A Corpus of Scottish Medieval Parish Churches

Apart from a few widely known examples, such as Edinburgh St Giles or Perth St John, the medieval parish churches of Scotland are very rarely dealt with in discussions of architecture in Britain in the Middle Ages. This is largely because they have never been systematically studied as a body, and there is surprisingly little knowledge of how much of medieval date survives. Indeed, it became clear some years ago that even the Church of Scotland itself was largely unaware of the medieval origins of the core of its stock of parish churches.

The aim of the project was to determine how much medieval fabric survives, either visibly or embodied within later buildings, to correlate this with the historical sources in order to determine likely dates of construction and adaptation, and to present an overview of all of the parish churches that embody medieval fabric.

In Scotland there are 1,136 sites. The current project was a one-year AHRC-funded pilot to establish the feasibility of a larger study covering all relevant sites. It focused on dioceses of Dunkeld and Dunblane, which together embrace some 97 parishes. The benefit of considering these dioceses initially was that, although largely rural in character, they also include a number of important urban settlements, so that the range of architectural types is relatively wide. There is the additional factor that the historical sources for these dioceses have been less closely studied than is the case for some of the larger dioceses, meaning that there was less risk of bringing preconceptions to the work.

The project team identified 105 sites for inclusion in the electronic resource. In total the resource comprises 1154 images, most of which where taken onsite by project members.