Dunkeld Cathedral

Dunkeld Cathedral stands on the north bank of the River Tay in Dunkeld, in Perth and Kinross. The building is of square-stone work in predominantly grey sandstone. It is still a place of worship for the parish, and the name cathedral has been kept, although the national church now has neither bishops nor cathedrals. Ownership is divided.

One account calls the whole cathedral a Crown property in state care and a scheduled monument. Another says the ownership is shared: the ruined nave, the south porch, the north-west tower and the surrounding grounds passed into state care in 1925, while the roofed choir stayed with the parish and is used for worship during part of the year. The choir is the earliest surviving part of the medieval church. The nave is a largely roofless ruin.

In the account current in November 2026 the west end is closed while conservation continues, the grounds remain open, the scaffolding is to be updated so that it weighs less on the appearance of the place, and parts of the nave are to be laser-scanned so that a three-dimensional model can record the condition of the stone.

The Gaelic name of the town, Dùn Chailleann, is one of the place-names that still carry the name of the Caledonii, the people named in Roman sources for what is now Scotland, even though the Gaelic forms themselves are much later. St Columba, also called Colmcille, was an Irish abbot and missionary. He was born on 7 December 521 to Fedlimid and Eithne of the Cenél Conaill at Gartan in Tír Chonaill, and he died on 9 June 597. His name means dove.

Adomnán of Iona took Colmcille to be his birth name, while other Irish sources give the birth name Crimthann, meaning fox. He studied at Movilla under Finnian of Movilla, then with the bard Gemman, then at Clonard under Finnian of Clonard, and he was counted among the twelve students of that house later called the Twelve Apostles of Ireland. He founded churches and monasteries at Derry, Durrow, Kells and Swords. A tradition links him to a quarrel with Finnian of Movilla over a copied psalter and to the Battle of Cúl Dreimhne in 561, in which many men were killed.

Richard Sharpe warned against accepting the many later claims that tie that battle to Columba’s leaving of Ireland, even though the annals show that Columba supported his own king against the high king. In 563 he crossed to Scotland with twelve companions in a wicker and leather currach, landed first on Kintyre while still in sight of Ulster, and settled on Iona, which his kinsman Conall mac Comgaill, king of Dál Riata, made over to him. He visited the pagan king Bridei of Fortriu at Inverness and won his respect without winning his conversion. By the late sixth century he was said to have been familiar with the people and the great king of the Tay.

That familiarity is the earliest link between the saint and this river. It is not the same thing as a monastery already standing at Dunkeld.

When a monastery was founded here is disputed, and the sources do not settle it. One account places the first house in the sixth or early seventh century, after an expedition of St Columba into the land of Alba, and describes it as a simple collection of wattle huts. Another says that very little is known of the Culdee community, especially of when it first settled, and that the cathedral probably occupies the site of a Culdee monastery dating from at least the middle of the ninth century, with traces that may also survive in the parkland. Both Causantín mac Fergusa, whose reign is given as 789 to 820, and Cináed mac Ailpín, Kenneth MacAlpin, have been linked to the foundation of a monastery dedicated to St Columba at Dunkeld in the first half of the ninth century.

One account says that Causantín built a more substantial church of reddish sandstone and declared Dunkeld the centre of the faith in Alba. Another says that Kenneth rebuilt a church and monastery founded by Constantine, after the Danes had destroyed it, and that he translated the relics. A third says that in 849, the seventh year of his reign, Kenneth brought relics of Columba to a church which he himself had built. The chronicle that records that gift does not name the place.

It is generally accepted that the church was Dunkeld. A list of saints’ resting places, the part of which that names Columba was compiled no later than the early tenth century, places Columba at Dunkeld on the Tay, second only to Alban. Kenneth’s own life is given with its own disagreements. He was born about 810, most likely on Iona, died at Forteviot of a tumour, and was buried on Iona.

