Recording Your Heritage Online
Event ID 563643
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Recording Your Heritage Online
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/563643
Kilmoluag graveyard A walled enclosure with three roofless structures and a number of grave slabs, one with fragments of medieval sculpture. Former parish church, early 13 th century, the rubbly ruin of a medieval church on a religious site founded c.560-90 and dedicated to St. Moluag. It has a good round-arched splayed window in the east gable and a late medieval arched tomb recess on the inside south wall. By 1773, when Raasay was part of Skye's Snizort parish, it was 'unroofed and ruinous' and used for burials. Memorial chapel, 1839, in memory of a Macleod daughter, possibly replacing the 'family burying-place' visited by Johnson and Boswell in 1773. This ashlar-faced Gothick chapel stands on a sloping site, underbuilt by five courses of rock-faced masonry, in the fashion of Edinburgh's New Town. Just visible is a tiny, lichen-blurred female mask reset on the inside apex of the east gable. Boswell saw it on the earlier building - a 'small bust or image of the Virgin Mary, carved upon a stone which makes part of the wall'. Burial lair to west, possibly 11 th century, with bevelled door lintel.
[The boundaries of Kilmoluag's burial sanctuary were once marked out by carved stone crosses, one of which has now been relocated to the roadside, just west of the mansion.]
Taken from "Western Seaboard: An Illustrated Architectural Guide", by Mary Miers, 2007. Published by the Rutland Press http://www.rias.org.uk
