A Corpus of Scottish Medieval
Parish Churches

Historical outline

Dedications: The Holy Trinity; St Columba

There is no unequivocal evidence for the survival of the parish of Holy Trinity, Dunkeld, beyond the twelfth century. It is probable that the church had been granted to Andrew, bishop of Caithness, between c.1145 and 1152, but the original charter recording the grant has not survived.(1) It is possible that the gift may have been intended to provide Andrew, who appears to have been unable to establish himself firmly within his nominal diocese, with independent means of financial support. Bishop Andrew granted the church to the monks of Dunfermline, possession to be given following his death, and received confirmation of this arrangement from King Malcolm IV and Bishop Richard of Dunkeld.(2) Further confirmations followed in the time of King William and through to 1234,(3) but it is clear that Dunfermline had been unsuccessful in securing possession and that the parish and church of the Holy Trinity may already have disappeared as independent ecclesiastical entities before that date. It is likely that Holy Trinity was merged with the church of St Columba of Dunkeld – the cathedral church of the diocese – before the end of the twelfth century.(4)

It is difficult to trace any independent history for the parish of Dunkeld St Columba, whose identity was wholly subsumed within the cathedral church probably from the later twelfth century. The establishment of St Columba’s as the cathedral church may have led to the rapid demise of the parish church of Dunkeld Holy Trinity, but how any merger was effected is entirely unknown. It is clear that the parish was small, being wholly encircled by the parish of Little Dunkeld, and its revenues were probably also no of any great significance. The parish appears to have been appropriated at an early date to the prebend of the treasurer of Dunkeld, the vicarage at least remaining so attached at the Reformation.(5) It is probable that parish services were provided at one of the altars in the nave of the cathedral, but there is no medieval record of which altar that might have been.

Notes

1. Barrow, David I Charters, no 255.

2. RRS, i, no 229; Dunfermline Registrum, nos 36, 123, 124, 125, 419.

3. RRS, ii, no 30; Dunfermline Registrum, nos 236, 272.

4. Cowan, Parishes, 53.

5. Kirk (ed.), Book of Assumptions, 311.

Architectural analysis

The site has a long association with Christian worship, and the artistic vitality of the early community here is attested by the so-called ‘apostles’ stone’ a particularly fine sculpted slab, which survived through use as churchyard gatepost.

The earliest part of the existing building is the chancel of four wide bays; this, together with the east walls of the nave aisles, was laid out in a single operation on the evidence of the continuity of the base course beneath those parts. In Abbot Alexander Myln’s history of the bishops of Dunkeld, of 1555, it was said that the chancel had been built for Bishop William Sinclair (1309-37) by Master Robert the mason. But what remains of the original fabric indicates it is unlikely to be so late, the main reason for rejecting this statement being the detailing of the dado of blind arcading that runs along much of the interior of the north wall below the windows. This could hardly be later then the mid-thirteenth century on the basis of its finely moulded trifoliate arches and the (badly damaged) stiff-leaf decoration of its capitals. Since this arcading is not repeated on the south wall, it might be argued that it had been constructed in an earlier phase of building, and simply retained in the campaign that Myln attributes to Sinclair. But this is implausible, since the external base course around the whole eastern limb is itself of a thirteenth-century type.

On balance, it appears likely that the chancel was laid out around the central decades of the thirteenth century, possibly in the time of Bishop Geoffrey (1236-49), who is said by Myln to have provided endowments for the adornment and lighting of the high altar. However, the construction may have been more protracted than had been anticipated, and was perhaps only completed in the time of Bishop Sinclair. The three-seat sedilia on the south side of the presbytery area could well date from his episcopate, and they are clearly different in kind – and date - from the decorative arcading along the north wall. The jambs and equilateral arches are framed by continuous mouldings, with double cusping and hood mouldings to the arches. Myln says the east window was filled with stained glass by Bishop John de Peebles (1378-90).

The chancel is lit by large traceried windows; these are of four lights in most of the bays along the flanks, but of two lights in the west bay of the south flank and of five lights in the east gable wall. The tracery in none of these windows appears likely to closely reflect the original forms, having been extensively renewed in operations of 1762 and 1814-15.The relatively slender buttresses that mark the bays are without intake until just below the wall-head, where they are weathered back and capped by pinnacles that rise through a crenellated parapet. However, Slezer’s view of 1693 shows neither pinnacles nor parapet, and it must be assumed that their present form dates from the restoration of 1814-15. This is also the case with the massive pinnacles at the wall heads of the two eastern angles, though Slezer’s view does suggest that there may have been provision for the support of something of that scale.