The day of his death is given as 8 February 858 and, in one regnal table, as 13 February 858. His move of relics from Iona is dated 848 or 849. The same year 849, the Annals of Ulster record that Indrechtach, abbot of Iona, went to Ireland with the relics of Columba. The two reports sit side by side: relics carried inland to a new church, and relics carried to Ireland.

Inland houses were not safe either. In Kenneth’s reign Danes were said to have raided as far as Dunkeld and Clunie. The monastery at Dunblane was burned by the Britons around the same time. In 875 Causantín, son of Kenneth, was killed in Atholl by Healfdene, a leader of the Great Heathen Army.

Further raids on Dunkeld are recorded in 878, when the community of Columba sought refuge in Ireland, and again in 903.

What happened to the relics at the Reformation is also left open. One account says they were kept at Dunkeld until the Reformation and were then removed to Ireland, and that some people believe Columban relics are still buried in the cathedral grounds. Another says their fate is unknown: they may have been destroyed or lost, and a separate tradition holds that they were taken back to Ireland and hidden. A Celtic bell believed to have been used at the monastery is not kept in the cathedral.

It was used in the church of Little Dunkeld, the parish church of the lesser district on the other bank. The reason is not fully understood. One possibility offered is that later canons treated the older Culdee observance as heresy and would not keep its relics. An irregular reddish streak in the eastern gable is said to be stone from that earlier monastery, set into the later grey wall.

Among the earliest carved stones is the Apostle’s Stone, also called the Apostles Stone, believed to be a fragment of a ninth-century cross-slab and a probable survivor of the Culdee house. The place record also notes two Class I and one Class II Pictish symbol stones. One had been used as a gatepost and now stands on the south side of the church. Another had been reused in 1729 as a farmer’s tombstone and later as paving, and part of a cross-shaft shows a horse standing on its hind legs.

Roman coins and medieval coins are recorded from the cathedral area, without a published count in that note.

Dunkeld’s rank did not last as a single primatial seat. In 865 Tuathal son of Artgal died as chief bishop of Fortriu and abbot of Dunkeld. The primacy is said to have moved to Abernethy, which has one of the two Scottish round towers of Irish type, the other standing at Brechin, and then to St Andrews. One chronicle places three elections of bishops at Abernethy in a time when Scotland had only one bishop, and calls that church for a while the principal royal and episcopal seat of the Picts.

The same chronicle is not trusted for the claim that Abernethy was the principal royal seat. In 906 King Constantine, son of Áed, and Bishop Cellach met at Scone on the Hill of Faith. By then the bishop’s church is read as the primatial church, and Columba’s bones are not said to have moved with the primacy. In 965 a battle at Dorsum Crup, likely Duncrub near Dunning, was fought against the king.

Dubdon, called satrap and presumed mormaer of Atholl, was killed, and so was Dunchad, abbot of Dunkeld. In 1034 Donnchad mac Crínáin, Duncan, son of another abbot of Dunkeld, became king, the first of a line running down to Alexander III. Between 865 and about 1100 no fewer than five abbots of Dunkeld are named. From the early eleventh century they were close to the royal family.

The last named abbot was Ethelred, brother of the kings Edgar, Alexander I and David I. Crínán, father of Duncan I, who reigned from 1034 to 1040, was Ethelred’s great-grandfather. It has been argued that the abbot was, in fact if not in name, the heir of Columba, with oversight of the Columban churches.

The territorial bishopric is dated in more than one way. One account says that about 1114 David I instituted territorial bishoprics and that Cormac was the first bishop of Dunkeld, holding the see until about 1132. Another dates the foundation of the see to 1107 and says that in 1127 Alexander erected Dunkeld into a cathedral church and replaced Columban monks with a chapter of secular canons, and that thirty-five bishops occupied the see from that foundation until the old hierarchy ended in the sixteenth century. A third says the earliest bishop styled of Dunkeld is Cormac, who witnessed two royal charters around 1130, both concerning Dunfermline, and who appears in a Gaelic note in the Book of Deer dated between April 1131 and April 1132.

