Recording Scotland’s Churches
For hundreds of years, Scotland’s churches have been seen, by the communities that surround them, as safe repositories for items of local, regional and national significance. Congregations, donors and patrons have commissioned artists and craftspeople to produce wonderful artefacts in wood, glass, ceramic, stone, metalwork and other materials to adorn their buildings. Families have memorialised their loved ones and the myriad sacrifices of our local war dead have been immortalised in monuments, plaques and windows. The belief was that these objects would be on display forever, but alas that has proven not to be the case.
Since the beginning of this decade, around three churches a month across Scotland have closed their doors and been sold off as national denominations choose to rationalise and reduce their building portfolios. While in most, but certainly not all, cases the physical buildings will survive these sales and be repurposed, their moveable contents and many of their fixtures and fittings will inevitably be removed, sold or lost as the next chapter in the lives of each of these historic buildings is being written.
As the speed and pace of church closures has quickened Scotland’s Churches Trust recognised the urgent necessity to make speedy records of this incredibly fragile and hugely important cultural heritage, in its current context, before it vanishes forever. In 2020, with the support of Historic Environment Scotland and the All Churches Trust (now the Benefact Trust), we embarked upon a pilot project to create a rapid church recording methodology that could be easily adopted by volunteers and rolled out for use across the country.
Delayed by the pandemic and the retirement of our Director, the pilot phase of the project was not concluded until March of 2023. By then, we had worked with many wonderful local volunteers and congregations across Scotland to develop our simple methodology for small groups, possessing little or no specialist knowledge, to document their local church, to collate their data and to organise it for uploading to a local or national archives for the use of future scholars.
In the years since, we have continued to grow and support a national network of local church recorders who have been rapidly recording Scotland’s closing churches, using our method, handbook and online recording form. We have held training days and online seminars and assisted these groups in any way we can, utilising our own limited resources, to ensure that the future generations will learn about the contents of churches that are being lost today.
In December 2024, the Brussels-based Future for Religious Heritage awarded our church recording project their “Religious Heritage Innovator of the Year” award, placing it first in a Europe-wide competition and marking our volunteers’ amazing efforts to date documenting the moveable contents of these churches for posterity.
Our volunteers have so far made records of over fifty churches and we, and other volunteers, are in the process of generating reports from the photographic and written data that they have created (you can read some of the published reports below). If you would like to get involved by recording your local church or helping us analyse and collate the raw data and turn it into a report from your own home, please do get in touch.
You can download a copy of our Church Recorders’ Handbook here and read more about documenting churches from ourselves and our recorders by searching “church recording” in our blog archive.