An elegant and commanding presence

SERIES

THE parish church of Woodside, a northern suburb of Aberdeen, is a striking building with a massive tower on a hill overlooking the valley of the Don. This river is not as grand as Aberdeen’s other river, the Dee, and lacks the royal and romantic associations of that river.

The Don has historically been of great economic and cultural importance; St Machar’s Cathedral and King’s College of the University of Aberdeen are both close to a mediaeval bridge across the Don, and Woodside itself is on an ancient route from Aberdeen to the north-western parts of Aberdeenshire.

When industrialisation reached this part of Scotland the relatively rapidly-flowing Don offered the best water-power resource in this area. The paper-making industry took early advantage of the river both for process water and for power. Much more dramatic was the construction of the Woodside Cotton Mills, in 1785, at the very beginning of the introduction of Richard Arkwright’s integrated process for spinning cotton yarn.

The Woodside Mill of Gordon, Barron and Co, was built at the same time as New Lanark, and in a similar style. Like New Lanark Woodside was clearly designed as a landscape feature as well as for financial gain. Later a large woollen works was established at Grandholm, on the north bank of the Don, downstream from the Woodside mill.

The population of the area had increased sufficiently by 1830 to justify the establishment of a ‘chapel of ease’ in Woodside, which was opened on May 9. Otherwise worshippers had to attend St Machar’s Cathedral in Old Aberdeen. In 1834 the General Assembly passed the ‘Chapels Act’, which provided for ‘chapels of ease’ to be given parishes, carved out of the existing parish system, in which Church and landowners shared responsibility for civil and religious matters.

On the basis of the 1834 Act, in the years that followed many more chapels were established, largely in towns and cities, where existing parishes and their church buildings were proving inadequate to cope with population growth. This caused tension between landowners and town councils on one hand and the Church of Scotland on the other. This came to a head in 1843, when the Court of Session in Edinburgh ruled that the Assembly’s Chapels Act was contrary to civil law.

This ruling effectively deprived the ministers of the chapels of their livings, including both churches and manses.

When the General Assembly met later in 1843 it is not at all surprising that about a quarter of the ministers who walked out of the Assembly to form the Free Church were ministers of chapels.

The continuing Church of Scotland claimed the church buildings of the chapels. In the case of Woodside, however, there was still a debt of £1200 outstanding. The Kirk Session decided that the church and debt should go together, so that rather than being transferred to the Presbytery the chapel building became the Free church for the village. The Church of Scotland, however, still wanted to have a presence in Woodside. Archibald Simpson, the Aberdeen architect of the chapel building, designed a new building, opened in 1846. It was still a chapel of ease, but without the parish which had been the problem with the chapels of the period between 1834 and 1843. In 1862 it was given its own ‘quoad sacra’ parish, disjoined from that of St Machar’s. After 1929 the original chapel became Woodside North Parish Church and the 1846 building Woodside South. The two congregations united in 1987, using the 1846 building, and the North Church was converted into flats. Woodside Parish Church still is an elegant and commanding presence in Woodside, a place in which to encounter God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit; long may it continue so.

This article appears in the April 2020 Issue of Life and Work

Click here to view the article in the magazine.

To view other articles in this issue Click here.

If you would like to view other issues of Life and Work, you can see the full archive here.