Scottish Church Heritage Research Ltd (SCHR) with the support of Historic Scotland and the Church of Scotland has been established to compile a Places of Worship database as a contemporary record of Scotland's built religious heritage. Now many churches lie redundant, while others have been reused, redeveloped and in some cases, demolished. The database contains varying amounts of information on some 10,500 sites that have been identified in Scotland for possible inclusion in the project. Of these SCHR has identified 34 Places of Worship in Kirkintilloch and surrounding district that meet the criteria for inclusion in the national database.
Kirkintilloch and District Society of Antiquaries (KDSA) signed up to this project in 2015 (announced here in February 2015), and since then time and effort have been spent on identifying which Places of Worship in the ambit of the Society would be suitable to 'kick start' its contribution to this Scotland-wide proposal. To further the Society's contribution we have taken part in additional training and discussed various aspects of the project with appropriate people at both regional and national levels. It is quite clear now that progress across Scotland has not been as quick as had been anticipated, in large measure because of the magnitude of the project and the time and effort required to gather and collate the information required for each church.
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| Lenzie Union Church (© Copyright G Laird and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence) |
Nevertheless, in spite of a rather slow start, we are pleased to announce that the first contribution from the Society has been completed and submitted to SCHR. As anticipated, this has been achieved for Lenzie Union Parish Church, in large measure due to the efforts of Bill Williamson together with other members of the congregation. In recognition of the considerable heritage value of the submission, permission has been sought and given for it to be posted on KDSA’s web site where it is available as a download by clicking here. We strongly recommend that it should be read by members of the Society.
Donald Macleod, Bill Williamson and David Graham.
