Deer Abbey

Deer Abbey stands in ruins in the Buchan district of Aberdeenshire, a Cistercian house founded in 1219 by William Comyn, Earl of Buchan, who settled monks brought north from Kinloss Abbey on ground roughly two miles west of an older religious settlement. Dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, it was never a large foundation — the community numbered no more than fifteen monks at any one time — yet it held the revenues of four parish churches: Deer, Foveran, Kinedward and Peterugie. The abbey church was built to a cruciform plan some 157 feet in length, with a north aisle, and considerable portions of the south range of the cloister, about seventy by ninety feet, still stand. Like most Scottish monasteries it did not survive the Reformation intact: secularised through the sixteenth century, its lands were erected into a secular lordship for the commendator Robert Keith in 1587. By 1766 the site had passed into the Pitfour estate, and in 1809 the third laird enclosed it with a wall. The ruins, now in the care of Historic Scotland, lie near New Deer, in a landscape whose name endures in the Book of Deer, whose margins record earlier grants to the community here.