The building now occupied by Newburgh Flooring is widely believed to have once been a church. In reality for much of its history it appears to have functioned as a church hall. In 1885 John Livingstone paid for the construction of a stone hall for…
On the east side of Clinton Street stands Newburgh’s United Reformed Church. This building has a complicated denominational history. In the early 1840s over a hundred people who disagreed with the congregation at the former Burgher Church on Clinton…
There were some Episcopalian families in Newburgh in the eighteenth century. However, they do not appear to have had an official place of worship. In the 1890s a small Episcopal Chapel was built on the corner of Abbey Road. In the 1920s a peal of…
For several centuries St Katherine’s Church (which was formerly located on the north side of the High Street) served as Newburgh’s parish church. The church is first recorded in 1470 when it was described as ‘the chapel of St Katherine the Virgin’.…
Newburgh Parish Church was built in the early 1900s. It originally served as the United Free Church. The building was designed by the Dundee architects Patrick Thoms and William Wilkie (who had then newly gone into partnership together). In 1929 the…
Lindores Abbey was founded in the late twelfth century by David, Earl of Huntingdon. The earl had recently fought in the Third Crusade and established the abbey to give thanks to God for his safe return to Scotland. Lindores was a Tironesian…
A Burgher Church was built on the west side of Clinton Street in the 1780s. The Burghers were a break-away movement from the Church of Scotland and enjoyed considerable support in Newburgh. In the 1790s the local Church of Scotland minister commented…
The Baptist Chapel on the north side of the High Street in Newburgh was built in the early 1880s. It replaced an earlier chapel on a wynd on the south side of the same street. The funds for the new building were largely raised by James W. Wood, who…
In 1808 a Baptist chapel was founded in Newburgh. The congregation was established by Archibald McLean, who was leading figure in the Scotch Baptists (a group which developed in Edinburgh in the eighteenth-century and was rather more hardline than…
The hill known as Mares Craig was for many years a stone quarry. In the 1920s a Celtic handbell, of the type associated with early medieval religious foundations, was discovered here, along with a considerable number of dressed stones and lime…
Abdie and Dunbog Parish Church opened its doors in 1827. It was built to replace Abdie’s medieval parish church. The architects for the new building were James Milne and William Burn. In the 1830s the new church was described by the minister of Abdie…
There has been a parish church at Abdie since at least the 1190s. For most of the Middle Ages the rectorship of Abdie was held by Lindores Abbey. The abbey benefited from income from the parish, and in exchange appointed a vicar who was meant to take…
The Buckhaven Church of God was formed as a breakaway from the Open Brethren in 1986. They are an evangelical organisation part of the global organisation known as the Churches of God. The church is still active.
Jehovah’s Witnesses were first established in Buckhaven in 1971, moving into a building constructed c.1900 and previously occupied by a group known as the Church of Christ. The building underwent significant renovation in 1980, and is still in…
The Buckhaven Christian Fellowship moved into the building on Institution Street in 1969. It had formerly been a United Free Church constructed in 1934. The Fellowship were a Pentecostal Church, originally known as the Assembly of God. The group had…
A corps of the Salvation Army was first launched in Buckhaven in 1897, fell into abeyance and but was re-founded in 1936. They met in Mullin Hall until 1978 when they moved to their current site in Michael Street in a former telephone exchange. They…
Buckhaven’s Baptist Church was formed in the early 1900s as part of a wider revival moment in Fife. The earliest mission began in November of 1908, with a church formally founded in 1910. This early congregation had 20 members and met in the…
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…
After the Great Disruption of 1843, adherents of the Free Church in Buckhaven initially attended the church in East Wemyss, before the decision was taken to form a separate congregation in the town in 1866. About 140 members of the church at East…
By 1869, the congregation of the United Presbyterian Church on Buckhaven Links took the decision to construct a new, larger, place of worship on Church Street. The new building, called St David’s, was capable of seating 860 people and built at a cost…
In 1739 a Buckhaven resident and one of the elders of Wemyss Parish Church, Mr John Thomson, seceded from the Church of Scotland with a number of others and joined the Burgher Church. They attended first Bethelfield Associate Church in Kirkcaldy, and…
At the Great Disruption in 1843 a large group of the congregation of East Wemyss parish church broke away and joined the Free Church. They began building a church in Main Street the following year and it opened for worship in 1846. In 1929 the…
A Church of Scotland ‘chapel at ease’ was built in what is now Church Street in West Wemyss in 1835. It was intended to save the villagers the long walk to East Wemyss. This structure was replaced by a full parish church in 1895, and briefly served…
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,…
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…
In 1952 Alexander Smith listed a number what he described as Other religious bodies in Methil, including a Gospel Hall, the Central Gospel Mission and the Methil Town Mission. It is unclear where that organisation met, but a group with the same name…
In 1952 Alexander Smith listed a number what he described as Other religious bodies in Methil, including a Gospel Hall, the Central Gospel Mission and the Methil Town Mission. The Gospel Hall was found on Wellesley Road. It is unclear when it fell…
In 1952 Alexander Smith listed a number what he described as Other religious bodies in Methil, including a Gospel Hall, the Central Gospel Mission and the Methil Town Mission. One of these was the Spiritualist Church, located on Methil Brae. It was…
Shortly after the start of World War II a small chapel was built in Methil Docks to cater to the dock personnel and those involved in war production at the site. The chapel was demolished at the end of the war and its exact location is unknown.