In that note Gartnait son of Cainnech and Éte daughter of Gille-Míchéil gave a pledge to Cormac, bishop of Dunkeld, to guarantee a grant to Columba and Drostan at Deer in Buchan. Deer lies far outside even the northern outliers of the later diocese, and the pledge is read as evidence that Cormac acted as head of the Columban family in Scotland, not merely as diocesan of a local patch. A foundation charter of Scone of about 1120 also names him, but that charter has been argued to be spurious. Alexander I is described as the likely mover of the transfer of the abbacy’s lands to the bishopric, and perhaps of the establishment or re-establishment of the bishopric itself.

His instrument was the Augustinian order. He founded Scone, the first Augustinian house in Scotland, and his prior Robert became bishop of St Andrews in 1123 or 1124.

The first community of canons who tried to settle at Dunkeld in the twelfth century are associated with the later house on Inchcolm, an island in the Forth dedicated to St Columba. The cathedral’s order of service and the canons’ rule are said to have taken Salisbury as their model. Alexander was storm-bound for three days on the island and was looked after by a hermit dedicated to Columba. That story was written in the mid-fifteenth century by Walter Bower, abbot of Inchcolm.

Whether the hermit stood for a larger community is left open. One reading treats the island priory as the salvaging of a failed scheme to place Augustinians at Dunkeld, perhaps because at least some of the Dunkeld clergy were Culdees and would not take the Augustinian rule, or because the island mirrored Iona. Another reading treats it as a plan laid by Alexander and carried on by David: canons were gathered in David’s lifetime, Bishop Gregory of Dunkeld, about 1147 to 1169, held lands in trust from David for their use until there should be canons on the island called Emonia, and during the long building of the island house the regulars likely lived at Dunkeld, serving the altar and the bishop. Material compiled between 1191 and 1200 records both Culdees and regular canons at Dunkeld.

Gregory’s charter, dated about 1162 to 1169 and also from 24 May 1163, gave the island church a tenth of his cain of corn, cheese and malt, and a tenth of the food and drink consumed when he was on the island. His successor Richard, bishop from 1170 to 1178, granted the church of Rosyth. The island lay at least two days’ journey from the cathedral, about 63 kilometres or 39 miles in a straight line. Five bishops of Dunkeld were buried on Inchcolm rather than in the cathedral: Richard, 1170 to 1178; Richard de Prebenda, 1203 to 1210; John of Leicester, 1211 to 1214, whose painted tomb dates from the 1260s, when the bones of three bishops were moved into a new choir; Gilbert, about 1230 to 1236; and James Levington, also Livingstone, 1475 to 1483.

In 1272 Richard de Inverkeithing, whose episcopate is given as 1250 or 1252 to 1272, ordered that his heart be buried in the choir at Inchcolm. He had paid for that island choir himself in 1266. His body was buried at Dunkeld. An opening for the heart-casket can still be seen in the foundations of the north wall of the island choir.

The same Richard is named in the cathedral’s own burial list as a chamberlain of Alexander II.

The medieval cathedral that now stands was a work of the Middle Ages, the European period running approximately from the fifth century to the late fifteenth, with an end sometimes placed about 1500 and sometimes at the Reformation. The High Middle Ages are placed after the year 1000, and the Late Middle Ages are marked by famine, plague and war, including the deaths of about a third of Europeans between 1347 and 1350. Gothic building of great churches belongs to the later part of that span. At Dunkeld the work is given both as beginning in 1260 and ending in 1501, and as probably beginning in the middle of the thirteenth century and reaching completion in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth, only about sixty years before the Reformation.

The duration is given both as more than 250 years and as more than 200 years. Very little was built in the fourteenth century, and that pause is tied to the instability of the Scottish kingdom. It is also said outright that the year the choir was begun is not known with certainty. The earliest surviving part is the choir of the middle to late thirteenth century, also called the late 1200s.