Myln states that the nave at Dunkeld was founded by Bishop Robert de Cardeny (1398-1437) on 27 April 1406, and that he completed it up to the blind storey, which may mean that he stopped below the gallery stage. There is no reason to doubt his statement. The nave was set out with seven aisled bays, with doorways on the two sides in the fifth bay from the east, and a processional doorway at the centre of the west front. The arcade piers are of squat cylindrical form. Since Cardeny had been educated in Paris, it might be suspected that these piers were indebted to France, where there was to be a revival of the use of cylindrical piers, particularly from the earlier fifteenth century. Yet the Dunkeld piers are very different from the types usually found in France. It is true that they are unquestionably late Gothic in spirit, as is seen especially in the tall bases of the majority of them, in which there is a relatively high vertical section between the octagonal sub-base and the circular upper parts, with most of the mouldings having profiles developed from ogee curves. But the salient characteristics of the piers are their relatively compressed proportions, the marked separation of pier and arch established by the capitals, and the emphasis on the flat soffit of the supported arches, and in much of this there is more of the spirit to be seen in the churches of the coastal provinces of the Low Countries, as in the choir of St Bavo at Haarlem started in 1397, than of anything to be found in France.

The aisle flanks were pierced by an ambitious range of traceried windows which, though damaged, must still reflect the intentions of their designer. Those in the two eastern bays, which lit the chapels, being of three lights, and most of the others of two lights. Some of these windows display a very similar approach to design as is to be seen in the work of the Paris-born mason John Morow, who provided a list of his works at Melrose Abbey, and whose tracery is to be seen in parts of Melrose Abbey, Lincluden Collegiate Church and Paisley Abbey. The three-light easternmost window of the south aisle at Dunkeld, which had a pair of curved daggers wrapping around circular quatrefoils, and with a pointed quatrefoil at the apex, appears to have been virtually identical with the window to the south side of the high altar at Lincluden. The second window from the east on each side shows a related approach in the inverted bowed triangle that emerges from the intersecting arcs which embrace the three lights below; a grouping of bowed triangles formed from intersecting arcs also figures in one of the two-light window types. However, the reveal mouldings are different from those favoured by Morow, and it is perhaps more likely that at Dunkeld we are seeing Morow’s designs being copied by a mason who wished to emulate his work, rather than a work by Morow himself. As may also be indicated by the design of the arcade piers, we are probably seeing the work of a mason who was able to draw on the most fashionable European-inspired sources, but who was eclectic in his approach.

An intriguing aspect of the nave aisles is the question of how they were covered. In the south aisle, stone vault springings were built in with the outer walls and arcades, but on the indications of metal pins emerging from the tops of these, it appears that above the springings the vaults could have been of wood. In the north aisle the only provision for vaulting is a series of corbels along the aisle walls, and on that side it therefore seems that the vaults must have been entirely of wood.  

The two east bays of each of the aisles functioned as a chapel. That on the south side, dedicated to St Ninian, was destined to be Cardeny’s own burial place, and his tomb is located between the windows in its south wall. The tomb chest has four panels with shield-bearing angels set below canopies, the panels being separated by smaller figures on plinths and below canopies. The recess for the effigy is framed by a moulded segmental arch carried on squat jambs, above which is a hood moulding with an ogee flip that is richly crocketed and surmounted by a finial. Flanking the tomb are small buttresses that presumably once carried pinnacles. The east walls of these chapels, which rise from base courses laid out along with the mid-thirteenth-century choir, are blank, presumably because decorated altarpieces were intended to be set up against them, and there are traces of fixings in the wall of St Ninian’s chapel which might have been associated with a retable. There are also possible traces of a parclose screen between the arcade piers. The north chapel is thought to have been dedicated to the Virgin, as was often the case. According to Myln, Donald Macnachtan, dean of Dunkeld (c.1420-40), endowed the altar in the Lady Chapel and provided a stained glass window in which his arms were set. However, since the nave was not finished until after Macnachtan’s death, there may have been an earlier Lady Chapel in the eastern limb.

Myln says that it was Bishop Thomas Lauder (1452-75) o completed the nave, roofed it, glazed the windows, and dedicated it for worship in 1464. It cannot be known if the elevations to which it was completed were what had been intended from the start, or if they represented a change of design; whatever the case, it has no known close prototypes or followers. It may, however, have established a limited vogue for elevations of three distinctly expressed storeys in a number of major churches, at a time when there was a more general preference for the middle storey to be either suppressed or for its impact to be reduced. The triforium and clearstorey levels are marked horizontally by string courses, but there is no vertical articulation other than the precise alignment of the gallery and clearstorey openings above the arcade arches, and in all of this there is a strong expression of the planes and mass of the walls. At triforium level the openings are framed by semi-circular arches with large-scale mouldings, within each of which a pair of sub-arches is deeply recessed. At clearstorey level, where there is no wall passage, there is a single two-light window to each bay. Changes in the mouldings of the gallery and clearstorey stages suggest that the building sequence of the upper storeys may have been: first the entire north gallery; second the two east bays of the south gallery; third the rest of the south gallery; fourth the north clearstorey together with the three east bays of the south clearstorey; and finally the rest of the south clearstorey. The most remarkable feature of the nave elevation is the sequence of semi-circular arches at gallery level, which are strikingly different from the pointed arches of the arcades and clearstorey windows; although arches of this type had been becoming increasingly common in Scotland from the later fourteenth century onwards, they had not been used in quite this way elsewhere. The absence of piers to support the gallery arches suggests there was a conscious urge for a more monumentally reductionist approach at Dunkeld than had so far been seen elsewhere.

