# Glasgow Cathedral

church in Glasgow, Scotland, UK

Glasgow City, United Kingdom

Sacred place. 1136 CE

## Story

• Saint Mungo, also Kentigern, is said to have built a church by the Molendinar Burn, and the cathedral dedicated in his name still marks the place of his tomb.
• David I of Scotland attended the dedication of the first stone cathedral in 1136, and the present church was dedicated again in 1197 before a long thirteenth-century rebuilding.
• The Lower Church was made as a shrine, Robert Wishart was buried there in 1316, and after the Reformation three congregations shared the one building.
• The western towers were demolished in 1846 and 1848, the whole cathedral was in state care by 1857, and it remains a parish church of the Church of Scotland.
• Excavation in 1992 and 1993 found the line of the 1136 west front and seventy-seven burials, and in October 2025 the ancient well in the crypt was opened and given a glass mosaic.

## Visiting

Admission is free, and donations are welcome. No tickets are required for entry. From 1 April to 30 September the cathedral opens from 9.30am to 5.00pm Monday to Saturday and from 1.00pm to 5.00pm on Sunday. From 1 October to 31 March it opens from 10.00am to 4.00pm Monday to Saturday and from 1.00pm to 4.00pm on Sunday.
Last entry is 45 minutes before closing. The cathedral is closed on 25 and 26 December and on 1 and 2 January. Opening hours may vary when a service or a private event is being held. Another set of visiting hours closes the building at 4.15pm from 1 April to 30 September and at 4.00pm from 1 October to 31 March, with last entry at 3.15pm.
A further set of hours includes a midday closure from 12.00pm to 1.00pm, a summer opening from 10.00am, and a winter Sunday close at 5.00pm, with last entry at 4.30pm. Assistance dogs are allowed to enter. Other dogs are not allowed to enter. Mobility scooters and heavier chairs are not allowed on the stair lift.
Visitors with disabilities are charged standard admission rates, and up to two accompanying carers receive free entry.

## History

Glasgow Cathedral is the parish church of the Church of Scotland on the western bank of the Molendinar Burn, and it is the oldest building in the city. From the twelfth century until the Reformation it was the cathedral of the bishops and archbishops of Glasgow. It is one of only two medieval Scottish cathedrals to have survived that change virtually intact, the other being the cathedral at Kirkwall.

The dedication is to Saint Mungo, also called Kentigern, the patron of Glasgow. He is said to have been born at Culross after his mother, Teneu, was set adrift, and to have been raised by Saint Serf. As a young man he built a church beside the burn, was driven out, founded a church at Llanelwy, and returned at the invitation of King Riderch Hael. His death is placed on Sunday 13 January, in 603, about 612, or in 614.

Four stories are attached to him and appear on the city’s arms: a restored robin, a fire relit with hazel, a bell brought from Rome, and a ring recovered from a fish in the Clyde. His shrine was a place of pilgrimage until the Reformation, and his remains are said still to lie in the crypt. A spring called St Mungo’s Well fell east from the apse. No artefacts have been found that prove he founded the church, though a burial of the later seventh or eighth century was uncovered in 1992 and 1993.

David I of Scotland refounded the diocese between 1114 and 1118 and appointed his tutor John as bishop, intending to free Glasgow from York. The first stone cathedral was dedicated in 1136 in his presence. David, king from 1124 until his death at Carlisle on 24 May 1153, spent much of his reign defending that independence and widening his power in northern England after the Battle of the Standard.

In 1164 Somerled was defeated at Renfrew, and his head was brought to the cathedral. Bishop Jocelin enlarged the church from 1181 until a fire stopped the work, and a second dedication followed in 1197. In 1175 the pope called Glasgow a special daughter of Rome. William I made the town a burgh of barony and, in 1198, granted a fair from 6 July, crediting the birth of his son Alexander to Saint Mungo.

Bishop Walter completed the choir and Lower Church between 1207 and 1232. William de Bondington, from 1233 to 1258, lengthened the east end for a shrine at the main level and added the chapter house, the treasury, and the projection that became the Blackadder Aisle. The nave followed in the later thirteenth century. The transepts do not project, and steps rise to the choir and descend to the crypt, which is planned around the tomb and the Lady Chapel.

Edward I made offerings at the high altar and the tomb over four days in August 1301. In 1306 Robert Wishart absolved Robert the Bruce and went with him to Scone. Wishart turned timber for the bell tower into siege engines, was ransomed after Bannockburn, and was buried in the crypt in 1316. Lightning in 1406 destroyed the timber spire.

Lauder, Cameron, and Turnbull rebuilt the tower, spire, and chapter house, and the stone pulpitum dates from that time.

A bull of 7 January 1451 founded the university, which is said both to have begun in the chapter house and to have settled in the Dominican friary. In 1492 the see became an archbishopric under Robert Blackadder, who vaulted the south aisle around 1500. James IV ratified a peace treaty at the high altar on 10 December 1502. The precinct then held the bishop’s castle, the canons’ houses, and St Nicholas’ Hospital, dated both to 1450 and to 1464.

Only Provand’s Lordship still stands.

At the Reformation James Beaton fled to France with the records. The fittings were stripped, but the building was kept. From 1587 three congregations shared it: the Outer High in the nave, the Barony in the crypt, and, from 1635, the Inner High in the choir. The General Assembly met here in November 1638 and abolished episcopacy.

Arthur Rose, archbishop of Glasgow and then of St Andrews, was among the last of the old bishops. Parliament removed the prelates on 22 July 1689.

The bell of 1583, paid for by Marcus Knox, was recast in 1790 and now stands on the floor. The castle was demolished in 1789 for the infirmary. Memorials remember tobacco merchants who owned enslaved people, among them Cecilia Douglas, who also gave a window that has since been removed. Charles Macintosh, inventor of the waterproof coat, lies in the graveyard.

Duncan Macfarlan, twice moderator and principal of the university, ministered to the High Church from 1824.

By 1835 the Outer High and the Barony had left. The western towers came down in 1846 and 1848, and Edward Blore finished the aisle ends. The whole building was in state care by 1857. Munich glass of the 1860s was later replaced, beginning with Douglas Strachan’s window in 1936.

Albert Lister Peace was organist from 1879, the year Henry Willis installed the first organ since the Reformation.

Roofs were renewed in oak and copper between 1909 and 1912. A window for the dead of both world wars was unveiled in 1954, and a nurses’ chapel was dedicated in 1961. Memorial services followed the Ibrox disaster in 1971 and the death of Donald Dewar, the first first minister, whose funeral was held here in October 2000. Elizabeth II attended jubilee services in 1977 and 2012.

Digging in 1898, 1965, 1979, and especially 1992 to 1993 traced the 1136 west front, painted twelfth-century stone, and seventy-seven burials, with two bronze mortars in a pit. The Lower Church yielded no structural trace of the tomb. In 2025 a radar survey looked for an earlier south transept, and on 21 October the crypt well, called 770 years old, was excavated and fitted with a Venetian glass mosaic. The building is listed in Category A, a date given as 15 December 1970 and as 14 December 1970, and the precinct is scheduled.

