St Ninian and the Scottish Powerhouse

Perhaps the most surprising place to find an image of St. Ninian is on the entrance doors of the former Scottish Office in Edinburgh. Built between 1936-9, St. Andrew’s House now contains part of the Scottish Government, including the office of the First Minister of Scotland.

The architect was Thomas S. Tait, who also designed the futuristic Empire Exhibition in Glasgow and the piers to Sydney Harbour Bridge. St Andrew’s house is a monumental, Classical Art-Deco building, dramatically sited on the side of Calton Hill and “is by far the most impressive work of architecture in Scotland between the wars” (1). Although thought by some to be in Creetown Granite, it is actually built in Northumbrian Darney stone.

Tait used several sculptors and artists to adorn the building and add to its symbolic meaning. For the entrance doors he turned to the established sculptor Walter Gilbert (1871-1946). Gilbert’s is best remembered today for his gates designed for Buckingham Palace, the reredos in Liverpool Cathedral and the “Liver Birds” on top of the Royal Liver Friendly Society Building in Liverpool. Throughout his life, Gilbert collaborated with other sculptors to help carry out his work and in undertaking the design of the doors for St. Andrew’s House, he employed H. H. Martyn to model much of the detailing. Gilbert’s sculpture sometimes can be stiffly formal, seen in his figures for the war memorials in Troon and Clydebank, and lacking the expressive movement found in the work of his sculptor cousin, Sir Alfred Gilbert who is best known for his Eros in Piccadilly Circus. But in many ways Walter Gilbert’s formality of approach is appropriate for the great bronze doors, giving them a impressive solemnity. (2)

The doors depict four Scottish Saints, Ninian, Kentigern, Magnus and Columba; representing the spiritual fathers of the nation. Their garments merging with the background of the St Andrew’s Cross, they rise up with only the upper body seen in depth and detail. Reading from the left, St Ninian is appropriately the first saint depicted. He is dressed in episcopal vestments with mitre and crosier but oddly without his symbolic broken shackles which he is usually depicted carrying. A tree of life appears behind him and emerging, small as though in the distance, is the image of an early church building. Seen as a man in his thirties, he is shown in profile, looking across to the figure of St Columba. At the centre of the doors, a roundel shows the scene of Christ addressing St Andrew the fisherman, flanked by the words, “And I will make you Fishers of Men”.

It is indeed a surprising image, for in this age of political correctness and multiculturalism, it is inconsevable that the entrance to the main government offices in Scotland could today be sculpted to carry a representation of Christ and the nation’s saints.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjCoHR8pTnw&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Flallandspeatworrier%2Eblogspot%2Ecom%2F&feature=player_embedded


(1) Gifford, McWillaim and Walker, The Buildings of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1984.
(2) This summer (2009), on the 70th anniversary of the building, the bronze doors are to be cleaned.

John Piper and the Five Scottish Chapels (in ruins)

John Piper (1903-1992) was born in Epsom in England. He attended the Royal College of Art in London. During the 1930's he formed friendships with such artists as Henry Moore, Ivon Hitchens, Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Paul Nash. He exhibited regularly with the London Group and the 7 & 5 Society . He also collaborated with his poet friend John Betjeman on the famous Shell Guides. During the war he was commissioned to record bomb damage, most notably in London, Bristol and Coventry and in 1944 he was made an official war artist. He is best remembered for his paintings of churches, castles & stately homes. His use of colour, texture, strong tonal contrast and perspective heighten the dramatic effect of his romantic subjects, which have wide appeal. Along with Patrick Reyntiens he designed the stained glass baptistery window for Coventry Cathedral (1952-62).

Piper rarely ventured to draw and paint in Scotland. In 1975 he completed a seriers of screenprints entitled Five Views of Scottish Chapels (in ruins). One ‘chapel’ is the ruin of Whithorn Cathedral Priory. The set was issued as a limited edition of 70, printed by Kelpra Studio, London and was published by Marlborough Fine Art, London.

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Whithorn Priory

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Skeabost, Skye

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Ruined Chapel, Isle of Mull

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Kirkmaiden-in-Fernis

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Kilmory Chapel

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In 1976, a set of the prints was purchaced for the UK Government Art Collection.

