By type
Abbeys, priories, cathedrals and the roofless churches of the medieval world.
Building or ruin · Medieval
Scottish Borders
Dryburgh Abbey was nominally founded on 10 November (Martinmas) 1150 under an agreement between Hugh de Morville, Constable of Scotland, and the Pr…
Building or ruin · Medieval
Fife
An earlier priory at Dunfermline dated back to the reign of Malcolm III (Máel Coluim mac Donnchada, 'Malcolm Canmore', reigned 1058–93) and his que…
Building or ruin · Medieval
Argyll and Bute
In the first half of the 7th century a monastic community was established on Eilean Mor, the largest of the three islands in Loch Finlaggan — eithe…
Building or ruin · Medieval
Stirling
The priory was founded in 1238 by Walter Comyn, Earl of Menteith, for a small community of Augustinian canons (the Black Canons). There is some evi…
Building or ruin · Pictish & early medieval
Argyll and Bute
Saint Columba came to Iona from Ireland with twelve companions in 563, founding a monastery when Iona was part of the Kingdom of Dál Riata. It beca…
Building or ruin · Medieval
Scottish Borders
Kelso Abbey was founded at Roxburgh in 1128 by Tironensian monks from Tiron, near Chartres in France. The community had first entered Scotland c. 1…
Building or ruin · Medieval
Scottish Borders
St Mary's Abbey, Melrose was founded in 1136 by Cistercian monks at the request of King David I of Scotland — the first Cistercian abbey in Scotlan…
Building or ruin · Pictish & early medieval
Angus
Restenneth Priory was a monastic house of Augustinian canons founded by Jedburgh Abbey, under the patronage of King Malcolm IV of Scotland, in 1153…
Building or ruin · Pictish & early medieval
Fife
The Cathedral of St Andrew was founded in 1158 to provide more accommodation than the older church of St Regulus (St Rule) afforded, and became the…
Building or ruin · Medieval
West Lothian
The Knights Hospitaller of the Order of St John of Jerusalem were invited to Scotland in 1132 by David I, and the preceptory — their Scottish headq…
Building or ruin · Medieval
Perth and Kinross
A large part of the chapel dates to 1446, when it was built by Sir David Murray, Baron of Tullibardine, of Tullibardine Castle, as a family chapel…
Building or ruin · Medieval
Angus
It is the reputed birthplace of the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath, Scotland's most celebrated assertion of national independence.
Building or ruin · Medieval
Fife
It is the ruined shell of a royal Cistercian foundation, established from Melrose in the 1220s under the patronage of Ermengarde de Beaumont, queen…
Building or ruin · Medieval
Aberdeenshire
A rare surviving twelfth-century motte-and-bailey earthwork that served as the administrative heart of the medieval Garioch.
Building or ruin · Medieval
Dundee City
A much-fought-over tower house guarding the Tay estuary, later rebuilt as a Victorian coastal fort and now a museum of Dundee's military and mariti…
Building or ruin · Medieval
Renfrewshire
A rare surviving example of a small Scottish collegiate church, founded by the Sempill lords and still sheltering the tomb of one who fell at Flodden.
Building or ruin · Medieval
Aberdeenshire
A rare surviving medieval Cistercian ruin in Buchan, carrying the name recorded in the margins of the celebrated Book of Deer.
Building or ruin · Medieval
Stirling
A largely thirteenth-century cathedral whose ruined nave was rescued and re-roofed after three centuries of decay, it preserves both medieval fabri…
Building or ruin · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
A Cistercian foundation of 1142 whose ruins are remembered above all as the place where Mary, Queen of Scots is said to have spent her last night i…
Building or ruin · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
It preserves the story of a Cistercian house whose lands and manuscripts became prizes in the power struggles that followed the Scottish Reformation.
Building or ruin · Medieval
Scotland
It is one of Roman Scotland's genuine geographical puzzles — a place named by Ptolemy that scholars have spent a century trying, and failing, to pi…
Building or ruin · Medieval
North Ayrshire
One of Scotland's early Tironensian monasteries, its ruined medieval church and later clock tower anchor the North Ayrshire town that took the abbe…
Building or ruin · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
It preserves a rare double history — a twelfth-century Galloway nunnery displaced by a richly carved Douglas collegiate church — with the tomb of a…
Building or ruin · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
It preserves the twelfth-century earthworks of a motte-and-bailey castle that served as the administrative heart, or caput, of the medieval barony…
Building or ruin · Medieval
Aberdeen City
As a large Roman marching camp near Aberdeen, it marks one stage of Rome's military advance into north-east Scotland.
Building or ruin · Medieval
Midlothian
A mid-15th-century Sinclair foundation whose densely carved choir is counted among the finest medieval stonework in Scotland.
Building or ruin · Medieval
East Lothian
A rare and unusually intact survival of a Scottish collegiate church, its choir and transepts left frozen mid-construction by the Reformation and s…
Building or ruin · Medieval
Argyll and Bute
One of Scotland's more complete early monastic sites, it preserves a sequence running from a sixth-century Celtic foundation through a Norse-era ru…
Building or ruin · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
It is one of Scotland's most evocative Cistercian ruins, founded and named for a widow's lifelong devotion to her husband's embalmed heart.
Building or ruin · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
One of Galloway's medieval Premonstratensian abbeys, remembered chiefly for its notorious alchemist-abbot John Damian and now surviving only as fra…
Briefer entries — recorded and worth knowing, with fuller pages to come.
Building or ruin · Medieval
South Ayrshire
One of Scotland's most complete surviving medieval monastic complexes, founded in 1244 and preserving the full plan of a Cluniac abbey.
Building or ruin · Medieval
West Lothian
It was one of the principal residences of Scotland's Stewart monarchs and the birthplace of Mary, Queen of Scots.
Building or ruin · Medieval
Isle of Anglesey
Building or ruin · Medieval
Cheshire West and Chester
Building or ruin · Medieval
Isle of Anglesey
No places match those filters.