## Photographs

- [Glasgow — Bewahrerderwerte](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/2018_07_19_Schottland_%2833%29.jpg)
- [Holy well and collection of early Christian stone fragments in Glasgow Cathedral. The well is in the lower eastern corner just opposite to the chapter house. — Fthierygeo](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/St_Mungo%27s_Well_%28Glasgow_Cathedral%29.jpg)
- [Counter Seal of Robert Wishart, 1271 — Andrew MacGeorge](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/Counter.Seal.Robert.Wyshard.1271.png)
- [Ecclesiastical Seal — Andrew MacGeorge](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/Eccleasiastical.Seal.png)
- [Glasgow Cathedral. Christians have worshiped at this site since the 5th century but little is known about the church buildings until the early part of the 12th — Frederick Blake](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/Glasgow_Cathedral_-_geograph.org.uk_-_10200.jpg)
- [​ 格拉斯哥大教堂 ， 格拉斯哥 是 蘇格蘭 重要的信仰中心之一，而在該市的諸多 教堂 中，又以屬於 蘇格蘭教會 （Church of Scotland）的 格拉斯哥大教堂 地位最重要。本圖片由上傳者 SElephant 拍攝於2004年8月。 — SElephant](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/Glasgow_Cathedral_%281%29.jpg)
- [Glasgow Cathedral — emma mykytyn](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Glasgow_Cathedral_-_geograph.org.uk_-_277899.jpg)
- [Glasgow Cathedral — Tom Pennington](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Glasgow_Cathedral_-_geograph.org.uk_-_340148.jpg)
- [Glasgow Cathedral. Memorial in honour of Glaswegians awarded the Victoria Cross for valour. 578997 — wfmillar](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Glasgow_Cathedral_-_geograph.org.uk_-_578989.jpg)
- [Glasgow Cathedral — wfmillar](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ec/Glasgow_Cathedral_-_geograph.org.uk_-_579067.jpg)

## Sources

- [Glasgow Cathedral](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_Cathedral) — Wikipedia
- [David I of Scotland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_I_of_Scotland) — Wikipedia
- [Saint Mungo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Mungo) — Wikipedia
- [Albert Lister Peace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Lister_Peace) — Wikipedia
- [Arthur Rose](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rose) — Wikipedia
- [Cecilia Douglas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecilia_Douglas) — Wikipedia
- [Charles Macintosh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Macintosh) — Wikipedia
- [Donald Dewar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Dewar) — Wikipedia
- [Duncan Macfarlan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Macfarlan) — Wikipedia
- [Glasgow Cathedral Statement of Significance](https://www.historicenvironment.scot/publications/all/publication/?publicationId=d6d0bc5b-99d8-4959-bf71-a8b800aa7976) — Historic Environment Scotland
- [Glasgow Cathedral: history and stories](https://www.historicenvironment.scot/visit/all/glasgow-cathedral/history-and-stories/) — Historic Environment Scotland
- [Glasgow Cathedral: plan your visit](https://www.historicenvironment.scot/visit/all/glasgow-cathedral/plan-your-visit/) — Historic Environment Scotland
- [Glasgow Cathedral, excluding the scheduled precinct](https://portal.historicenvironment.scot/designation/LB32654) — Historic Environment Scotland
- [Glasgow Cathedral, precinct and graveyard](https://www.trove.scot/designation/SM90150) — Trove
- [Glasgow Cathedral listing record](https://www.trove.scot/designation/LB32654) — Trove
- [Excavations at Glasgow Cathedral: a preliminary report on the discoveries of 1992-93](https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/gas.1991.17.17.63) — Glasgow Archaeological Journal
- [Shining New Light on Glasgow Cathedral’s Ancient Wellspring](https://glasgow850.com/article/14488/Shining-New-Light-on-Glasgow-Cathedral-s-Ancient-Wellspring-with-new-Mosaic-for-City-s-850th-Anniversary) — Glasgow 850
- [Geophysical Survey Report, Glasgow Cathedral](https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/data-catalogue/resource/b4d4f67c6b90f1455b4b5ccbd9d7b1d2f8e559ed911445beb24c61c5f1549ed9) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Piecing together the Munich Glass](https://www.historicenvironment.scot/about-us/our-work/projects-and-research/piecing-together-the-munich-glass/) — Historic Environment Scotland
- [Tours at Glasgow Cathedral](https://glasgowcathedral.org/friends/tours/) — Glasgow Cathedral
- [Glasgow Cathedral](https://www.nationalchurchestrust.org/church/glasgow-cathedral) — National Churches Trust
- [Illuminating the archaeology of Glasgow Cathedral](https://wosas.net/news/glasgow.html) — West of Scotland Archaeology Service
- [2018 07 19 Schottland (33).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2018_07_19_Schottland_(33).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [St Mungo's Well (Glasgow Cathedral).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St_Mungo%27s_Well_(Glasgow_Cathedral).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Counter.Seal.Robert.Wyshard.1271.png](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Counter.Seal.Robert.Wyshard.1271.png) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Eccleasiastical.Seal.png](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eccleasiastical.Seal.png) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Glasgow Cathedral - geograph.org.uk - 10200.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Glasgow_Cathedral_-_geograph.org.uk_-_10200.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Glasgow Cathedral (1).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Glasgow_Cathedral_(1).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Glasgow Cathedral - geograph.org.uk - 277899.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Glasgow_Cathedral_-_geograph.org.uk_-_277899.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Glasgow Cathedral - geograph.org.uk - 340148.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Glasgow_Cathedral_-_geograph.org.uk_-_340148.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Glasgow Cathedral - geograph.org.uk - 578989.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Glasgow_Cathedral_-_geograph.org.uk_-_578989.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Glasgow Cathedral - geograph.org.uk - 579067.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Glasgow_Cathedral_-_geograph.org.uk_-_579067.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Glasgow Cathedral stands on the steep western bank of the Molendinar Burn, in the Townhead district of Glasgow, though the cathedral grounds and the neighbouring Necropolis are treated as a district of their own. It is a parish church of the Church of Scotland, and from the twelfth century until the Scottish Reformation it was the cathedral of the bishop, and later the archbishop, of Glasgow, the mother church of the diocese and of the province. It is the oldest cathedral on the Scottish mainland and the oldest building in Glasgow. With the cathedral at Kirkwall it is one of only two medieval Scottish cathedrals to have come through the Reformation virtually intact. The medieval bishop’s castle stood to the west until 1789. The building has been Crown property since 1587, a status acknowledged again in 1836 because of the Act of Annexation of 1587 and the final abolition of episcopacy in 1689. One account places the moment it became state property in 1836, and by 1857 the entire building was in the care of the state. Another account places the passing of the whole building into state care in 1857, and records that care as ownership. It remains a parish church, and it is one of only three properties in that care that still serve the purpose for which they were built, the others being Dunblane Cathedral and Fort George. It is not described here as a world-heritage inscription. The building is listed in Category A, with the date of listing given as 15 December 1970 and also as 14 December 1970, and with the record amended on 30 June 2017 and also on 29 June 2017. The precinct and graveyard are a scheduled monument, added on 30 November 1981 and amended on 20 November 2002. The listed-building record excludes that scheduled area. A measured account gives the length as 285 feet, or 87 metres, the width as 65 feet, or 20 metres, and the height as 105 feet, or 32 metres. The spire is also given as 67 metres above the ground.

