‘Prior Walls’ / Chapel Site by the Sea

‘Prior Walls’ / Chapel Site by the Sea

By the late eighteenth century there was a tradition in Crail that there had once been a medieval priory by the sea, a little to the south of what is now called Prior’s Croft. In reality the name probably arises from the land being owned by the nuns at Haddington Priory. However, there may have been a small chapel in this area in the Middle Ages. In the 1790s it was noted that there stood by the sea ‘a ruin evidently of great antiquity, the east gable of which is still standing’. This ruin bore ‘the name of the prior walls’. The gable (which according to a nineteenth-century writer had ‘Gothic windows’) was washed away by the sea during storms in about 1801. Some foundations remained visible into the 1860s, but by the twentieth century they too had been lost to coastal erosion.

sacredlandscapesoffife

Bess Rhodes

Site

210

06/10/2021

09/26/2023 02:56:27 pm

(1) Andrew Bell, ‘Parish of Crail’ in the Old Statistical Account (1793), vol. 9, pp. 450-451. (2) William Merson, ‘Parish of Crail’ in the New Statistical Account (1845), vol. 9, p. 964. (3) Anne Turner Simpson and Sylvia Stevenson, Historic Crail: The Archaeological Implications of Development (1981), p. 21.

cm x cm x cm

current,56.260990338256555,-2.62082071056045;

‘Prior Walls’ / Chapel Site by the Sea

TEXT

Building

446

Catholic

Crail