Amongst his other works, Bishop Lauder started to build a 29 metre-high tower to the nave in 1469/70, which was presumably completed by Bishop James Levington (1475-83) since his arms were placed near its top. Before its addition, the only vertical accent at the cathedral appears to have been a stair turret towards the south side of the west front. The asymmetrical location of the new tower, at the north-west corner of the nave, followed the precedents of the mid-thirteenth century towers at the cathedrals of Glasgow and Brechin, and a tower that is known to have existed at Fortrose Cathedral. The tierceron-vaulted ground floor of the tower is lit by traceried windows in the west and south walls and, since it was used as a consistory court, the upper walls were eventually decorated with painted scenes of judicial subjects, including the judgement of Solomon and the woman taken in adultery. Although there are four storeys to the tower, there are only two further stages of windows, with single-light openings to the middle storey and two-light windows to the belfry stage. The wall head had a parapet decorated with open quatrefoils, which has been reduced in height along most of its length, creating a series of cusped round arches. The stair turret at the south-east angle of the tower rises a little above the wall head.

At the same time that the tower was started, an outer skin was added at the lower level of the west front, with an arch embracing the original west doorway. Above this a very large new six-light west window was inserted, which was inevitably displaced sideways in relation to the central axis of the nave, since it extended to the full space between the tower to the north and the stair turret to the south. Only stubs of the tracery of this window survive, but it was clearly virtually identical to the south transeptal chapel window at Linlithgow St Michael, other than that the individual lights had trifoliate arched heads. As at Linlithgow the tracery field was defined by a large bowed triangle, within which were three circlets and three tear shapes, each containing interlocking combinations of quatrefoils and curved daggers. There could be no reasonable doubt that these two altogether exceptional windows were designed by the same mason, and their design appears to show a close awareness of a type of window design to be found in the parts of eastern France around Lyon and Vienne. It is tempting to suspect that the mason, John French, who was buried in Linlithgow Church, could have been of the French origin that his name suggests, and that he had worked at both Linlithgow and Dunkeld.

Bishop Lauder also added a porch over the south doorway into the nave. This rather diminutive feature was apparently intended to be covered by a stone vault on the evidence of what appears to be an arched wall rib built into the south wall of the church, though in its final form it was given a lower roof, which must have cut through a tabernacle framing a shield-holding angel. It is not known at what stage of the operations Lauder built the porch, but Myln tells us that he started the chapter house block on the north side of the chancel in 1457. This was of two narrow bays from east to west, corresponding to the one bay of the chancel that it abuts, and it is covered by two compartments of quadripartite vaulting. At its south-west angle a stair leads up to a chamber which presumably functioned as a treasury. 

The last significant medieval structural changes to the building were in the time of Bishop George Brown (1483-1515) who formed a chapel in the west bay of the north nave aisle, which is marked by a square-headed three-light window, above which are his arms. By that stage, however, when the cathedral was structurally complete and architecturally adequate for the needs of those who served it, as much attention was being paid to the liturgical furnishings and fixtures as to the building itself. Myln provides details of the many purchases aimed at enhancing the setting of worship, all of which have since been lost, including stained glass, choir stalls, screens, lecterns and altarpieces. Apart from the possible evidence for a retable and parclose screens in St Columba’s Chapel which has been referred to above, at the east end of the south nave aisle, there are possible traces of the seating of the rood beam within the blocked chancel arch.

Reference must be made here to a number of medieval memorials within the cathedral, in addition to that of Bishop Cardeny which has already been mentioned. Set within the blind arcading on the north side of the presbytery area is a strikingly fine – albeit headless – effigy in full mass vestments. In this position it is likely to commemorate Bishop William Sinclair (1309-37), who was initially buried in front of the altar steps, but whose tomb was relocated to the north side of the altar, according to Myln. Behind the modern communion table screen, near the east end of the chancel is the relocated and partly reconstructed tomb chest and effigy of Alexander Stewart, Earl of Buchan, the rapacious ‘Wolf of Badenoch’, a son of Robert II. He died in 1405, but the effigy has been dated on the basis of the armour to between 1410 and 1430. The tomb chest is carved with figures of knights separated by miniature buttresses and surmounted by canopies. Another memorial worthy of note is the incised ledger slab of Canon Alexander Douglas, who held the prebend of Moneydie; this is of interest for showing the costume of a canon of a secular cathedral, with mass vestments and a hood over his head.