The dedication is to Saint Mungo, also Kentigern, the patron of Glasgow, whose tomb is said to lie at the centre of the Lower Church. Kentigern is the Welsh Cyndeyrn Garthwys and the Latin Kentigernus. The name is explained from a British form meaning hound-lord, on the evidence of the Old Welsh Conthigirn, and another proposed meaning, chief prince, is set aside because the Old Welsh and Old English forms do not support it. In Scotland he is known by the pet name Mungo, possibly from a Cumbric phrase meaning my dear one, with a Gaelic parallel in Mo Choe or Mo Cha, the form behind the name of Kirkmahoe, which appears as the church of Saint Kentigern in the Arbroath register in 1321. His mother Teneu was a princess, daughter of King Lleuddun, or Leudonus, who ruled a territory around what is now Lothian, perhaps Gododdin. A British Library manuscript says she became pregnant after being raped by Owain mab Urien. Other accounts say Owain and Teneu had a love affair while he was still married to Penarwen, that her father, called King Lot in that telling, separated them, and that after Penarwen died Teneu returned, married Owain, and survived him when he died fighting Bernicia in 597. Her father had her thrown from Traprain Law. She survived, was set adrift in a coracle, and came ashore at Culross, where the child was born. Saint Serf, ministering to the Picts there, brought him up and gave him the pet name. The ruinous chapel at Culross, also called Saint Serf’s, is traditionally the birthplace. It was founded in 1503, later silted up, and was excavated in 1926.

At twenty-five, Saint Mungo began his mission on the Clyde, on the site of modern Glasgow. He built his church across the water from an extinct volcano, beside the Molendinar Burn, where the medieval cathedral now stands. For about thirteen years he lived austerely in a small cell. A king called Morken led an anti-Christian reaction and drove him out. He went to Wales by way of Cumbria, stayed with Saint David at St David’s, and founded a cathedral at Llanelwy, St Asaph. He is said to have gone to Rome, and when he left he appointed Saint Asaph bishop in his place. One study treats the St Asaph connection as a Norman invention. King Riderch Hael, also Rhiderch, invited him back. For some years his seat was at Hoddom in Dumfriesshire, from which he evangelised Galloway, and excavations at Hoddom have uncovered a late sixth-century stone baptistery. He returned to Glasgow, and a community grew around him. At Kilmacolm he was visited by Saint Columba, then working in Strathtay. They embraced, talked at length, and exchanged pastoral staves. In old age he was feeble and his chin was held by a bandage. He is said to have died in his bath on Sunday 13 January. The year is given as 603, as about 612, and as 614. Welsh annals place the death in 612. Thirteen January was a Sunday in both 603 and 614. One argument reads the death in the bath as a confused memory of a collapse during a baptism. A life written by the hagiographer Jocelin of Furness about 1185 reworked an earlier Glasgow legend and an Old Irish document. Two other medieval lives are known, an earlier partial life in a Cottonian manuscript and a later life by John of Tynemouth based on Jocelin. Jocelin seems to have changed what he did not understand and to have added the journey to Rome in order to promote the bishopric. The ancestry in the Bonedd y Saint makes Owain a king of Rheged and Lleuddun probably a king of the Gododdin, and Lothian is named from him. There is little reason to doubt that Mungo was among the first evangelists of Strathclyde under Riderch and probably the first bishop of Glasgow. A late fifteenth-century fragment called Lailoken and Kentigern sets him against the mad prophet Lailoken, alias Merlin. Lailoken’s appearance at the Battle of Arfderydd in 573 has been tied to the rise of Riderch and to Mungo’s return, and one later notice places the return from Llanelwy in 573. The life also resembles Chrétien de Troyes’s romance of Yvain, a version of Owain, which suggests a shared source.

Four miracles are remembered from his Glasgow years, and they appear on the city’s arms. He restored a robin killed by his classmates. Left in charge of a fire at Serf’s monastery, he slept, the fire died, and he relit it with a hazel branch. A bell, thought to have been brought from Rome, was used in services and at funerals. The original is gone, and a replacement made in the 1640s is displayed in Glasgow. Queen Languoreth of Strathclyde was accused of infidelity. King Riderch demanded a ring he said she had given to a lover, though he had himself thrown it into the Clyde. She appealed to Mungo, a fish was caught, and the ring was inside it. A nearly identical story is told of King Maelgwn of Gwynedd and Saint Asaph. His feast is 13 January in the West and in the Greek Orthodox calendar, and 14 January in the Russian Orthodox calendar. A special mass for the feast, printed by the Bollandists, dates from the thirteenth century. The city’s longer motto, and the shorter Let Glasgow flourish, both grow from his call to let Glasgow flourish by the preaching of the word. On the spot where he was buried stands the cathedral. His remains are said still to rest in the crypt. A spring called St Mungo’s Well fell eastwards from the apse. His shrine was a centre of pilgrimage until the Reformation. He is also said to have founded Stobo Kirk and, shortly before his death, the church of St Kentigern at Lanark, now a ruin, with a later nineteenth-century church of the same name in the town since converted to housing and offices.

The history of the building is tied to the city. In the sixth century Saint Mungo is said to have brought the body of a holy man, Fergus, for burial at a place called Cathures, later Glasgow. Saint Ninian is reputed to have dedicated that burial ground, on the western bank of the burn, in the fifth century, and the Blackadder Aisle, also spelled Blacader, may mark the spot. The aisle has also been explained as a covering for Fergus’s burial, the hearse Kentigern is said to have followed to Glasgow. The early churches would have been of timber and wattle. Tradition holds that the saint founded the cathedral and evangelised the Britons of Strathclyde, as bishop of a diocese matching the kingdom, from Clach nam Breatann, the stone of the Britons, in the shadow of Ben Lomond, to the Rere-cross east of Penrith. No artefacts have been found to corroborate that foundation. A human burial dated between the later seventh century and the later eighth century was found in the excavations of 1992 and 1993. The scarcity of early carved stones, and the number of them at Govan, has suggested to some that the main religious focus near what is now Glasgow lay further down the Clyde. The present church is thought to stand over a site occupied since his time in the later sixth or early seventh century, and worship on the spot is reckoned at well over a thousand years.

