Cromarty Church On Restoration Shortlist

The community of Cromarty at the north east tip of the Black Isle is appealing for support from across the Highlands to help breath 21st century life into the last place which provides a direct link to life in the 13th century.
 
At the same time a question which divides expert opinion may finally be answered.
 
A simple phone call could do it.
 
The old Parish Church, or East Church, is one of three Scottish projects shortlisted for BBC2’s Restoration programme. The edition featuring the Scottish entrants will be broadcast on Friday 18th August and during the next week viewers are asked to vote by telephone (09013 600500 - calls cost £1) for the most persuasive architectural cause presented. A multi-million pound sum will be spent restoring the ultimate winner.
 
Cromarty will face challenges from the Borders and Orkney, but the Ross-shire campaigners believe their objective will strike a chord elsewhere in the Highlands.
 
For eight centuries the site of the old Parish Church in Cromarty was the centre of religious life in the medieval burgh.
 
Parts of the building which stands there today almost certainly date back to the days before the 16th century Reformation, which brought the curtain down on Roman Catholicism in much of Scotland.
 
But there is a debate as the exact date of the construction of the bulk of the church
 
Cromarty’s most celebrated son, the polymath  High Miller (folklorist, stonemason, geologist, writer, journalist and church politician) was convinced it was a post-Reformation church having unearthed a local tradition that the church had been built after 1560.
 
However there is strong evidence pointing to the contrary.
 
It was built on the East/West orientation characteristic of churches in which mass was celebrated - the priest, facing the altar, looked towards the rising sun – a symbol of the Resurrection. No church built shortly after the Reformation would have been so constructed.
 
There is an aumbry (a cupboard for holding the vessels for mass) in the north wall at the east end, a feature of a pre-Reformation church. The low height of the aumbry indicates that the floor level was once significantly lower.
 
In addition a fourteenth-century, or possibly fifteenth-century, grave-slab, now in the west porch, was discovered (c1980) within the church.
 
Lastly the church is close to the site of the ‘vicar of Cromarty's manse’. This is a pre-Reformation term and its proximity to the church also suggests that the church site is pre-Reformation.
 
But over the centuries the church also undeniably came to embrace much that is typical of a Scots Presbyterian church. Its box pews, low galleries, (known as lofts, wooden hat hooks and flag stone floors take the visitor back in imagination to eighteenth and nineteenth century burgh life when Presbyterianism was the unchallenged force in the land.
 
However, now the building is tired and showing all the signs of its advancing years. There are occasional services. They allow local people to sit in a building which has come to symbolise so much of worth to them, sit amidst their own history.
 
Perhaps looking up to the laird’s pew in the 17th century and seeing the internationally renowned eccentric Sir Thomas Urquhart. He invented a universal language, traced his family tree back to Adam and Eve and translated Rabelais, but was reputed to have died in a fit of immoderate laughter at the news of the Restoration of Charles 11.
 
Or Hugh Miller, sitting in his family pew at the front of the loft in the Poors’ Aisle (built with money accumulated in the Poor Fund in 1741), fretting about church affairs or possibly even the origins of life. He would eventually leave the church becoming one of its leading critics, heralding the Disruption of 1843 and the founding of the Free Church of Scotland.
 
But for the most part the church stands silent, slowly losing its fight with time, weather and decay. It is cared for by the Scottish Redundant Churches Trust which is seeking funds to preserve it for the nation as one of the finest examples of a Scots kirk.
 
Historian David Alston, who is also Cromarty’s local councillor, is clear that the restoration of the church is vital: "We are extraordinarily lucky to have so much information about this building, including firsthand descriptions from the seventeenth century and afterwards. It embodies so much that is typical of Scottish parish kirks. Restoration will preserve this for future generations - and, perhaps, help us settle the debate as to the buildings origins.”   
 
 
ENDS