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Unthank / Unthiekil Parish Church

Summary description

It is uncertain if there was a parish church here, and no physical traces of one have been located. 

Historical outline

The early history of this church, identified in the fifteenth century as the ‘church of St Tevanan of Unchickil’, is utterly obscure.  It is first mentioned in a supplication to Pope Eugenius IV by an un-named rector in April 1446, which identifies it as a prebend of Brechin.(1)  The supplication requested the provision of indulgences for anyone who contributed to the repair of the church, ‘which was miserably burned by a fortuitous and unsought chance’.  Cowan suggested that the church may have been associated with the toun of Unthank, which lay within Brechin parish,(2) and it is indeed possible that it was formed out of properties within that parish for the sole purpose of supporting a prebend in the cathedral.(3)  It has no recorded post-Reformation history and presumably was subsumed back into the larger parish from which it had been detached.

Notes

1. CSSR, iv, 1433-1447, no.1290. 

2. Cowan, Parishes, 204

3. RSS, v, no.2776.  The lands of Dubton and Unthank, described as within the parish of Brechin, were the source of a pension granted by Bishop John Sinclair of Brechin before 1566.

Architectural description

The only basis for considering that there was a parish church of Unthank is a reference in 1446 to a church of St Tevanary at Unthiekill that had been appropriated as a prebend of Brechin Cathedral. It has been speculated that the church served the settlement of Unthank, which  was itself within the Parish of Brechin in the sixteenth century.(1) One possible site for the church is the location of Unthank to the north of Brechin, at around NO 603 613, though there is no surviving evidence of a church or churchyard there.

Notes

1. Ian B. Cowan, The Parishes of Medieval Scotland (Scottish Record Society), 1967, p. 204