In 1931, some 300 years after the closure of the parish church in Methilhill, a new Church of Scotland parish church was constructed on Chemiss Road, close to the site of the medieval church. As with the new Methil Parish Church on Wellesley Road,…
In the early 1920s the steady growth of the population of the town led the Church of Scotland to construct a new parish church in Methil to replace the West Church (1838). Land on Wellesley Road was gifted by the Wemyss family and the commission was…
Nearly four centuries after the Protestant Reformation, a Roman Catholic congregation returned to Methil with the opening of a church in 1903. Located on Methil Brae and called St Agatha’s, the congregation had expanded to such an extent that in the…
As a result of the large numbers of German sailors visiting Methil annually in the late nineteenth century a missionary from the German Church in Edinburgh (located in Leith) began to make periodical visits to the town. In 1898 the heads of that…
Following the Great Disruption in 1843, a quod sacra Free Church parish was set up in Methil, before a full mission was established in 1852. The mission initially met at the Salt Girnel, before in 1882 a full congregation was formed in Methil, and in…
The Scottish Coastal Mission, founded in 1850, was a Protestant organisation dedicated to ministering to sailors and maritime communities. By 1861 they employed 10 missionaries and had 29 stations along the east coast of Scotland. They began services…
From the early 1600s to 1838 Methil was part of the parish of Wemyss and the congregation attended the church in Easter Wemyss. Following an increase in the population in the early nineteenth century, a church was built in the High Street with room…
The church of the medieval parish of Methil (spelt Methilkil or Methilhill) was located inland, on the banks of the River Leven about a mile and a half from its mouth. It is first recorded in 1207 and 1218. The archbishops of St Andrews gifted the…
On the coast a little way north of the burgh of Crail (near Crail Airfield) is land known as Kilminning. This name is thought to derive from the Gaelic for ‘Church of Monan’. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries human bones were often…
Towards the end of the 1840s the Free Church congregation in Crail built a church on the road then known as Jockeys Port (now called St Andrews Road). The original Victorian building was demolished near the beginning of the twentieth century, and…
The early nineteenth century saw major divisions in the Church of Scotland over secular interference in religious affairs. In the 1840s a large number of relatively evangelical ministers broke away from the established church and founded the Free…
A plot of land on the south side of the Nethergate in Crail has long been known as ‘The Nunnery’. However, written records suggest that there was at no point a convent of nuns in Crail. The name is perhaps derived from an association with the nuns at…
By the late eighteenth century there was a tradition in Crail that there had once been a medieval priory by the sea, a little to the south of what is now called Prior’s Croft. In reality the name probably arises from the land being owned by the nuns…
The site now occupied by Holy Trinity Church has been a place of worship for several different denominations. A church was built here in the 1790s for Crail’s Burgher congregation. In 1847 the congregation became part of the newly created United…
When the Church of Scotland adopted Presbyterianism at the start of the 1690s a number of ministers refused to support the change. The minister of Crail, Alexander Leslie, was among those who opposed the re-establishment of Presbyterian government…
The parish church at Crail has been a place of worship since at least the twelfth century. During the reign of Malcolm IV (who died in 1165) revenues from the parish of Crail were
given to the Cistercian nunnery at Haddington. The nuns at Haddington…
There appears to have been a castle at Crail by the middle of the twelfth century. In 1359 the castle chapel is described as being dedicated to St Ruffinus – which is thought to be a Latinised form of St Maolrubha (an early medieval saint who was…
During the First World War an airfield was built at Crail, but the site was abandoned following the end of hostilities. At the start of the Second World War Crail was once more brought into military use and expanded to become an important base for…
The United Secession Church had its origins in the splits within the Church of Scotland in the eighteenth century. The congregation worshipped for some years in the two burgher churches on South Street, but in the 1820s moved to what is now 52 North…
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…
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,…
