Deer Abbey

Before the Cistercians arrived, a smaller community of Scottish monks or priests already occupied the site, never numbering more than fifteen. Grants made to this earlier community during the 12th century were recorded in notes written into the margins of the Book of Deer, along with a claim that the foundation itself went back to Saint Columba and Saint Drostan, though no independent record confirms that origin.

By 1219 William Comyn, Earl of Buchan through his marriage, founded a new Cistercian abbey about two miles west of the old religious house, granting it a share of the lands of Old Deer while the remainder supported a parish church. He brought monks from Kinloss Abbey near Elgin to establish the community, which was dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, and the older foundation was likely absorbed into the new one rather than continuing separately.

For roughly three centuries after its founding the abbey's history is largely undocumented, a gap common to many small religious houses that left few surviving records. By the 16th century the community was being secularised, and in 1587 the abbey's lands and title were converted into a secular lordship for the Commendator Robert Keith II, who became Lord Altrie, ending its life as a working monastery.

In 1766 the ruined abbey lands were acquired by James Ferguson, Lord Pitfour, and absorbed into the wider Pitfour estate. His son, the third laird, enclosed the site with a stone wall some 5 metres high in 1809 and turned the grounds into an orchard, adding a four-columned Doric portico taken from an earlier mausoleum; excavation during this period uncovered some burials, which were left undisturbed.

The fifth laird of Pitfour had the ruins cleared and used stone taken from the abbey buildings to construct a family mausoleum, built to hold the body of his daughter after she died in 1851 at the age of twenty-one. Only one other person was later buried there, Ferguson's mother-in-law, Lady Langford, making the mausoleum a small, private postscript to the medieval site.

The Pitfour estate went bankrupt in the early 1900s, and around 1926 the abbey property passed to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Aberdeen, which soon handed its care to the Ministry of Works. The estate house, by then in poor repair, was demolished, with much of its stone reportedly reused in council house construction in Aberdeen, while the 19th-century mausoleum was removed in the 1930s and part of it rebuilt as an entrance, again without disturbing the graves it held.