Publication Account

Date 1999

Event ID 1018334

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Publication Account

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1018334

The Riverside Parish Church figure 23.C stands at the east end of the curving High Street, on the site of the medieval parish church, and dates from 1811. Designed by Glasgow architect John Brash, it is a smaller version of his initial plan, the original proving too ornamental and expensive. The church has a simple rectangular plan with a two-stage tower over its west gable. A medieval stone within the church figure 8 and a worn sundial on its south wall may represent older structures incorporated within the current building.

The present building may have preserved traces of at least two earlier phases of the church. A mid eighteenth-century picture figure 7 records a church here, which appears to contain architectural elements of a fourteenth-or fifteenth-century date; and there may have been at least one earlier church on this site. In the seventeenth century, the church is known to have been enlarged, giving a T-shaped plan. It was this structure that was replaced by the 1811 church. Traces of all these earlier churches may be preserved beneath the present floor levels of the existing church and, in particular, more ancient walls may have been re-used as foundations for successive structures. Indeed, traces of earlier structures were noted during construction of the 1811 church. Development would not be expected here, but any ground disturbance in the form of environmental improvements or the insertion or maintenance of services should be archaeologically monitored.

Information from ‘Historic Dumbarton: The Archaeological Implications of Development’ (1999).