Forgan Old Parish Church / St Fillan's Parish Church

Forgan Old Parish Church / St Fillan's Parish Church

There is a church recorded at Forgan in the twelfth century. The old parish church at Forgan was appropriated to St Andrews Cathedral Priory for much of the Middle Ages. The church survived the Reformation, and for part of the 1560s had a canon of St Andrews Cathedral as reader. In the 1628 the St Andrews graduate Henry Scrimgeour was appointed minister of Forgan. He was a supporter of Charles I’s changes to the Church of Scotland and fiercely resisted the National Covenant. Scrimgeour was removed from his position as minister in 1639, having apparently declared that the supporters of the Covenant were “taking the crown off the King’s head”. The church underwent a major renovation in the 1770s, and new pews were installed at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the 1830s the medieval parish church was described as being “situated in a most beautiful and sequestered spot”. Ominously, it was also noted at this time that the location was “very inconvenient for the population in general”. In the early 1840s the parishioners of Forgan moved to a new parish church, closer to the main settlements near the Tay. The old church was abandoned and gradually fell into ruins.

sacredlandscapesoffife

1120

Dante Clementi

Site

315

27/02/2024

Corpus of Scottish Medieval Parish Churches, entry for ‘Forgan / Forgrund Parish Church’: https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/corpusofscottishchurches/site.php?id=158590#TT_button [Accessed February 2024]. Hew Scott, Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae: The Succession of Ministers in Scotland from the Reformation (1925), p. 203. Charles Nairn, ‘Parish of Forgan’ in the New Statistical Account (1845), vol. 9, p. 515.

cm x cm x cm

current,56.4225774719067,-2.9001384973526005;

Forgan Old Parish Church / St Fillan's Parish Church

TEXT

Building

659

1840

1

Catholic,Church of Scotland

Forgan