Named bishops appear in the middle of the eleventh century: Magnus, John, and Michael, probably suffragans of the archbishop of York. Between 1114 and 1118 Prince David of Cumbria, later David I of Scotland, refounded the diocese and the cathedral and had his former tutor, John, appointed bishop. The two men meant to take the diocese out of the supremacy of York. David I of Scotland was born on an unknown day in 1084, probably the eighth son of Malcolm III and certainly the sixth and youngest child of Malcolm’s second wife, Margaret, and a grandson of Duncan I. He was king from 1124 to 1153, and before that prince of the Cumbrians from 1113 to 1124. In 1093 Malcolm and David’s brother Edward were killed at Alnwick. David, Alexander, and Edgar were probably present when their mother died soon after. Later tradition places the three brothers in Edinburgh, besieged by their uncle Donald III. An insertion in the Chronicle of Melrose says Donald forced the three into exile while allied with another nephew, Edmund. John of Fordun, writing centuries later, says their maternal uncle Edgar Ætheling arranged an escort into England. David spent much of his childhood in Scotland and then lived at the court of Henry I. His brother King Edgar bequeathed him the lands south of the Forth. Edgar died on 8 January 1107 and Alexander took the throne. David cannot be shown in possession of that inheritance until he founded Selkirk Abbey late in 1113, when Henry had returned from Normandy. Later in 1113 Henry gave him Matilda of Huntingdon, daughter of Waltheof, earl of Northumbria. The marriage brought the Honour of Huntingdon, spread through Northamptonshire, Huntingdonshire, and Bedfordshire. Matilda bore two sons, Malcolm, who died young, and Henry, named for the patron. David’s claim to the Scottish kingdom was doubtful. He was the youngest of eight sons of a king who was himself not the most recent. Duncan II’s son William fitz Duncan and Alexander’s son Máel Coluim mac Alaxandair were nearer in one sense, but the Scots had not adopted primogeniture, and neither had Henry’s backing. When Alexander died in 1124 the nobles could accept David or face war with David and Henry.

Outside his Cumbrian principality and the southern fringe, David I of Scotland had little power in the 1120s and has been called king of Scots in little more than name. He was at Henry’s court in 1126, early 1127, and again in 1130, when he judged Geoffrey de Clinton for treason at Woodstock. In 1130 Matilda died. While David was still in southern England his nephew Máel Coluim rose with Óengus of Moray, grandson of King Lulach and David’s most powerful vassal. The rebels reached Angus and were met by David’s constable. Henry sent a fleet and Norman knights, among them Walter Espec, to Carlisle. The fleet was used in the Irish Sea, the Firth of Clyde, and along the Argyll coast. In 1134 Máel Coluim was captured and imprisoned at Roxburgh, and he is not to be confused with Malcolm MacHeth. By the death of Henry I on 1 December 1135, David held more of Scotland than before. He then backed his niece, the Empress Matilda, against Stephen, and despite defeat at the Battle of the Standard in 1138 he widened his power in northern England. Before the end of December 1135 he had marched, and by the end of January he held Carlisle, Wark, Alnwick, Norham, and Newcastle. A first treaty at Durham soon failed. A second campaign followed the winter of 1136 to 1137, and a third invasion came in January 1138. After the Standard he retired to Carlisle with the bulk of his army. Wark, besieged since January, fell in November. On 26 September Cardinal Alberic of Ostia reached Carlisle, where David had gathered nobles, abbots, and bishops, to examine whether the bishop of Glasgow owed allegiance to York. David accepted a six-week truce that did not cover Wark. On 9 April he and Stephen’s wife, Matilda of Boulogne, another of his nieces, settled at Durham. His son Henry received the earldom of Northumberland, the restoration of Huntingdon, and Doncaster. David kept Carlisle and Cumberland. Stephen kept Bamburgh and Newcastle. In the civil war later called the Anarchy, David again took Newcastle and Bamburgh, held England north-west of the Ribble and the Pennines and the north-east as far as the Tyne, rebuilt Carlisle, and from the mines at Alston began the first silver coinage of the kingdom. Carlisle replaced Roxburgh as his favourite residence. He failed to place his chancellor William Comyn in the bishopric of Durham, vacant since Geoffrey Rufus died in 1140. Comyn was de facto bishop from 1141 to 1143 and held the castle, but the chapter resented him, and William of St Barbara was elected in 1143. David also failed to install Henry Murdac at York in 1149 and withdrew rather than fight Stephen’s new garrison. Aelred of Rievaulx, once of David’s court, wrote that David so disliked the traditional Scottish homage at a king’s promotion that the bishops had difficulty compelling him to receive it. Aelred’s eulogy says David found three or four bishops in the kingdom north of the Forth and left nine, ancient sees restored and new ones erected. The old claim that he created the whole parish system is now moderated. He moved Mortlach east to Old Aberdeen and arranged the diocese of Caithness. No other bishopric can safely be called his creation. Glasgow was restored, not resurrected. He appointed his French chaplain John, known as John Capellanus, and after an inquest assigned the bishopric all the lands of his principality except those in the east already under St Andrews. He also pushed Brechin, Dunkeld, Mortlach, and Dunblane into a national diocesan order.

The English church had claimed Scottish sees for York or Canterbury. From his election in 1124, Robert of Scone could not be consecrated to St Andrews because of that claim. Scottish and Irish sources give the title archbishop to Bishops Giric and Fothad II, but the papacy had not granted it. Archbishop Thurstan of York found Glasgow, south of the Forth, the easier target. In 1125 Pope Honorius II ordered John of Glasgow to submit to York. David sent John to Rome to seek a pallium that would make St Andrews an archbishopric over Glasgow. Thurstan and William de Corbeil of Canterbury went to Rome as well. Henry’s support won a year’s postponement, and Robert was consecrated without a profession of obedience. York’s claim north of the Forth was dropped in practice for the rest of the reign, while the claim on Glasgow remained. In 1151 David again asked for a pallium. Cardinal John Paparo met him at Carlisle in September, carrying four pallia for Ireland, and on the cardinal’s return David repeated the request. The issue does not seem to have been put to the papacy. The next year the papacy created the archbishopric of Trondheim, covering the Isles and Orkney. On 12 July 1152 David’s heir, Henry, earl of Northumberland, died. David had his grandson Malcolm IV accepted as successor and the younger grandson William made earl of Northumberland. Donnchad I, mormaer of Fife, as rector or regent, took the eleven-year-old Malcolm through Scotland to receive homage. David’s health failed in the spring of 1153, and on 24 May 1153 he died in Carlisle Castle. The Annals of Tigernach call him king of Scotland and England. He is a saint of the Catholic Church, with a feast on 24 May, though he was never formally canonised. His mother, Saint Margaret, was canonised in 1249. He is also described as increasingly re-Gaelicised in the later reign, after a youth with little initial connection to the society of the Scots.

