Browse Items (658 total)

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

A walking trail to see the Geology of St Monans.

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…

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…

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 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…

Permanently closed/derelict.

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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.

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

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

A Free Church congregation was established at Strathkinness in the 1840s during the Great Disruption. In the 1860s they built a church on Main Street in Strathkinness. The Free Church was converted into a community hall in the 1930s, as following the…

Strathkinness Parish Church was built in the 1860s. The building underwent major repairs in the 1930s, following the union between the village’s Church of Scotland and Free Church congregations. In the 1950s two stained glass windows from St…

Tayport Auld Kirk

Tayport Parish Church on Queen Street was built in the 1840s for a Free Church congregation. It has an impressive Victorian Gothic frontage. Following the union of the United Free Church with the established church in 1929, the congregation became…