Longniddry, Glassel Park Road, Longniddry House, John Knox's Kirk

Within the garden adjoining Longniddry House, ¼ of a mile south-west of Longniddry Station, is a fragment of building of indeterminate age, which is locally known as ‘John Knox's Church’ and is so noted on the O.S. map. The building has been rectangular on plan and orientated; 31 feet of the north wall, which is 2 ¾ feet in thickness, remains to a height of 9 feet, as well as several courses of the west gable return. There are the jambs of a doorway on the north wall and, adjoining the doorway, traces of a small window, which may have had an arched head. The masonry is of light coloured rubble.

Chalmers writes that this chapel ‘is popularly called John Knox's Kirk’ (1), and this seems to be the earliest allusion to this idea. M'Crie expands in the statement that Knox catechised his youthful pupils ‘publicly in a chapel at Longniddrie, in which he also read, at stated times, a chapter of the Bible accompanied by explanatory remarks. The memory of this fact has been preserved by tradition, and the chapel, the ruins of which are still apparent, is popularly called John Knox's Kirk’ (2). He refers to Chalmers and also compares the passage in Knox's.Historie of the Reformation, p. 67. On that page in Crawford's edition we are told the fathers of Knox's three pupils (Douglas of Longniddry and Cockburn of Ormiston) solicited him to take them with him to the Castle of St. Andrews, to which he was retiring as a-refuge (1547). There he ‘red untoe thame ane Catechisme, accompt quhairof he caussit thame gif publicklie in the Paroche Kirk of St. Andrews. He red mairover unto thame the evangell of John, proceiding quhair he left at his departing frome Langniddrie, quhair before his residence was; and that lecture he red in the chapell within the Castell, at a certane hour’.

RCAHMS 1924, visited 23 March 1920.

(1) Caledonia iv., p. 525; (2) Life of Knox (ed. 1839), p. 26.