Page 17 - LOTN Summer Issue 47 2021

FAITH AND CULTURE
Seating the Faithful: St Gregory's, Preshome

BY ALASDAIR ROBERTS & ANN DEAN

rom early in Queen Victoria’s reign and through
much of the twentieth century a key word used for
church entries in the Scottish Catholic Directory
Fwas ‘Sittings’. It celebrated growing numbers of the
faithful, most of them Irish. Catholic Emancipation helped
(bells could legally be rung) but St Gregory’s Preshome
opened thirty years before that. Splendidly isolated in the
Braes of Enzie near Fochabers, it was the largest Catholic
church in Britain after the embassy chapels of London.
Bishops had long presided there, close to the Catholic
Gordons of Huntly. Preshome was ideal for developing a new St Gregory's, Preshome © Anne Burges / Creative Commons
stage in ecclesiastical finance: seat rents.
Even in ‘the papistical country’ of the Enzie the previous period ‘bench-holders’ elected trustees to look after the financial side
had been one of concealed mass-centres. After the Jacobite defeat of the mission. John Bossy’s socio-religious study The English
at Culloden a punitive military squadron loaded books from the Catholic Community cites the extreme congregational example
well-stocked Preshome chapel library into carts and burned them of Soho in London where laymen built the Catholic chapel,
in the square at Cullen. St Margaret of the Craigs, in a ravine and hired priests, and ‘defied diocesan efforts to cast them down.’
easily missed, was spared the flames because of other buildings Bossy ends by stating that ‘all town chapels in the decades after
close to it. However, altar, pulpit and seats were taken out and 1791 were to a greater or lesser extent supported by the rent of
burned. Shortly before he left the Preshome area to become a sittings.’ In the rural Tynet chapel east of Fochabers, raised to
coadjutor bishop, George Hay wrote to Bishop Alexander Smith look like a sheep cote, there is a 1779 list of householders paying
at Edinburgh: ‘I have my chapel now put in good order; my altar one shilling and sixpence for forty sets of stools near the front
is up, and pleases. The seats are to be put in next week.’ He and one shilling for ‘half sets’ at the back. The fore loft had
expected to raise much of the cost from ‘a cess on seats’. three sets of free stools and the back loft four. We are not told
Perhaps they were backless benches: in Catholic Lancashire how many stools were in a set.
Preshome went beyond previous
local efforts thanks to the planning of
its priest. Born there, John Reid seems
to have been educated by his uncle the
Rev. William Reid at Mortlich outside
Huntly. His unusually long period of
eleven years at Scots College Rome
supports the claim that he designed the
Preshome building. Reid remained on
good terms with his clergy neighbour
Alexander Geddes at Auchinharlig, a
radical theologian who was dismissed by
Bishop Hay for being too familiar with
Protestants. John Geddes, who became
Hay’s coadjutor, supported Reid in
standing by a non-Catholic housekeeper
who was close to him in age and status.
Unsurprisingly, Hay was hostile to
Reid’s costly Preshome project.
The late Ian Bryce was an architectural
historian who became well known
for his articles in Aberdeen’s Leopard
magazine. A sewn notebook reached
him from a reader in Surrey, rescued
from the shredder by a boiler-man
responsible for keeping the university’s
library warm. Ian was struck by the
strangeness of Papal bulls being sent
Ann Dean's fine watercolour of the church interior. to nearby Clochan post office. Local
man Allan Fraser turned the sixty-page
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