A new cathedral for the diocese was begun about 1118 and consecrated, or dedicated, in 1136, in the presence of David I of Scotland and his court, during the episcopate of John. It rose on high ground above the burn, over the burial place, which may explain the awkward hillside site. The work went on, with interruptions and recasting, for about 150 years. Excavations between 1988 and 1997, and the major season of 1992 to 1993, found the west front of the 1136 church on the line of the third nave arcade piers west of the crossing, and its east end included the area of the tomb. Half-drums of cylindrical piers, reused later, suggest that part of John’s church had aisled arcades or a crypt subdivided by piers. In 1164 Somerled, called king of the Isles, led a great fleet up the Clyde toward Glasgow in an attempt on the throne. He was defeated at the Battle of Renfrew. Bishop Herbert, John’s successor, is said to have helped by prayers at the tomb, and he declared that the Scottish saints were truly to be praised when Somerled’s head was brought to the cathedral. The event lifted Kentigern in national regard. Bishop Jocelin, Herbert’s successor, commissioned a new biography of the saint and his miracles and enlarged the church so that the cult could be properly housed. He began a major expansion in 1181. Parts of his work still stand. A fire halted the project. A further series of works in the 1180s preceded a second consecration, or dedication, in 1197. Fragments of that early building survive in the south-east of the crypt. Painted stone, including a voussoir found in 1916 and on display in the crypt, shows that enough stood by 1197 for a complex scheme of decoration in at least one part. A new north wall, found below the thirteenth-century nave arcade, seems to have been meant as the outer wall of an aisle-less western limb. Its depth, about 3 metres, suggests that both the crypt and the choir of Jocelin’s church were meant to run considerably further west than the present crypt.

In 1175 Pope Alexander III recognised Glasgow as a special daughter of Rome, free of the archbishop of York, a privilege extended to the whole of Scotland in 1178. Around the same time William I, also called William the Lion, granted Jocelin a charter making Glasgow a burgh of barony, and one account adds the privileges of a royal burgh. The king, then in his fifties, attributed the birth of his only son, Alexander, named in honour of the pope, to the intercession of Saint Mungo. In 1198 William granted Jocelin a fair beginning each year on 6 July. The Glasgow Fair continues, in a very different form. In 1199 Jocelin was succeeded in quick succession by three bishops, only one of them consecrated.

From 1207 to 1232 Bishop Walter, also Walter Capellanus, began a far grander enlargement, completing the choir and the Lower Church and fixing the layout of the transepts and nave as eventually built. From 1233 to 1258 his successor, Bishop William de Bondington, continued the rebuilding. He made an entirely new and much longer eastern arm, plainly to give Saint Mungo a shrine at the main level, and he added three projections: the chapter-house block, the sacristy and treasury, and what later became the Blackadder Aisle. One account says Bondington and his successors brought the building to completion. Another says the major campaigns of the present church began around 1200, that by 1240 a new and grander layout had been adopted and work on the crypt and choir begun, and that the choir was complete by the last decades of the thirteenth century, when work on the nave restarted. Construction continued through much of the century, including a bell tower at the north-west corner of the nave. A south-west tower was added about a century later, in the fourteenth century. The listing counts at least four or five campaigns from the early twelfth century to the early fourteenth, by which time the main body was complete. The spire and the Blackadder Aisle were not finished in their present form before the fifteenth century. Work on that aisle is also said to have started with the thirteenth-century campaign and then to have been abandoned until Archbishop Blackadder completed it between 1483 and 1508.

The plan is unusual. Transepts divide the main body into roughly equal halves and do not project beyond the aisles, so the space is compressed onto the flights of steps that rise into the choir and descend into the crypt. The nave is eight bays. The eastern limb has an aisled five-bay choir, presbytery, and feretory, then a rectangular ambulatory with four chapels on the east, a Cistercian way of housing many altars, economical for pilgrims moving to a feretory behind the high altar. Offerings in 1301 show both a tomb in the crypt and a separate feretory near the high altar by then. The crypt is manipulated toward two focuses, the tomb toward the west and the Lady Chapel to the east, and the placing of the Lady Chapel below shows the importance of that level. The crypt has been called some of the most advanced spatial planning of its time, without an obvious contemporary parallel in northern England. The choir carries no high vault, yet the piers are solid, a Scottish preference already seen at Holyrood, unlike the slim piers of Lincoln, one of the models. Plate tracery survives in the aisle windows, rare in Scotland and England. The nave, undocumented in date, is read as a late thirteenth-century attempt to reconcile existing wall-shafts with newer ideas, and the linkage of triforium and clearstorey, with a reduced middle storey as at Southwell and York, fits the later decades of that century, as does the tracery. Only a late twelfth-century fragment in the crypt, early thirteenth-century lower walling, and the fifteenth-century tower and spire break the unity of a mid and later thirteenth-century building. It is called the most important building of its period surviving in Scotland. Ideas moved freely between Lowland Scotland and northern England, but the church is not a copy of an English prototype.

Off the north side, a two-storey chapter house projects north and partly east of the north-east chapel. Its double height seems never to have been copied, but the square centralised plan may have been the model for Crossraguel, Jedburgh, and Glenluce. The sacristy and treasury abut the west bay of the north aisle. The upper sacristy, destroyed by the 1830s, was entered from the choir aisle. The treasury below could be reached only by a mural stair. A two-storey block of this kind became common, as at Arbroath and Dunkeld, or in a longer form at Dunblane and Fortrose, but the crypt forced the unusual choice of putting the treasury at the lower level. The Blackadder Aisle runs four bays south from the south transept. The only known Scottish counterpart is an abandoned thirteenth-century scheme for a lateral arm at Iona. Only the lower level at Glasgow was completed, and it is unlikely the upper storey was meant to rise above the aisle height. The first documented reference to the bishop’s castle is 1258.

In August 1301, during his invasion of 1301 to 1302 and the First War of Scottish Independence, Edward I of England made offerings over four days at the high altar, at the feretory, and at the tomb in the vault, the tomb of Saint Mungo. One account names the high altar and the tomb. Leaving Glasgow, he took Bothwell Castle quickly. In February 1306 John Comyn was killed at Greyfriars in Dumfries. Robert the Bruce hurried to Glasgow and met Robert Wishart, the warrior bishop, in whose diocese the killing had been done. Wishart absolved him, urged the clergy to rally, and went with him to Scone, where he was crowned Robert I. Wishart used timber that the English had given him to repair the bell tower, and he is also said to have used timber intended for that tower, to make siege engines against the English in Kirkintilloch Castle. He then took charge of the assault on Cupar Castle in Fife. He was captured and imprisoned, and he was ransomed after Bannockburn in 1314. He died in 1316, two years later, and was buried in the crypt, between the chapels of Saints Peter and Paul and of Saint Andrew. The tomb is uninscribed. The head of the effigy has been defaced, probably at the Reformation. The effigy wears mass vestments of a probable early thirteenth-century date and is believed to be Wishart’s. A excavation in 1965 proved a burial vault beneath it.

