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Publication Account
Date 1986
Event ID 1017454
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Publication Account
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1017454
Of red Nithsdale sandstone and hugely, but fittingly, out of scale with the village, the abbey church of Sweetheart or New Abbey ('new' in relation to the mother-house ofDundrennan) was the last, and is now the most complete, of Galloway's trio of Cistercian monasteries. It is also the most romantic. Its name, 'Dulce Cor' (Sweetheart), reflects the circumstances of its foundation in 1273 by the rich and pious Dervorguilla de Balliol in fond memory of her husband, John (d. 1268). His embalmed heart in a casket was buried with her on her death in 1290. An effigy of the foundress bearing a representation of the heart casket surmount ·the reassembled fragments of a copy of her tomb in the south transept chapel.
Anglo-Scottish warfare evidently delayed building works in the later 13th and 14th centuries, and caused much damage to the abbey's property. Its buildings were also struck by lightning before 1381, and were alleged in 1397 to have been 'totally burned'. At the Reformation in 1560 it was staffed by an abbot and convent of 15 monks, and, covertly, under Maxwell family protection, Roman rites continued into the early 17th century. The abbey and its estates were formed into a secular lordship in 1624, but successive buildings in and around the cloister continued to serve as the parish church until 1877. Positive affection for the abbey church ensured its survival, for in 1779 it was purchased from the owners and would-be quarriers of the site by a local consortium 'desirous of preserving the remainder of that building as an ornament to that part of the countIy'; the conventual buildings were practically all removed, however, leaving only the gateway from the outer court into the cloister.
Opinions differ as to the quality of the design and detailing of the church itself; its unquestioned merits are its colour and its completeness. Virtually all load-bearing medieval masonry is still in place except for parts of the transepts and the outer wall of the north nave-aisle. Its layout demonstrates the essential conservatism of Cistercian planning: a cruciform outline consisting of aisled nave, square-ended transepts (with a pair of chapels in each transept) and simple unaisled chancel. The structural nave, in this case two-storeyed and of six bays, contained the liturgical choirs required for lay brothers and monks. The provision of a low belfry-tower over the crossing and the introduction of decorative details, particularly in the traceried windows, represent departures from earlier and stricter Cistercian practice. There are rose windows in the west and south gables, the latter encircling, halo-like, a solid segment of the roof apex of the former east range. The surviving bar tracery involves much use of geometric circles, a style well exemplifIed in the great east window.
Outside the churchyard, the abbey precincts are enclosed on the north and east sides by a massive granite boulder-built wall up to 3.6m high and 1.2wide, one of the most complete of its kind in the country. The wall originally embraced an area of more than 12 hectares, the site of the western gateway being marked by a roadside pillar in the middle of the modem village. The eastern wall is reduced to footings, and the southern boundary was apparently formed by a water-filled ditch.
Information from ‘Exploring Scotland’s Heritage: Dumfries and Galloway’, (1986).
