Publication Account
Date 1985
Event ID 1016212
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Publication Account
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1016212
An unaisled 13th century parish church is represented by the ruinous side walls of a nave that may never have been rebuilt when the collegiate church was begun. By contrast, the foundations of a rectangular building protruding westwards from the south transept are those of a chapel added by Catherine Sinclair of 'Hermandston', wife of the 1st Lord Seton c1434.
The present choir and sacristy were built in part by the 3rd Lord (died c1478); the 4th completed the vaultingand founded the College in 1492; the 5th, who fell at Flodden in 1513, roofed the choir with stone slabs and provided glazed windows, stalls and canopies above the altar. His widow Janet Seton added the north transept in 1541, and in 1545 rebuilt the south transept so as "to make it ane perfyt and proportionat croce kirk". She also "biggit up the steeple as ye see it now to ane grit hight swa that it wants little of compleiting". It seems never to have been completed, however.
Internally, the crossing appears spatially separate from the rest of the church (cf Dunglass, no. 57, and the surviving part of the former Carmelite friary church at South Queensferry, NT 128784). The square ribvaulted tower is also unusual in that the spire to which it is coupled is octagonal. The way in which the faces are alternately widened and narrowed allows it to be called a broach tower-though of a French rather than English type.
As with many late medieval Scottish churches, the east walls of the transepts are windowless; the choir, meantime, terminates in a three-sided, buttressed apse and like the rest of the interior (save for the crossing) is tunnel-vaulted. Around the choir there has been a stone seat; in the south wall is a 15th century piscina or basin for washing out communion or mass vessels and next to it, unusually high up, a single-recessed sedilia or priest's seat.
Next to a second piscina in the south transept, an elaborate Renaissance monument commemorates James, 1st Earl of Perth, husband of Lady Isobel Seton, died 1611. Other 17th and 18th century monuments commemorate Ogilvies, Setons and Wintons.
Though well preserved the church suffered after the Reformation, and by the mid 19th century bays and windows were blocked up and one transept used as a carpenter's shop.
Information from 'Exploring Scotland's Heritage: Lothian and Borders', (1985).
