Browse Items (515 total)

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

A walking trail to see the Geology of St Monans.

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.

St Monans (/ˈmoʊnənz/ (About this soundlisten), locally /ˈsɪmənənz/ (About this soundlisten)),[1] sometimes spelt St Monance, is a village and parish in the East Neuk of Fife and is named after the legendary Saint Monan.

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

The parish of St Leonard’s has its origins in the Middle Ages. However, the congregation has only worshipped in the current St Leonard’s Church on Hepburn Gardens since the early years of the twentieth century. From 1761 until 1904 the parishioners…

St Leonard’s Chapel has a long and varied history. The Culdees may have had a pilgrim hospital on this site in the Early Middle Ages. In the 1140s the hospital and its property were given to the newly founded St Andrews Cathedral Priory. An…

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’.…

St John’s was founded in 1752 following a split within the congregation of St Peter’s parish church over the choice of a minister by right of patronage. 127 parishioners left the Church of Scotland, acquired a yard with houses on the north side of…

Following the Reformation the authorities in St Andrews (like many other Scottish towns) prosecuted Roman Catholics. This meant that for several centuries there was no official Catholic congregation in St Andrews. As religious toleration increased in…

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…

Aerial view of St Fort sand and gravel quarry

St Fort disused sand and gravel quarry on the Wormit esker.

The parish church of Aberdour first appears in the records in the twelfth century when it was the subject of a dispute between a local lord, William de Mortimer, and the Augustinian canons of Inchcolm. Substantial sections of the current building…

St Fillan's Church, Aberdour, Fife, Scotland. View from the south.

Early Christian hand-bell formerly kept and used in St Fillan’s Church, Struan (near Blair Atholl), Perthshire, and possibly associated with that place since the eighth century. It is made of wrought iron, coated in bronze. From the collection of…

The priory of May was founded by David I, sometime around the year 1140. It was dedicated to St Ethernan, and was affiliated to a mother house located at Reading in Berkshire. The monks were initially Cluniacs, followers of a reformed and stricter…

The Isle of May was an important early Christian site which included a chapel and shrine from at least the ninth century, and probably earlier. The chapel, as well as a monastic site at Kilrenny and the Caiplie Caves are connected to two saints,…

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…

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…

Following the Great Disruption in 1843, the minister of Dysart, John Thomson, and a large part of the congregation joined the Free Church. Their first church was opened the following year (1844) on the corner of West Quality Street and Fitzroy…

Anstruther Easter was part of the parish of Kilrenny until 1634, but by the later middle ages it was home to a growing fishing community. At some time in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries, a chapel-at-ease was constructed to serve…

During the late Middle Ages a chapel dedicated to St Anna (the grandmother of Jesus) stood on the north side of North Street. St Anna’s Chapel was probably a chantry – an institution where one or more priests regularly prayed for the souls of the…

Carboniferous volcanic vent, Kinkell Ness has at its centre the Rock and Spindle

Geological field guide to St Andrews.

St Andrews Cathedral was once the most important church in Scotland. It was the base for the country’s senior bishopric and housed the relics of Jesus’s disciple Andrew (the nation’s patron saint). The origins of St Andrews Cathedral stretch back…

St Andrews (Latin: S. Andrea(s); Scots: Saunt Aundraes; Scottish Gaelic: Cill Rìmhinn) is a town on the east coast of Fife in Scotland, 10 miles (16 kilometres) southeast of Dundee and 30 miles (50 kilometres) northeast of Edinburgh. St Andrews had a…

St Andrew’s Church was built to replace a smaller Episcopal church (also dedicated to St Andrew) which once stood on North Street. The foundations for the new church were laid in 1867, and the church was consecrated (in other words officially blessed…

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…

In 1690 Scotland officially became a Presbyterian country, rejecting episcopacy (or the government of the church by bishops). Some Scots did not accept the changes, forming the origins of the Scottish Episcopal Church. There have been Episcopalians…

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…

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…

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…

Sampling the platform sections at Kingcraig point for OSL dating

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…

The Salvation Army started a corps in St Andrews in 1893. After some difficulties in the early years, there was a continuous Salvation Army presence in St Andrews from 1934 until 2003. During the 1980s the Salvation Army acquired a former house on…

This bay doesn’t actually have rubies, it’s named after the tiny red garnets in the sand which look a bit like rubies to the untrained eye. You might find some if you get down on your hands and knees sift through the sand.

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…

Overview of Kinkell Ness with Rock and Spindle

The Rock and Spindle is an ancient volcanic vent, and it has an excellent example of radial columnar jointing (it looks like spokes of a wheel) due to the way the magma cooled. The rock just to the north of the Rock and Spindle is believed to be a…

The Rock and Spindle geological site