In 1406 lightning did significant damage, including to the wooden steeple, and destroyed the original timber spire. It also damaged the chapter house, which needed extensive repair. Bishops William de Lauder, whose dates are given as 1408 to 1425 and as 1408 to 1425 or 1426, John Cameron, 1426 to 1446, and William Turnbull, 1447 to 1454, rebuilt the central tower, the spire, and the chapter house to their present forms. The stone spire was up by the middle of the fifteenth century. Cameron added the spire. The ornate stone pulpitum, or screen, at the east end of the nave, under the east crossing arch, probably dates from this early fifteenth-century reordering, and it is also placed in the early 1400s. Its central door is flanked by four arcaded panels, with a traceried balustrade above. Each panel once had a corbel for an image. Those corbels were removed when Archbishop Blackadder added altar platforms about 1500, carved with eleven low-relief figures, thought to be the faithful disciples, in canopied niches, a rare survival. Other Scottish screens survive at Culross, Inchcolm, Lincluden, Melrose, and Roslin. Around 1430 Cameron rebuilt the bishop’s palace, immediately west of the church, as a great tower house. Turnbull prompted James II, a canon of the cathedral, to ask Pope Nicholas V for a university. A bull of 7 January 1451 erected a studium generale for theology, canon and civil law, the arts, and any other lawful faculty. The bishops were to be chancellors. One account says the university held its first classes in the chapter house, then moved to the Pedagogium, the Auld Pedagogy, on the Rottenrow. Another says it took up residence in the nearby Dominican friary.

By the fifteenth century the church stood in a walled chanonry containing the castle, the manses of the prebendaries, the houses of the vicars choral, St Nicholas’ Hospital, and the burial ground. The hospital is dated to 1450, and also to 1464, when it was founded for a priest and twelve old men. The late fifteenth-century Provand’s Lordship, on the west side of Castle Street, is the only upstanding survival of the precinct. It served the prebend of Barlanark, or Provan, and it began in the 1470s as a manse for the hospital. The Vicars’ Alley, on the north side, has gone. Much of the precinct was cleared after 1560. By the early sixteenth century there were thirty-two prebendary canons, more than at any other Scottish cathedral. Archbishops James Beaton, 1503 to 1523, and Gavin Dunbar, 1523 to 1547, remodelled the castle with a towered curtain and a great gatehouse. In 1492 Pope Innocent VIII raised the see to an archbishopric, and Bishop Robert Blackadder, 1483 to 1508, became archbishop. Around 1500 he gave the thirteenth-century south projection its vaulted ceiling, and the aisle took his name, spelled both Blackadder and Blacader. James IV, also a canon, ratified the treaty of Perpetual Peace at the high altar on 10 December 1502. The cathedral and the castle played a part in the battles of Glasgow in 1544 and 1560.

At the Reformation of 1560 Archbishop James Beaton, the second of that name, fled to France with the diocesan records and much else. The records were later lost in the French Revolution. The church was cleansed of Catholic furnishings, altars, and sculpture, and the roof was apparently stripped of lead. It was kept for Protestant worship. In 1562 David Wemyss, previously minister of Ratho, became the first Protestant minister. By 1574 the town council lamented the great decay, the lead and slates and other gear taken in the troubled time, and raised a tax of 200 pounds for repairs. Windows were bricked up. In 1578 the lead of the roof was repaired. In 1579 the Glasgow Trades House defended the building from further plunder, and it survived relatively unscathed. On 22 April 1581 James VI granted the town the income of certain lands for the upkeep. In July 1584 members of the town council and other supporters of episcopacy pulled Wemyss from the pulpit to make way for Robert Montgomery, appointed tulchan archbishop by the Duke of Lennox. Three congregations came to share the building. In 1587 the Outer High, serving the eastern part of the city, began to worship in the nave, and in 1647 a stone wall at the east end of the nave gave it a distinct space. One account places the Outer High specifically in the west end of the nave. In 1595 the Barony congregation was created for the land around the city and worshipped in the Lower Church, the crypt. In 1635 a partition on the pulpitum turned the choir into the High Church, later called the Inner High. Internal walls and galleries separated the three. After the National Covenant, the General Assembly met in the cathedral in November 1638. Dominated by the Covenanters, it nullified the acts of assemblies from 1606 to 1618, abolished episcopacy, and affirmed its right to meet every year. Bishops remained, with reduced influence, until the final abolition in 1689. Arthur Rose, also found as Ross, belongs to that last episcopal generation. Born in 1634, the younger son of John Rose, minister of Birse, and Elizabeth Wood, he graduated from Marischal College on 9 July 1652, was licensed by the presbytery of Garioch on 5 April 1655, and received the parish of Kinearny the next year. He moved to Old Deer in the autumn of 1663, became rector of Marischal College in 1664, and later that year, persuaded by Archbishop Alexander Burnet, was given St Mungo’s in Glasgow. In 1675 he became bishop of Argyll and kept the parsonage. Elected bishop of Galloway in 1679, he was translated on 5 September. In October 1679 he succeeded Burnet as archbishop of Glasgow, and on 25 December 1684 he was installed as archbishop of St Andrews and primate. Parliament abolished all prelates on 22 July 1689. Rose continued discreetly as an Episcopalian and, informally, as primate until he died on 13 June 1704 at Campbell’s Close in the Canongate. He was buried at Restalrig. He is counted, informally, as the first Episcopal primate of Scotland after the fall of the Restoration episcopate. A separate notice names Archbishop John Paterson, with the dates 1697 to 1699, as the city’s last archbishop after the abolition of episcopacy in 1689.

The great bell now stands on the floor. Its inscription says it was made in Holland in 1583 at the expense of the Glasgow merchant Marcus Knox. It broke in 1778 and was recast in London in 1790 by Thomas Mears. In 1798 the Barony stopped using the Lower Church. About a metre of earth was laid over the crypt floor and railings marked the lairs, and the whole crypt became a burial place. In 1843 the graves and earth were removed, the original floor levels were restored, and the windows were opened. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries memorials were set up to Glasgow’s tobacco lords, who made their fortunes in slave-produced tobacco. They included Alexander Spiers of Elderslie, Sir James Stirling of Keir, and Cecilia Douglas, all of whom owned enslaved people in the West Indies. Cecilia Douglas was born on 28 February 1772, the fifth of eleven children of the merchant John Douglas and Cecilia Buchanan, and one of only two daughters. Her brother was Lieutenant-General Sir Neil Douglas, and her cousin was Sir James Douglas, governor of Vancouver Island. On 26 January 1794 she married Gilbert Douglas, a plantation owner born in 1749. They had no children. He died in 1807. He had owned Fairfield, a cotton plantation in Demerara, and Mount Pleasant, a sugar plantation on St Vincent. She inherited half, including the enslaved people, and the use of Douglas Park and Boggs in Lanarkshire. Her worth is given as 40,000 pounds, about 2.4 million pounds in twenty-first-century money. In the 1820s she toured Europe, especially Italy, buying paintings and sculpture, and she invested in British industry. She lived at Orbiston House, formerly Douglas Park, at Bothwell. She commissioned a stained-glass window in the cathedral to preserve her family’s legacy, and it has since been removed. She left her collection to the Corporation of Glasgow, which placed it in the galleries in Sauciehall Street. Some of the paintings are now in Kelvingrove. She died at Orbiston House on 25 July 1862. A plaque in St Bride’s at Bothwell remembers her and her husband.