It has fine arcading on the north wall and an early fourteenth-century sedilia on the same wall. The window tracery was replaced in the restoration of 1814. The choir is now the parish church. The furniture inside it is relatively modern.

A sixteenth-century history of the bishops, written by Alexander Myln, a former canon here who became abbot of Cambuskenneth in 1517 and the first president of the Court of Session, describes how the fittings once looked.

Bishops named in the burial list before the great nave campaign include John Scotus, 1183 to 1203; Geoffrey de Liberatione, 1236 or 1237 to 1249; Richard de Inverkeithing; William Sinclair, 1309 to 1337, whose effigy remains; and Michael de Monymusk, 1370 to 1376. Sinclair is also remembered for 1317, when he rallied the sheriff of Fife and men who were fleeing an English attack on the lands of Inchcolm along the Fife coast, saying they would take revenge with Columba as protector of the land being destroyed. The English nickname Sant Qwhame played on his Scots name Colm and on a word for torment and violent death. Among later burials is the first Earl of Atholl, about 1440 to 1512, and Robert Cockburn, bishop from 1524 to 1526.

Alexander Stewart, Earl of Buchan, called the Wolf of Badenoch, is buried in the cathedral, and his armoured effigy still lies on the tomb. He was a younger son of Robert II by Elizabeth Mure, the fourth son, born about 1343 or about 1345. He was Justiciar north of the Forth sometime before February 1387 and was removed from that office after Robert, Earl of Fife, became the effective ruler late in 1388. His marriage to Euphemia of Ross was annulled in 1392, and with it he lost Ross.

In May and June 1390 he burned the burgh of Elgin and its cathedral. There is no proof that the nickname Wolf was used in his lifetime. A legend says he died after a night of chess with a tall stranger in black at Ruthven, and that he was found dead in the hall in the morning. The date of the real death is disputed.

His life is headed 20 July 1405, and one sentence says he died about 20 July 1405 and was buried at Dunkeld. The damaged Latin inscription on the tomb names him Alexander Stewart, son of King Robert and Elizabeth More, lord of Buchan and of Badenoch, and says he died on the twenty-fourth day of July, with the rest of the line missing. Several other notices put his death in July 1394, which leaves the mentions of him at Spynie on 3 May 1398, as baillie of the earldom of Atholl in 1402, and at Perth in 1404 either referring to him or to a son of the same name. The cathedral’s own short account says he was buried here after a death in 1394.

The monument account gives the year 1405. The effigy shows a knight in fifteenth-century plate armour, hands clasped, feet resting on a lion. Each face of the massive reconstructed sarcophagus carries weepers, men-at-arms in canopied niches. The chest tomb is described as one of the few Scottish royal monuments to survive from the Middle Ages.

In 1406 Bishop Robert Cardeny, also de Cardeny, laid the foundation stone of the nave. He is called the longest-serving bishop of Dunkeld and is said to have been consecrated by Pope Benedict XIII in 1399. His tomb was built in 1420, seventeen years before his death, and his death is given as 1437. In 1408, on the word of Abbot Myln, he built a substantial castle nearby.

Both that castle and the bishop’s palace were used as a prison from the 1550s until about 1743. The nave he began is an aisled church of seven bays with a three-storey central space and single-storey aisles entered through cylindrical pillars. The design is read as looking to the Low Countries rather than to England: cylindrical piers and curvilinear window tracery of a kind used in northern European churches and not found in English church architecture of this period. The same turn toward the Low Countries is noted at St Andrews, at St Machar’s in Old Aberdeen, and at Elgin.

Bishop Thomas Lauder began a chapter house in 1457 and consecrated the nave for public worship in 1464. The tower is dated in more than one way. One account says construction began in 1467 and was finished by Lauder’s successor, Bishop James Livingstone, whose years are 1475 to 1483. Another says the great west window was inserted during construction of the tower begun by Lauder in 1469.

