Archaeology Notes

Event ID 725416

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Archaeology Notes

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/725416

NX24NE 2 27840 48920.

(NX 2784 4892) Chapel Finian (NR) (Remains of)

OS 6" map (1957)

Excavations were carried out at this site in 1950 by the Dumfriesshire Galloway Natur Hist Antiq Soc. The foundations and lower walls remain of Chapel Finian, a mortared rectangular stone chapel or oratory, measuring some 6.7m by 4.1m internally and buttressed. It is surrounded by a possibly earlier drystone wall enclosing a sub-rectangular area which contains a well (see NX24NE 1). "The chapel is named after St Findbar and is dated to the 10th or 11th century. Its situation near the shore suggests that it was for the use of pilgrims landing nearby.

C A R Radford 1951; E W MacKie 1975; S Piggott and W D Simpson 1970

Plaster from the excavations is in Dumfries Museum (Accession no. 1972/61).

A E Truckell 1972

Chapel Finian (Department of the Environment nameplate) is a simple buttressed rectangular chamber entered by a 0.9m wide doorway in the south wall. It measures 6.7m NE-SW by 4.1m within a wall 0.7m thick and up to 0.9m high. A stone wall (originally dry built but necessarily consolidated with lime mortar to preserve it) encloses the chapel in a manner characteristic of Early Christian sites. This wall, surviving on all but the south-west side is 0.9m thick and up to 1.3m high. There are wall footings 0.7m wide and 0.1m high immediately outside the door of the chapel and outside the enclosing wall in the south east; their purpose is not clear.

Surveyed at 1:2500.

Visited by OS (TRG) 17 May 1977.