General view of St Moluag's Cathedral, Lismore, from South West with four women and a man in graveyard

Description General view of St Moluag's Cathedral, Lismore, from South West with four women and a man in graveyard

Date 7/7/1882

Collection Papers of Erskine Beveridge, antiquarian, Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland

Catalogue Number AG 1703

Category Photographs and Off-line Digital Images

Copies SC 500617

Scope and Content Lismore Parish Church, Argyll & Bute, from the south-west Lismore Parish Church occupies part of an early 14th-century building that served as the cathedral church of the medieval diocese of Argyll and the Isles. When the cathedral fell into ruins after the Reformation, the choir was used as a place of worship. The present building is a result of a reconstruction of the choir in 1749, and, since that time, it has continued to serve a local congregation as the parish church. The Victorian photographer, Erskine Beveridge, photographed the church in 1882. This harled and whitewashed building, surrounded by its churchyard, is precisely orientated in an east-west direction. The external buttresses on the south wall (right) are original features dating from the early 14th century, but the round-headed windows in between, perhaps superseding medieval openings, date from the 18th-century restoration. The doorway in the west gable (left) served as the principal entrance, and the two rectangular windows above light a west gallery. The gable is topped by a bird-cage belfry. The medieval cathedral was dedicated to St Moluag, and may well have occupied the site of an earlier church dedicated to the saint, although no remains have been found which can be definitely ascribed to the Early Christian period. Moluag, an Irish saint who founded a religious community on Lismore in the second half of the 6th century, was one of the earliest Christian missionaries in Scotland, travelling extensively and preaching to the Picts. Source: RCAHMS contribution to SCRAN.

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