A third says the south porch and the north-west tower were added by Lauder before 1483. The western front is dominated by the tower and by that off-centre window. Stubs of the tracery suggest a complex pattern, probably like a contemporary window in the south transept of St Michael’s church at Linlithgow. The ground floor of the tower keeps large areas of painted decoration, the Judgement of Solomon and the woman taken in adultery, matching the room’s use as the consistory court, which heard matrimonial cases among others.

Those paintings are a rare survival. Little of the original furniture remains. A screen between nave and choir is known to have been richly ornamented with portraits of kings, bishops and benefactors. Myln’s history is the source of that interior detail.

A sixteenth-century antiphonary, now in the library of the university at Edinburgh, is believed to have come from this cathedral and preserves settings for the masses sung here.

The Reformation reached the building in 1560, when reformers cleansed it. Soon afterwards a local laird, a descendant of Bishop Cardeny, took the roof off the nave. The nave has stood without that roof since. The choir became the parish church and was re-roofed in 1600.

Notable late medieval bishops include James Kennedy, here from 1438 to 1440 before he was translated to St Andrews, and Gavin Douglas, the makar, bishop from 1516 to 1521, who translated the Aeneid into Scots verse and died in exile in England. John Hamilton held Dunkeld from 1545 to 1547, then St Andrews, and was executed at Stirling in 1571. The see was declared void in 1571. Robert Crichton, nephew of an earlier bishop and called the last pre-Reformation bishop, is also said to have lived until 1586.

About 1609 James VI appointed a new bishop of Dunkeld. Until the abolition of episcopacy in the national church in 1690, the post-Reformation bishops lived in a tower house now incorporated into Belmont Castle. A separate seventeenth-century account says the bishopric became an appendage of the Crown and afterwards descended to the earls of Fife.

In 1566 the dean’s manse became the residence of the Earl of Atholl. Parliamentarian forces destroyed that house in 1653, and a new residence was built on the site between 1676 and 1684. A formal garden was laid out around the house between 1724 and 1750. The sentence about 1653 belongs to the manse, not to a second destruction of the cathedral itself.

The Glorious Revolution deposed King James II and VII in November 1688. He had become king in February 1685. The birth of his son James Francis Edward Stuart on 10 June 1688 raised the prospect of a Catholic dynasty, and an invitation went to William of Orange. William landed in Devon on 5 November 1688.

James’s army broke up, and James went into exile in France on 23 December. In April 1689 a convention made William and Mary joint monarchs of England and Ireland. A separate Scottish settlement followed in June 1689. Mary died in 1694, and William ruled alone after that.

The movement to restore James or his heirs, Jacobitism, lasted into the late eighteenth century. John Slezer, a German-born military engineer and artist, was caught on the losing side of that change. He had arrived in Scotland in 1669 as surveyor of stores and magazines, and he is known for engraved views of castles, abbeys, towns and noble seats, made while he travelled as captain of the artillery company. He was raised to captain in 1688 and imprisoned later that year as a supporter of James VII, then released the following year.

The heading of his life gives his death as 1717. The narrative of that life says he died on 24 June 1714, after poor sales of the 1693 volume and years in the sanctuary of Holyrood Abbey to avoid his creditors. He married Jean Straiton of Dundee. His engraving of Dunkeld Cathedral is dated 1693, four years after the fighting in the town.

The Battle of Dunkeld was fought in the streets around the cathedral on 21 August 1689, in the Jacobite rising of that year, often called Dundee’s rising. After the Jacobite victory at Killiecrankie and the death of Viscount Dundee, command passed to Colonel Alexander Cannon, leader of the Irish recruits, rather than to Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel, a veteran of about sixty. Cameron left and took some of his clan with him. The Privy Council, preparing to leave Scotland, ordered the new Cameronian regiment under Lieutenant Colonel William Cleland to move north from Perth and hold Dunkeld at all costs.

