Lochgilphead, Argyll Street, Baptist Church

This modest early 19th-century chapel, which stands on the E side of Argyll Street, measures 15m from N to S by 10.7m transversely. It is constructed of snecked rubble and has a S entrance and three rectamngular windows in each side-wall. The wallhead was raised and the original hipped roof replaced by a gabled one at about the end of the 19th century, when the round-headed window in the N gable was probably built or enlarged, and the internal furnishings date from the same period.

The church was built in 1815 for the Revd Dugald Sinclair, pastor of a congregation originally founded in 1805 at Bellanoch on the Crinan Canal, who had conducted a notable series of evangelising tours in the West Highlands. He transferred the property in 1819 to ‘the Calvinistic Baptist Society at Lochgilphead’, but following a decline in numbers with the construction of a nearby Parliamentary church in 1828, Sinclair and many of his remaining congregation emigrated to Ontario in 1831. There was however a revival during the long pastorate of his successor and the building has remained in continuous use.

RCAHMS 1992, visited May 1986