In the earliest stages of the Reformation, orders for the ‘cleansing’ of the cathedral of monuments of idolatry were sent to the lairds of Arntilly and Kinvaid on 12 August 1560, though it was stipulated that doors, windows and essential furnishings should not be damaged. However, it seems that the laird of Cardeny removed the nave roof soon afterwards, presumably because it had already been decided that worship should be confined to the chancel, which could be adapted to reformed practices more easily than the aisled nave. Nevertheless, by 1600 repairs were required to the chancel roof itself, and were being carried out at the behest of Stewart of Ladywell.

Further repairs were required after the battle of Dunkeld on 21 August 1689, which was part of the rising in favour of the deposed James VII and II; in the course of the hostilities the cathedral was fortified for the government troops under Lieutenant Colonel William Cleland. The subsequent repairs were instigated in 1691 by the marquess of Atholl, one of whose houses was adjacent to the cathedral, and whose imposing monument was to be placed in the cathedral chapter house after his death in 1703. Further repairs to both the chancel and the tower were carried out in 1762 by the duke of Atholl, at which time extensive renewal was carried out on the tracery of the chancel windows. This campaign was of some additional interest since it received a government subsidy of £300. This was one of the earliest known cases of the state becoming involved in such operations, in recognition of the fact that an Act of Annexation of 1587, and the final abolition of episcopacy within the established Church in 1690, had left the crown in nominal ownership of many monastic houses and cathedrals.

In 1811 the crown determined to grant the cathedral to Dunkeld for use as a parish church; however, the fourth duke of Atholl objected to this, and instead it was granted to him.(The parochial identity of Dunkeld was eventually clarified by an agreement in 1928.) The duke subsequently instigated a major campaign of restoration of the chancel to the designs of Archibald Elliot in 1814-15. About £5,000 of the costs was met by the duke, with a government contribution of £996.18s. As a result of this operation only the three western bays of the chancel were in use by the church, and the walls were lined with lath and plaster, while imitation quadripartite vaults of the same materials were constructed over the entire space, all of which was lined painted to appear like masonry. The main foci of attention in the new arrangements were a prominent canopied three-stage pulpit below the  central window on the south side, and an imposing box-like ducal pew facing it on the south side, which looked across to the pulpit through three arched openings. Galleries were constructed at the east and west ends for additional seating, and these presumably replaced a less regular arrangement of galleries and pews. At the same time the window tracery was again repaired and renewed without record of what remained, so that we have no way of knowing if the designs took what remained of the medieval patterns as a starting point. While this work marked a new interest in the medieval appearance of the cathedral, as might be expected at this date it showed little regard for the medieval fabric itself; it was presumably the insertion of the lath and plaster lining that resulted in the cutting back of the projecting parts of the wall arcading along the north wall. Elliot also carried out some works of stabilisation and repair on the walls of the roofless nave as part of this operation. A memorial statue to the duke, by John Ternouth, was placed in the restored chapter house

As appreciation of medieval architecture increased, restorations of the kind carried out by Elliot came to be held in low esteem. In 1900 the architect Peter Macgregor Chalmers drew up proposals for a more scholarly restoration, but these were rejected by the duke of Atholl. Subsequently, the shipping magnate Sir Donald Currie commissioned the architects W. Dunn and R. Watson, who had worked for him on his estate at Glenlyon, to carry out a restoration. This took place in 1908, and reversed much of what had been done by Elliot, exposing the medieval masonry and removing the imitation vaults. In keeping with the more ecclesiologically ‘correct’ ideas of the time, the communion table became the main focus of liturgical attention, being set against a panelled screen with canopied cresting towards the east end of the chancel, a little to the west of the site of the medieval high altar. A pulpit and prayer desk were placed symmetrically at each end of sections of the screen that extended towards the west, while seats for elders were set against the screen behind the communion table. However, unlike at Dunblane, where the whole church had been brought back into use, there was no idea of re-seating the main body of the chancel as it would have been in the middle ages, when choir stalls would have extended down the two sides. Instead an essentially parochial arrangements of two rows of eastward facing pews on each side of a central aisle was adopted, and with an organ on a gallery at the west end.

The choir continues in use for worship and is maintained by the Church, while the nave and tower are in state ownership and are maintained by Historic Scotland.

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