The regiment took its name from Richard Cameron, a covenanting leader who lived from 1648 to 1680, and it was raised largely from the tenants of the Marquess of Douglas. It later became the 26th Regiment of Foot and then the Cameronians, the Scottish Rifles. Dunkeld had no town walls. Cleland put his men in the cathedral, which had an enclosing wall, and in the nearby mansion of the Marquess of Atholl.

The Jacobites, outnumbering the Cameronians by more than four to one, stormed the town from all sides and drove the defenders back from the outer posts. The narrow streets left no room for the Highland charge that had worked at Killiecrankie. Cleland, aged twenty-seven, was hit in the liver and in the head in the first hour. He dragged himself out of sight so that his men would not see him fall, and he was later buried in the cathedral.

Command passed to Captain George Munro of Auchinbowie. The fight lasted sixteen hours. Highlanders who had barricaded themselves in houses were burned inside them. At eleven at night, short of strength and ammunition, the Highlanders withdrew, leaving 300 dead or dying.

The Cameronians, also out of ammunition, are reported to have stripped lead from the roof of Atholl House to keep firing. Losses on the Williamite side are given as a range, from 20 to 50. Holes from musket balls are still visible in the east gable. The cathedral was damaged and was one of a handful of buildings to survive the assault.

The dead of the battle were buried to the south of the cathedral. The field was added to the inventory of historic battlefields in 2012. Repair money came from the Marquis of Atholl and from the government. A further scheme of repairs to the choir was carried out for the Marquis in 1691.

In 1702 the Marquis’s monument was set up in the chapter house, which the dukes of Atholl used as a burial aisle. In 1762 the choir windows were restored and the tower was re-roofed, paid for by the third Duke of Atholl and by the state. Dunkeld is described as one of the first buildings in Britain, and one of the first historic buildings in Britain, to receive public money for restoration. In 1791 the fourth Duke acquired the south and south-west parts of the precinct and cleared many of the buildings there.

By about 1810 the cathedral and its precincts had been taken into a designed landscape around Dunkeld House. Around 1815 the family built St Adamnan’s Cottage south of the choir, and it stood until the end of the nineteenth century. In 1814 and 1815 major repairs to the nave and choir were directed by Archibald Elliot for the fourth Duke, again with a government subsidy. The hidden side of Cardeny’s tomb is most likely to have been turned to the wall during that duke’s restoration, which is also dated 1814 to 1818.

In 1908 a further restoration, mainly of the choir, was carried out by the firm of Dunn and Watson for the shipowner Sir Donald Currie. In 1925 the nave, the south porch, the tower and the cathedral policies were taken into guardianship. The choir remained with the parish. In 1975 the replacement of decayed stone began.

The chapter house holds the memorials of the Marquis and the later dukes, and also the original gravestone of Niel Gow, the eighteenth-century fiddler who served the duke and his family for many years. In the ruins is a memorial to General Charles Edward Stuart, also spelled Stewart, Count Roehenstart, also spelled Rochenstart, born in 1784, who died in Dunkeld after an accident in 1854. In the choir, an 1872 bronze commemorates the Black Watch, and another memorial names Cameronian officers killed in the First World War. The small chapter-house museum shows monastic and medieval pieces and local history.

Services are held every Sunday. In the winter months the congregation uses the smaller church at Little Dunkeld. The minister since 2001 is named as the Reverend R. Fraser Penny.

The tomb of Bishop Cardeny was built as a free-standing monument in St Ninian’s chapel in the nave, comparable with a tomb at Fortrose that is carved on both sides so that it can be seen from more than one angle. During a conservation assessment in 2018, a torch showed that the arch did not meet the wall as expected. A carved moulding ran around the back, and behind it were figures. One account says several figures, matching a worn figure on the front.

Another says at least a dozen saint-like figures, unrecorded, on the side that had faced the wall for centuries. The first photographs were made with a slim telephone because a larger camera would not fit. Sharper images were taken by way of a mirror and reversed. A three-dimensional model was made of the best-preserved figure, and a printed replica was made from it.

