For this week’s #Woodensday entry (a global celebration on social media platforms every Wednesday of historic woodwork. treen and woodworking craft ) Lynnette Robertson, one of our lovely Inverclyde church recorders, has kindly sent us a picture of the historic “Cutty Stool” from the Old West Kirk, Greenock that she captured a few years ago. 

In our latest blog, we explore the purpose behind this rare and unusual item of Scottish church furniture.

Cutty or Cuttie Stools, also sometimes more formally known as “Stools of Repentance”, were small seats that were once provided in Presbyterian churches across Scotland for adjudged sinners to sit upon during church services, to publicly repent their sins, in front of their entire community and peer group. Usually, these stools tended to be small, low and single-seated, the type of uncomfortably short circular stool we might think of as used in dairies when milking cows.

Many churches went one step further and invested in an iron “Joug Collar” from their local blacksmith that was bolted to the kirkyard gate or kirk’s doorframe, into which the unfortunate sinner was manacled both before and after the service, so that the entire congregation would parade past them and further their humiliation.

The purpose of the exercise was to provoke maximum public shame as punishment for the perceived “crime”. To emphasise the point still further, signage could be placed near to the stool to ensure that no-one in the congregation was left in any doubt as to why these individuals were sitting alone, at the front and centre of their church.

Our eagle-eyed Perthshire church recording volunteers recently recorded this incredibly rare example of one such original sign at Kincardine-in-Menteith Church. 

Despite it very fragile condition, the words “Place of Publick Repentance” still burn brightly against the dark, friable wood and hold the gaze just as much as they would have done three hundred years ago.

Understandably, many of these curious remnants of appalling forms of social punishment and coercion were lost or deliberately destroyed as the cruel practice happily fell out of use in the 19th century.

The Old West Kirk’s Cutty Stool may not have survived into the 21st century had it not been formally identified and recorded as an antiquarian oddity in “The Story of the Old West Kirk” written by local historian Ninian Hill in 1898.

Perhaps it should more accurately be called a bench or form rather than a stool, because it could clearly accommodate more than one “sinner” at a time. Many a courting couple was probably forced to profess profound penitence upon its well-worn seat and reflect upon the moral judgement meted out to them by their puritanical Kirk Session. 

It must be noted, however, that not all who were subjected to this public humiliation were humbled by the experience. Poet Robert Burns was forced to endure spells on the Cutty Stool of Tarbolton Kirk, sitting side by side with his lover Elizabeth Paton, with whom he had had a child out of wedlock. As we might expect from the man who would become our national bard, Burns wrote a poem about the experience called “The Fornicator” in which he shows not a jot of the contrition expected of him. In fact, he explains the experience only made the attraction for his “handsome Betsey” all the more intense!

Our sincere thanks to Lynnette Robertson for permission to share the picture of the Old West Kirk’s Cutty Stool and for scanning the 1898 photograph of it and to our Perthshire volunteer church recorders for locating and recording the remarkable painted sign at Kincardine-in-Menteith Church.