Dunkeld Cathedral

There is a streak of red running through the grey of the eastern gable at Dunkeld, irregular and unmistakable once it has been pointed out. Those stones came from the ninth-century cathedral that stood here before this one, built of reddish sandstone by Causantin mac Fergusa, who declared Dunkeld to hold the primacy of the faith in Alba. They are the oldest thing on the site that can still be seen, and they are in the wall by accident of reuse rather than by any intention to preserve them.

Before Causantin’s building there was a monastery, founded in the sixth or early seventh century after an expedition by Saint Columba into the land of Alba. It began as a collection of wattle huts on the north bank of the Tay. Relics of Columba, his bones among them, were said to have been kept here until the Reformation, when they were taken to Ireland; there are those who believe Columban relics remain buried somewhere in the grounds.

One relic certainly did not stay. The Celtic bell thought to have belonged to the monastery ended up not in the cathedral but in Little Dunkeld Church, the parish church of the lesser district across the river. The explanation offered is that the later canons regarded Culdeeism — the practice of the early Scottish monastic communities — as heresy, and would not house relics of it. If so, the building displaced the very tradition it grew out of, while keeping its stones in the gable.

The cathedral proper was begun in 1260 and completed in 1501. Two hundred and forty years is a very long build even by medieval standards, and the result is a structure in which Gothic and Norman elements are intermingled throughout rather than separated into legible phases. It is built in square-stone style of predominantly grey sandstone.

It is not, strictly, a cathedral any more. The Church of Scotland has neither cathedrals nor bishops, and Dunkeld is one of several former cathedrals that simply kept the name. In the seventeenth century the bishopric became an appendage of the Crown and afterwards descended to the Earls of Fife. Today the building is Crown property held through Historic Environment Scotland and is a scheduled monument, partly in ruins, and still the town’s parish church, with services every Sunday — though the congregation retreats to the smaller Little Dunkeld through the winter.

It has been fought over. In 1689 the Battle of Dunkeld was contested around the building between Jacobite Highland clans loyal to James VII and II, deposed the previous year in the Glorious Revolution, and a government force supporting William. The government side held the town.

Inside is a collection of the dead worth a slow circuit. Alexander Stewart, Earl of Buchan, remembered as the Wolf of Badenoch, was buried here in 1394 under a tomb surmounted by his armoured effigy, which survives. Bishops of Dunkeld lie here across four centuries — Geoffrey de Liberatione, Richard de Inverkeithing who was chamberlain to Alexander II, William Sinclair, Michael de Monymusk, Robert Cockburn. So does the 1st Earl of Atholl, and so does Charles Edward Stuart, Count Roehenstart, who died in 1854 and claimed descent from the Stuart line that the battle fought outside these walls had been about.

The small Chapter House Museum holds relics from the monastic and medieval periods together with local history exhibits — which is the closest thing the site has to an account of itself, on ground that has been in continuous religious use for something close to fourteen hundred years.