Some stones may have been recut or left out so that the tomb would fit the wall. When the tomb was moved, and why, is not known for certain. The likely occasion remains the restoration of 1814 to 1818. Colin Muir, the stone conservator who found the carvings, said that further work to protect the tomb was being planned and that other carved detail might still be hidden in the wall.

Archaeology around the church has been limited, and the deposits that have been seen suggest that more survives. A watching brief in 1993 found truncated walling in the eastern precinct. In 2000, during shallow excavation along an existing footpath, a cobbled surface appeared at a depth of 280 millimetres and was read as a cobbled way into the courtyard, near the principal entrance from the town. The chanonry, the housing of the chapter and of clerks and servants, lay to the south and south-west.

The bishop’s palace is thought to have been a cluster of two-storey buildings to the south-west. Cropmarks read as that palace imply that archaeological deposits there are likely to be well preserved. Documentary and map evidence suggests that some chanonry buildings lasted until the eighteenth century, when the fourth Duke cleared the ground. Burial in the surrounding ground may have continued until the middle of the nineteenth century.

In a study published on 29 April 2024, Gordon Noble, Leidy Laura Gonzalez Bojaca, Robin Worsman and James O’Driscoll reported survey and keyhole excavation at four early church sites in eastern Scotland: Abersnithock, Migvie, Glamis and Dunkeld. Aerial survey, geophysics and evaluative digging found rectilinear or curvilinear ditched enclosures centred on the church at each place, and radiocarbon dates placed those enclosures in the early medieval period. They are discussed as the sacred precincts, the great church enclosures, of the early church in Pictland. At Dunkeld the same geophysical survey also showed part of the old town, burned and abandoned after the Battle of Dunkeld in 1689.

A later geophysical survey, recorded on 24 July 2025, covered ground to the south-east of the cathedral ahead of a publicly accessible stone-hewing shed, a viewing deck, and the extension of a gravel path. That notice names the surveyor and the commissioning chain, and it publishes no catalogue of finds.

The ruined nave, porch, tower and a wide area of parkland, including ground to the north and west where the chanonry extended and the eastern part of the field called St Ninian’s Croft, where Dunkeld House later stood, were scheduled as a monument of national importance. The scheduling day is given as 9 October 1994 and as 10 October 1994. The choir, in use as the parish church, was left out of that scheduled area. The building was listed in the highest category.

The listing day is given as 4 October 1971 and as 5 October 1971, and the amendment as 17 April 2018 and as 18 April 2018. The scheduled area is irregular, with greatest diagonal dimensions of 450 metres from north-north-east to south-south-west by 295 metres from north-west to south-east. The legal interest of the monument is placed on the quality of the architecture, on the written record of the building campaigns, and on the chance to test that record by excavation. The grounds form part of a designed landscape of the eighteenth century, later enlarged in the nineteenth and early twentieth, and an assessment of that landscape called it of considerable value in every regard.

Dunkeld lies in an area recognised for scenic quality. The combination of the Highland edge, the Tay and the parkland is what sets the ruin off.

The same pattern, a medieval cathedral church that kept its name after the bishops had gone, appears at other Scottish churches linked with this one in the later medieval map of sees. Dunblane Cathedral is dedicated to the sixth-century St Blane. The lower part of its tower is pre-Romanesque, dated around 1100 and also to the eleventh century, and was once free-standing, with upper work of about 1500. Most of the rest is thirteenth-century Gothic.

It was the seat of the bishops of Dunblane, also called of Strathearn, until the abolition of bishops after the Glorious Revolution in 1689. After the abolition of prelacy the choir became the parish church, the nave fell out of use, and its roof had fallen in by about 1600, a dating that sits awkwardly beside an abolition placed in 1689. The building is Crown property. It was restored under Robert Rowand Anderson from 1889 to 1893, with further work by Robert Lorimer completed in 1912 and also dated 1914 in other notices of that restoration.

