Oronsay Priory, interior. View of cloister arcading.

Description Oronsay Priory, interior. View of cloister arcading.

Date 24/8/1898

Collection Papers of Erskine Beveridge, antiquarian, Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland

Catalogue Number AG 2201

Category Photographs and Off-line Digital Images

Copies SC 740720

Scope and Content West Cloister Arcade, Oronsay Priory, Argyll & Bute The ruins of Oronsay Priory stand at the west end of the small island of Oronsay, accessible by foot from its larger neighbour, Colonsay, at low tide. The priory was founded by John I, Lord of the Isles, between 1325 and 1353 as an Augustinian community, but little is known about its subsequent history. The building seems to have progressed intermittently through the 14th and 15th centuries, but by the early 17th century it was in a ruinous condition. The Victorian photographer, Erskine Beveridge, photographed the priory c.1897. The west arcade of the cloister, seven triangular arches formed by inclined slabs set on slab capitals, and borne on slab piers rising from a low masonry plinth, is a reconstruction of an earlier 16th-century rebuilding of the arcade, carried out using original fragments in 1883. At the centre of the arcade are two earlier piers, reused in the 1883 reconstruction, which bear decorative black-letter inscriptions in Latin and Gaelic ascribing the early 16th-century rebuilding work to the mason-sculptor, Mael-Sechlainn O Cuinn, working under the direction of Canon Celestinus. Mael-Sechlainn O Cuinn trained in the Iona School of sculpture, and carved the Oronsay Cross shortly before 1500. Source: RCAHMS contribution to SCRAN.

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