Shapinsay, South Churchyard, Balfour Burial-aisle

HY51NW 19 50283 16539.

(HY 5027 1653) Burial Aisle: In the graveyard, E of the parish church, is a roofless rectangular building 7ft 6ins high to the wall-head. Evidently it has been attached to a now demolished church and there is a local tradition that there was once a cross-kirk here. An arch which obviously opened to the main building is still intact in the S wall. A panel sunk on the S faces of the crown voussoirs contains the date 16(5)6 flanking the letters M G B. The doorway is on the W side, its lintel bearing the date 1656.

RCAHMS 1946, visited 1929

As described by RCAHMS.

Visited by OS (AA) 3 October 1972

The Balfour family mausoleum is a roofless rectangular building, 6.25m by 5.5m externally situated in the graveyard immediately E of the South Church. Its S side is an open round-headed arch, and the structure appears to have been the N transept of a cruciform church, for which date-slabs and architectural details suggest a seventeenth century date. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century burials, the last dated 1966 are in a railed extension to the S.

RCAHMS 1946; 1987, visited July 1984