Charles Macintosh, born in Glasgow on 29 December 1766 and died on 25 July 1843, was a chemist and the inventor of the waterproof raincoat that carries his name, now usually spelled mackintosh. He was the son of George Macintosh and Mary Moore, began as a clerk, and before he was twenty left to study under Joseph Black at Edinburgh and to manufacture chemicals. His work with naphtha, distilled from coal tar and supplied in quantity by the Bonnington Chemical Works, led to a fabric made by cementing two cloths with natural rubber dissolved in that naphtha. He married Mary Fisher in 1790, daughter of the Glasgow merchant Alexander Fisher. Their children are given as George Macintosh, 1791 to 1848, Alexander Fisher Macintosh, 1785 to 1868, Wallace Francis Macintosh, 1799 to 1815, and Mary Scott Macintosh, 1792 to 1823. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1823. In 1828 he partnered James Beaumont Neilson to exploit the hot blast for iron furnaces. He was buried in the cathedral graveyard with his parents, in the ground of his great-grandfather John Anderson of Douhill, also spelled Dowhill, lord provost of Glasgow. His name was added to the seventeenth-century monument against the eastern boundary wall. A later nineteenth-century memorial in polished red granite stands slightly to the north, on the grave of his son George, and names him again. The old burial ground also holds Mary Hill of Gairbraid, the founders of Hutchesons’ school George and Thomas Hutcheson, the surgeon Peter Lowe, Peter Murdoch of Rosehill, and the Jesuit John Ogilvie. Inside the church, besides Saint Mungo and Robert Wishart, are the archbishops James Boyd, Gavin Dunbar, James Law, and Walter Stewart, and several provosts of the name Stewart of Minto and Anderson.

The ruined castle was demolished in 1789 to make way for Robert Adam’s infirmary, on the ground where the Royal Infirmary now stands. Elements of the castle were found before Cathedral Square was formed, in 1969 and from 1986 to 1989. The original castle stood hard by the west front and was later shifted south-west, to the site of the St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art, where a stretch of wall is preserved. An early sixteenth-century heraldic panel from the castle is kept in the crypt. Neither Cathedral Square nor the large graveyard to the south and east is part of the property in state care. In 1833 the Necropolis, called Britain’s third hygienic cemetery after St James in Liverpool and Kensal Green in London, was laid out on the hill to the east, across the burn. The eighteenth century had already moved the city’s weight west toward George Square, and the steeple came to share the skyline with factory chimneys and later the infirmary. From the 1960s the surrounding tenements and factories gave way to housing, university buildings, and roads. In 1989 the landscaping of Cathedral Square and the making of the museum regenerated a run-down quarter.

Duncan Macfarlan was born on 27 September 1771 in the manse at Drymen, son of the minister Duncan Macfarlan, 1708 to 1791, who was sixty-three when the child was born, and maternal grandson of the minister John Allan. He studied philosophy and literature at Glasgow, graduated master of arts in 1788, and took a further degree in divinity. He was licensed on 28 June 1791, two days before his father died, and in 1792 became minister of Drymen. Glasgow gave him a doctorate of divinity in 1806. In 1819 he succeeded John Campbell as moderator of the General Assembly, and he was moderator again in 1843, the year of the Disruption. In 1823 he was elected principal and vice-chancellor of the university and remained principal until his death in 1857, thirty-four years. In 1824 he took the ministry of the Glasgow High Church, the congregation of this building. He married his cousin Anne Allan of Row, near Cardross, in 1797. She lived from 1778 to 1814, and they had nine children. He published on the appointment of ministers, against Sunday railway travel, on temperance, and, after his death, a system of theology. John Graham Gilbert painted him. He died at Drymen on 25 November 1857 and is buried under a large monument in the Necropolis, in front of the John Knox monument.

In the 1830s a new regard for the medieval fabric produced measured drawings and schemes of restoration. By 1835 the Outer High and the Barony had moved elsewhere, leaving the Inner High in sole possession, and a restoration toward the former glory could begin. William Stark had begun work in the choir in 1805. David Hamilton first opened the great west window in 1812. The two western towers were then demolished. The north-west tower, 144 feet or 43 metres, had been the bell tower until the central tower was finished in the fifteenth century, and it came down in 1848. The south-west tower, or consistory house, 70 feet or 21 metres, had held the diocesan records and the church courts, and it came down in 1846. The pair are also said to have been demolished in 1846 and 1848 because they were thought too asymmetrical, and because they were mistakenly judged not to be of great antiquity and to hide the west door and window. They had been joined to the church only by their east walls and projected fully west, a canyon-like gap with no precise parallel, though salient towers were common in Scotland, as at Holyrood and Dunkeld. Lack of money stopped the balanced replacements. Edward Blore formed the present aisle ends instead, and he recast the west window. In 1852 the galleries of the Inner High were removed. In the 1860s the windows were reglazed by the Königliche Glasmalereianstalt, the Royal Establishment of Glasspainting, near Munich, also called the Royal Bavarian Stained Glass Establishment and the Royal Bavarian Stained Glass Company, under Maximilian Ainmüller. It was one of the largest public art commissions of the Victorian age. The Munich glass was mostly removed in the mid twentieth century, and it is also said to have been removed almost entirely in the 1930s, whether from changing taste, from the decay of the very bright colours, or from anti-German feeling. The listing places the new glazing of nave and choir between 1936 and 1967, by Scottish and British artists, and says only a few small lights of the Munich scheme survive in the sacristy and the south-west porch. Another account says the Munich glass is now shown off the windows, in the crypt, and that the only figurative Munich glass still in place is high in the transepts. The first replacement was Douglas Strachan’s Moses window, in the north wall of the nave, in 1936. The most recent noted in that survey was John K. Clark’s Millennium Window, in the same wall, unveiled in 1999 by the Princess Royal. Since 2020 the surviving fragments, more than a thousand of them, have been matched to the forty-three original windows with the help of nineteenth-century drawings and the black-and-white photographs taken by Thomas Annan while the glass was still in place. Coats of arms taken out of the old windows and set into the new glazing are absent from those reconstructions even though they remain in the building. Little German glass of this period survived the Second World War, so the collection is rare. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert paid an official visit in 1849.

In 1879 an organ by Henry Willis, also called Father Henry Willis, was set in the triforium of the choir, the first organ since the Reformation. It is a four-manual instrument. Albert Lister Peace, born at Huddersfield on 26 January 1844, was the cathedral organist from 1879 to 1897, and he had been organist to the university from 1870 to 1880. He played professionally from the age of nine, as organist of Holmfirth parish church. In 1897 he succeeded W. T. Best at St George’s Hall, Liverpool, and remained there until his death. A teachers’ association called him one of the finest interpreters of the organ classics that England had seen. In April 1896 he was the guest when Kinnoull parish church unveiled an electric organ by the Hope-Jones company of Birkenhead, in cases designed by David Smart. Catalogues count 81 of his works in 109 publications. He died in 1912, aged 68, in Liverpool, and was buried at St Helen’s, Sefton. Harrison and Harrison have maintained the cathedral organ since they rebuilt it in 1996. The choir is a professional adult ensemble at the two Sunday services. Andrew Forbes is director of music, and Malcolm Sim is the organist.

