st-andrews.ac.uk

Site

158

04/08/2021

(1) D.E. Easson and A. Macdonald, eds, Charters of the abbey of Inchcolm (Scottish History Society, 3rd Series, 1938), no. 33 (2) Simon Taylor & Gilbert Markus, The Place-Names of Fife. Volume One. West Fife between Leven and Forth (Donington, 2006),

cm x cm x cm

current,56.058763111181705,-3.3071994772762996;

St Martin’s Church, Aberdour

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