Field Visit
Date May 1988
Event ID 1082927
Category Recording
Type Field Visit
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1082927
The remains of this late medieval chapel are situated at an elevation of about 18m OD on a slight knoll above an old seacliff120m from the SE shore of Loch Fyne, overlooking the former ferry-crossing to Inveraray. The adjacent chlorite-schist quarry (No. 248) extends to within a few metres of the W wall, and human bones were found there 'a good number of years' before 1870 (en.1). No enclosure was identifiable at that date, but an area of level ground extending E from the chapel may have been used as the burial-ground; on the S the ground slopes to the Allt na Criche.
The outline of the walls was excavated for the 9th Duke of Argyll soon after 1900 (en.2), but they are turf-grown and no lime mortar is visible. The chapel measured 12.6m by 4.3m within walls 0.8m thick which survive in places to a height of about 0.5m. The doorway was probably in the W half of the N wall, whose footings are not visible. The building was divided into two almost equal parts by a transverse wall of the same thickness as the side walls; the position of its doorway is not visible but, if centrally placed, it can have been no more than 1m wide. This wall may have divided the chapel proper from an anteroom with a chaplain's dwelling above, or may be the result of post-medieval domestic alterations .
The chapel was founded by Duncan Campbell of Lochawe, Lord Campbell (d.l453), who endowed it to support a chaplain, and a papal petition of 1466 by his younger son, Sir Colin Campbell of Glenorchy, requested that 'the chapel of St Catherine near Loch Fyne', although as yet unconsecrated, should be valid for mass and other services (en.3). This was granted, with the privilege of using a portable altar, and a fragment of such an altar, bearing three of the original five incised foliated crosses, was discovered in the NW part of the chapel about 1900, but does not appear to survive (en.4). The chapel probably remained in existence until the early 17thcentury, but by that period the two merklands of 'Kilkatrine', which probably represented its original endowment, had passed into the possession of a local family, under the superiority of the Earls of Argyll (en.5).
RCAHMS 1992, visited May 1988