Between 1909 and 1912 the medieval timber roofs of choir and nave, found unsafe, were replaced in oak under William Thomas Oldrieve, also W. T. Oldrieve, architect for Scotland in the Office of Works. Copper sheet took the place of lead and slate, the weight fell, and the green external roof dates from that work. By 1938 the Munich colours had faded and the leading had failed. The Society of Friends of Glasgow Cathedral, founded in 1936, decided that the glass should be replaced by the best contemporary artists. The society has since raised money for a royal pew and for windows, and it provides guides. In 1954 Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother unveiled a window in memory of the dead of the four Scottish divisions in the First World War and the Second World War. In 1961 a nurses’ chapel, also the chapel of St Andrew, was dedicated, furnished by nurses and dedicated to Scottish nurses who died in the second war. The cathedral stands next to the Royal Infirmary. In 1971 a memorial service followed the Ibrox disaster, in which 66 supporters died. Elizabeth II attended services for her Silver Jubilee in 1977 and her Diamond Jubilee in 2012.

Donald Dewar was born on Saturday 21 August 1937 at 194 Renfrew Street, the only child of the dermatologist Alasdair Dewar and Mary Howat Dewar. He studied history and then law at Glasgow, worked as a solicitor, and at twenty-eight was elected for Aberdeen South, serving from 1966 to 1970. He returned to the Commons for Glasgow Garscadden at the by-election of 13 April 1978 and held the seat, later Glasgow Anniesland, until his death, and the matching Scottish Parliament seat from 1999. After the 1997 election he was Secretary of State for Scotland, led the case for a parliament in that year’s referendum, and carried the Scotland Act 1998. On 13 May 1999 the parliament elected him first minister with 71 votes. On 17 May the queen gave him the royal warrant at Holyroodhouse, and he was sworn at the Court of Session. He was first minister, and leader of Labour in Scotland, until he died. In early 2000 he was admitted to the Royal Infirmary after tests at Stobhill. In May a four-hour operation repaired a leaking aortic valve. He took three months away, with Jim Wallace as acting first minister. On 10 October 2000 he fell outside Bute House after a cabinet meeting. A brain haemorrhage, possibly linked to the anticoagulant he was taking, followed. At 7 that evening he was admitted to the Western General in Edinburgh. By 9 he was on life support. At 12.18 on 11 October, after his children agreed that support should stop, he was pronounced dead, aged 63. His funeral was held in Glasgow Cathedral. He was cremated on 18 October 2000, and his ashes were scattered at Lochgilphead. A separate notice calls the occasion a memorial service for Scotland’s first first minister. Among those present were the Duke of Rothesay, Tony Blair and Cherie Blair, Jim Wallace, Bertie Ahern, David Trimble, Rhodri Morgan, Wendy Alexander, Henry McLeish, Gordon Brown and Sarah Brown, Jack Straw, John Swinney, Charles Kennedy, Neil Kinnock, Menzies Campbell, and James Douglas-Hamilton. Henry McLeish succeeded him. One account says he would have hated being turned into a secular saint.

Three recorded digs preceded the major work of 1992 and 1993. In 1898 Peter MacGregor-Chalmers looked for the apse of an early church enclosing the tomb. He reported the apse, but later re-excavation of his trenches found no trace. In 1965 a burial vault was proved under Wishart’s effigy. In 1979 Alistair Gordon identified a ceremonial drain west of the tomb. The 1992 to 1993 excavations, directed by Stephen Driscoll before new heating and electrical services, cut trenches in the nave, the choir, the crypt, and the session room. They produced the plan of the 1136 church, fragments of the later twelfth-century building, including water-leaf, crocket, and volute capitals and painted stone, and evidence for the thirteenth-century build and for the post-Reformation partitions in the nave. Seventy-seven burials were excavated, most of them reasonably datable, besides hundreds of loose bones. In the nave, burials ran from before the twelfth-century structures, at irregular intervals, into the nineteenth century, and most of the medieval ones speak to the population of medieval Glasgow. In the Lower Church no features of the tomb of Saint Mungo were found, and most of the burials there date to the early nineteenth century. Finds were scarce apart from architectural fragments, coffin fittings, and two massive medieval bronze mortars with an iron pestle, deposited in a pit. That pit is placed in the Lower Church and also in the Lady Chapel. The mortars perhaps date from the later thirteenth century and may have been buried around the Reformation. A monograph covers the excavations of 1988 to 1997. In October 1993 three small trenches in the session room, ahead of an electrical board, found five interments, four of them excavated, apparently early nineteenth century like most of the previous season’s burials. A watching brief in 1992 on a floodlighting track found two sets of reburied bones between the treasury and the sacristy, three stones mortared together on the north side, natural orange clay at the east end, and, under slabs inside the west door, rubble over larger blocks. The south buttress foundation by the door appeared original, and the north one had been rebuilt in the previous century. A later watching brief during further floodlight work recovered disarticulated human bone, already disturbed by later graves or by drains and landscaping, and two pieces of white marble carved with leaves, found in separate trenches and thought perhaps to be parts of a small altar removed at the Reformation. Some of the bone may belong to unrecorded burials tucked against the walls, marked only by initials cut in the stone.

In July 2025 a radar survey was made of a strip beside the cathedral, 40 metres by 15 metres, with antennae at 500 and 250 megahertz, in the hope of locating walls or wall-cuts of earlier layouts, especially an earlier south transept, beneath later graves. A survey north of the building, aimed at an earlier north transept, was given up because standing structures, permanent and temporary, prevented it. The published notice of that survey sets out the aim and the method and does not list what the radar returned. On 21 October 2025, for the first time in living memory, the ancient well in the crypt was excavated in a single day by Stephen Driscoll and David Sneddon, with the arts group that then commissioned a mosaic. The well is called 770 years old. A circular mosaic of more than a thousand hand-blown coloured glass tiles, each with gold leaf, made in Venice by a workshop given both as Orsoni Venezia 1888 and as Orsonia Venezia 1888, was lowered in a structure 2.7 metres deep over three days, shaped so that it would not touch the well walls. It is described as the first mosaic of its kind set in a historic well. One account holds that the well is where Kentigern made his cell and baptised in the burn below, that the natural well was later built into the walls at the heart of the shrine, that the place was a major pilgrimage destination for more than three hundred years, and that the well was a sacred site before Christianity. The older archaeological assessment still records that no artefacts corroborate the tradition of his foundation, and it leaves open whether the tomb itself can be proved. Dedication concerts were set for 5 and 6 December. The carved stones kept in the crypt include the painted twelfth-century voussoir, fragments of a mid thirteenth-century shrine base, fifteenth-century figurative corbels said to have come from the western towers and reminiscent of work at Melrose, possibly further work by John Morow, who listed Glasgow among his buildings, and the heraldic panel from the castle. The questions that remain are whether an early Christian church stood here and held his tomb, what the early twelfth-century church and its later twelfth-century successor looked like in detail, what the Blackadder Aisle was first meant to do, how the side altars were arranged, and how the chanonry was laid out before and after 1560.

Canonical page: https://getsitesee.com/places/glasgow-cathedral