Take my Heart to Whithorn

In 1508 an ambassadorial visit arrived in Scotland from France. It was headed by Bérault Stewart and Jean Sellat, president of the Parlement of Paris.

Although born and raised in France, Bérault Stewart described himself as Scottish but by this time Bérault, was Lord of Aubigny, councellor and chamberlain of the King of France, Knight of the Order of St Michael, Captrain of the Garde Ecossaise, hero of the Italian wars, great constable of Sicily and Jerusalem and French lieutenant-general within the kingdom of Naples.

His grandfather, John Stewart of Darnley, had fought for Charles the VII of France throughout the 1420s and received the lordship of Aubigny-sur-Nère from the gratful king in 1423. His father, also called John Stewart, second Lord of Aubigny, enjoyed a distinguished career under Charles VII and Louis XI, as captain of the Garde Ecossaise, the king’s bodygaurd. John Stewart married Beatrix d’Apchier; and around 1452-3 the couple had a son Bérault, whose fame eclipsed that of all other Scots in France.

In keeping with his high status Bérault began the construction of a château at La Verrerie, a few kilometres from Aubigny. The château, with its mixture of Frence and Italianate Rennaissance styles, is now a luxury hotel.

The chapel of La Verrerie has a painted interior including fleurs-de-lys and thistles surrounding roundels of portrait heads of contemporaries, both Scots and French.

During his ambassadorial visit to Scotland in 1508, gifts were showered upon Bérault, a tournament was held in honour of the French and a grateful king of Scots, James IV, wrote to Louis XII asking permission to retain the Lord of Aubigny in Scotland long enough to accompany him on a pilgrimage to Whithorn. No records survive to tell if they made the pilgrimage together as, falling ill in the house of his friend Sir John Forrester at Corstorphine, Bérault made his will on 8 June 1508, instructing that he should be buried in the Edinburgh Blackfriars, and his heart taken to the shrine of St Ninian at Whithorn. He died a few days later, leaving his Scottish kinsman Matthew Stewart, earl of Lennox, as his chief executor.

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Bladnoch Bridge

Seal of the Princess Margaret, Duchess of Touraine,

Countess of Douglas. Daughter of Robert III of Scotland.

It was considered an act of piety to maintain the bridges and roads on the pilgrimage routes to Whithorn. In 1441, Margaret, Countess of Douglas, made supplication to the Pope for her to be granted an indulgence for offerings made in support of rebuilding the bridge over the River Bladnoch.

The single track, packhorse bridge over the river stood for over 400 years.
In 1875 the contractor, John Granger sought permission to demolish it and use the stone in the construction of the viaduct to carry the Wigtownshire railway over the Bladnoch, south of the village and distillery of the same name. The viaduct was the only major engineering structure on the railway line, it proved a costly construction, and comprised two spans of 69ft [21m], the iron lattice girders being set on a central pier. The Wigtownshire line closed completely to passengers on 29 September 1950. Goods services continued from Newton Stewart to Whithorn until the line finally closed on 5 October 1964.

The present roadbridge which carries the A714 over the Bladnoch dates from the early 19th century. Standing slightly downriver from the site of the lost medieval bridge, it is of two-spans in dressed-stone construction with fine elliptical arches and triangular cutwaters.

The photograph of the old Bladnoch Bridge is taken from Scottish Pilgrimagwe in the Land of Lost Content by Ratcliffe Barnett, published by John Grant, Edinburgh, 1942. His book Reminiscences of Old Scots Folk, published by T. N. Foulis in 1913 contains ten colour plates of paintings by Robert Gemmell Hutchison, R.S.A. Hutchison is commemorated in the widows of St Ninian's Church in Whithorn.

Reverend T. Ratcliff Barnett was the man who brought the poets Winfred Owen and Sassoon together at Craiglockheart. Owen was at first conventionally patriotic but he was soon reporting home on the 'most execrable sights on earth'. Wounded on the Somme he was invalided to Craiglockheart Hospital, where he met Siegfried Sassoon. Ratcliffe Barnett, a Presbyterian minister in the Free Church of Scotland, was serving as chaplain at Craiglockheart, the Edinburgh First World War Hospital.