There is no entrance charge. On 13 June 2024 the charge was united with Kilmadock and Kincardine-in-Menteith. The ninth-century burning of the Strathearn monastery of Dunblane belongs to the same generation of raids that reached Dunkeld.

Brechin Cathedral dates from the thirteenth century and was the cathedral of the diocese of Brechin. It has not served that function since the Scottish Reformation in the sixteenth century. It is in the pointed style. Restorers damaged it in 1806, and that work was removed in a restoration completed in 1902 under John Honeyman.

The western gable, with its flamboyant window, Gothic door and massive square tower, parts of a much shortened choir, and the nave pillars and clerestory, are what remains of the medieval building. Immediately to the south-west stands a round tower built about the year 1000, 86 feet or 26.21 metres high, 50 feet or 15.3 metres in circumference at the base, 16 feet or 4.9 metres in diameter, with a hexagonal spire of 18 feet or 5.5 metres added in the fourteenth century. The only Scottish towers of this Irish type are at Brechin and at Abernethy. The doorway is raised above the ground, with a crucifixion on the arch and ecclesiastics on the jambs, one with a crosier and one with a Tau-shaped staff.

Inside are the Brechin hogback, the most complex Ringerike-style stone known in Scotland, and St Mary’s Stone, an eleventh-century cross-slab. The church closed as a sanctified church at a service on 28 November 2021, after the presbytery agreed in February 2020 to a dissolution. A committee led by Caroline Carnegie, Duchess of Fife, then took up the care of the building. The round tower at Abernethy is the same kind of monument as Brechin’s, and Abernethy is one of the churches to which Dunkeld’s early primacy is said to have passed.

Dornoch Cathedral is the parish church of Dornoch and keeps the name because it was the seat of the bishop of Caithness. It was dedicated to its founder, Gilbert de Moravia, later called Saint Gilbert, and was built in 1224, in the reign of Alexander II and in Gilbert’s episcopate. Gilbert’s death is given as 1245. William de Moravia, first Earl of Sutherland, was buried there in 1248.

In 1570 the Mackays of Strathnaver burned the cathedral during local feuding. Full renovation waited until 1835 to 1837, when William Burn rebuilt it for Elizabeth, Countess of Sutherland, at a cost of 15,000 pounds. The ruined but largely intact aisled medieval nave was demolished and a narrower nave without pillars was built on its site. In the seventeenth century Dornoch ceased to be the seat of the bishops of Caithness because the episcopate in the national church was abolished, and the name remained.

The interior was reordered between 1924 and 1926, when Victorian plaster was removed. Like Dunkeld, it is a medieval bishop’s church that a later parish kept, and that a fire and a long ruinous interval separated from the building a visitor sees now.

The choir at Dunkeld has its own present crisis of fabric. Over recent years the stonework deteriorated enough that a fence was put around the building so that falling masonry would not injure anyone, and at various times the building had to be closed. A restoration of the choir is estimated at about 4.2 million pounds. Its aims are to restore the external and internal stone, repair the roof and its coverings, replace leadwork, improve the disposal of rainwater, and upgrade heating and lighting so that the building can be used all year.

By 1 March 2026, 60,000 pounds had been awarded for the development stage of a request for 1.8 million pounds. A consultant had been appointed, invitations to tender for the design team had gone out, and a further application for the delivery stage was aimed at the following September. A state heritage grant programme had accepted the project for further assessment. The parish also described the story of Christianity here as stretching back to the sixth century, when missionaries from Iona made a base from which to carry their news through central Scotland.

That sixth-century claim sits beside the accounts that put the first known monastery in the ninth century and that leave the date of the first settlement unknown. The west end remains closed for conservation. The grounds are open. Visitors are received in the parish church in the former choir, except when services, fabric, or a request to leave the private ground closes that welcome.