You don’t have to carry the faith to appreciate the architectural beauty of an old heritage church; and with nearly 11,000 churches, chapels, and basilicas dotting the countryside, Scotland has a lot of architectural beauty to behold.
Sadly, it will soon have much less to behold, as The Church of Scotland plans to close between 400 and 700 churches in the next few years.
For retired quality surveyor Les Taylor, letting these hallowed halls fall to ruin – without at least recording their interiors for posterity so future generations can still enjoy them – would be the real sin.
“I was raised in the small market town of Turriff in northern Aberdeenshire,” shares Taylor, who has uncovered some gothic masonry down his family tree. “My grandfather, a Barlow, was a local farm servant, and yet our lineage – curiously enough – has been traced back to the Earl of Findlater. Even though Findlater Castle itself is now a ruin, I don’t think the owners would welcome me trying to take possession of it.”
He didn’t come to his current project by way of any targeted interest in church architecture, however – if anything, his start with the Old Rugged Kirks project was “a bit of serendipity.”
“I attended the funeral of an old friend near Inverness,” he recounts. “The church – like so many old Scottish churches – looked drab and almost invisible from the outside, the kind of place you walk past without a second glance. Yet inside, the transformation was total. Sunlight streamed in through the stained-glass windows onto mature, honey-coloured woodwork and a soaring, vaulted timber ceiling.
“When I commented on this mesmerizing collage of colours to a friend next to me, he told me to enjoy it while I still could as the church was due to close, and a local furniture store had their eyes on it for long-term storage. From then on, this magnificent place would be lost to public view forever. It was then that the idea of Old Rugged Kirks came to me – recording and photographing the interiors of these old churches for posterity.”
Taylor has recorded history before, researching books both on the RAF Banff Strike Wing Air Force station and on German bombing raids on Scotland during World War II. Despite those prior experiences, he doesn’t anticipate much funding to support his parish photography project. As such, he expects this to be an undertaking he will largely work towards alone.
“Right now, it is just me, although I am talking to interested parties who would like to get involved. Ideally, an office base and a full-time staff role or two is the aim, but that may be a long way off, if ever.
“Sure, there are government agencies and other sources of funding such as the UK National Lottery, but the harsh truth is that there is a distinctly political element to who is more likely to get official funding in Scotland and who is not. And while it is true that churches can secure funding for physical repairs, a project like this – to simply photograph and record the interiors of Scottish churches – is always going to be way down at the bottom of the pecking order with most official sources of funding. So, until the project can get some funds behind it, it is going to remain an idea rather than a reality, perhaps with some voluntary work to keep things going during the odd evening and weekend.”
The biggest challenge, he explains, has been getting the message out to the public.
“Newspapers and magazines have been approached in Scotland, but no takers yet. It’s just not a big enough or controversial enough story, I suppose. Then it was suggested to me that Scottish communities in North America might be a good place to spread the word and look for funding, and that is why I’d like to reach out to people around the world with a strong sense of Celtic connection to Scotland and its heritage. My hope is that folks will visit the website, see what I am trying to achieve, and leave a wee donation to help support the project.
“In the meanwhile, here I am – rattling my collection tin as if it was a rainy flag day in Aberdeen. As that fine old Scottish saying goes, ‘mony a mickle maks a muckle!’”
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