A children's book, from a series Stories of the Saints, tells the story of St Ninian of Whithorn, the Saint who built the first stone church in Scotland in 397AD. Published by Oxford University Press in 1948, it was written by William D. Maxwell. The two-colour illustrations are by Margaret Horder with cover designed by V.M. Kimber.

The book mostly follows the standard life of Ninian. Unfortunately, while charmingly produced, it reinforces the speculation that Ninian landed at the Isle of Whithorn and there built his first “small stone church, and beside it a row of huts for his followers to live in. The ruins of a much later church stand on what was probably the exact spot where Ninian built, and it is believed that the little mounds nearby, now covered with grass, hide the stone foundations of the monk’s huts. This place he called Candida Casa…St Ninian himself was later buried here.”

Excavations since the book was written have found that below the grass mounds no evidence of early monk’s huts exists and the chapel was probably erected c.1300 to replace a 12th-early 13th century chapel, whose foundations were found by Radford's excavations in 1957.

It is at Whithorn that Ninian built the church known as Candida Casa and, by almost all accounts, it was there he was buried.

Whithorn's first MP

From 1702-7, Sir John Clerk of Penicuik represented Whithorn in the Scottish Parliament. This seat was doubtless gained through the influence of his first wife's brother, the Earl of Galloway, and her cousin the "Union" Duke of Queensberry. Politically a Whig and Anglophile, Clerk was in 1706-7 a commissioner for the Act of Union and was returned the member for Whithorn to the first Parliament of Great Britain. In the following year he was made a Baron of the newly constituted Court of Exchequer of Scotland. This administered the financial affairs of Scotland and it brought him a salary of £500 per annum - such a parcel of rogues in a nation. But Clerk defended his salary, "I have always thought that my salary as a Baron of the Exchequer was publick money and a gratification I owed to my Country, and therfor I laid out the whole of it and some of my privat patrimony for the Improvement of my Country..."

Clerk was born in 1676, and educated first at Glasgow and then at Leyden University where he studied law. Whilst at Leyden he suggested to his father that he should be permitted to visit Italy to see its art and architecture since "all the world are but imitators of the Italian masters". His two year Grand Tour, during which he visited Germany, Austria, Italy and France was begun in 1697. At Rome he pursued the study of antiquity under the guidance of Champini, music with Corelli, and architecture under a drawing master.

On his return Clerk was enthusiastic patron of the arts in the early years of the Scottish enlightenment. He was friendly with the poet Allan Ramsay and was an early patron of William Adam, one of Scotland's leading architects and builders. Adam, described by Clerk as "the Universal Architect of Scotland", had an extensive practice working for many of the leading Whig aristocracy. His business included contracting and building work as well as design, and was continued after his death by his sons John, James and Robert. Robert Adam subsequently became the most famous architect of the 18th century.

It was to William Adam that Clerk turned in 1722 when he set about building his own house of Mavisbank. This is the 'little villa' of Clerk's poem The Country Seat, to which Adam's book of designs, Vitruvius Scoticus, is closely related. The importance of the partnership between Clerk and Adam to the development of Scottish architecture cannot be overstated. Built in the classical style, the main house is linked by screen walls to flanking pavilions. A fire in 1973 destroyed the roof and the house is currently a shell.

Mavisbank shot to fame in 2003 by becoming one of the finalists in the first series of BBC2's Restoration. Selected as one of six Scottish sites in the competition, Mavisbank captured the Nation's heart, winning votes not just from Edinburgh region, but from supporters throughout the UK. Sadly, the house fell short of gaining the number of votes needed to win the competition, missing out on an estimated £3.5 million prize. Mavisbank's inclusion on the World Monument Fund's 2008 list of the 100 most endangered historical sites in the world has provide further impetus to the effort to restore the house and its designed landscape.

The master mason at Mavisbank was John Baxter Senior. His son, also John Baxter, bacame something of a protégé of Clerk and subsequently, with Clerk's advice, designed and built Galloway House a few miles from Whithorn, for Clerk's friend Lord Garlies.

Whithorn Tolbooth, then standing in the centre of George Street, was rebuilt in 1708-9. Perhaps Sir John Clerk also had some say in the design of this building with its "good hall for public meetings, adorned with a spire and turrets, and provided with a set of bells"?