A continuous tradition of worship

BOWDEN is a small village in the former county of Roxburghshire, now part of the Scottish Borders council area. The parish is now part of Bowden and Melrose.

Its church history probably dates back to the early 7th century, when this part of the Scottish Borders was in the kingdom of Northumbria. Christianity was brought to the area by St Aidan, from the monastery of Iona founded by St Columba. Aidan was asked by Oswald, king of Northumbria to bring Christianity to his kingdom, which stretched from the Humber to the Firth of Forth.

Aidan was made bishop of Lindisfarne, and founded a monastic school there, a base for missionary journeys throughout what are now northern England and southern Scotland. One of Aidan’s missionary monks was St Boisil, remembered in the name of St Boswells, not far from Bowden. Boisil eventually became abbot of Melrose, and ‘achieved considerable fame as a teacher and a biblical scholar, particularly on the Gospel of St John’. Bowden was probably one of the centres of worship that Boisil established.

The Christianity brought to Northumbria by Aidan and his team was that of what is now the Eastern Orthodox Church, which was firmly rooted in the Gospel of St John, rather than of the Petrine/ Pauline Church which had become the faith of the Church of Rome. After the Synod of Whitby in 664, however, the Northumbrian Church began to accommodate itself to Roman customs, though apparently reluctantly, and perhaps only partly.

In the early 11th century Malcolm II secured the part of the former kingdom of Northumbria between the Tweed and the of the Scots. About a century later David, Earl of Huntingdon, who had been allocated Lothian as his ‘fiefdom’, began to Romanise (or Normanise) the church in that area. He founded an abbey on a Roman (Tironensian) model at Lindean, near Selkirk. The revenues of the parish of Bowden were allocated to it.

After David I became King of Scots in 1124 he moved this abbey to Kelso. Presumably the revenue of Bowden went with the monks. The first stone church at Bowden was probably built at that time, and parts of its walls may well survive within the fabric of the present building. It was rebuilt in the 17th century, when two burial aisles were added for local families, in accordance with the ruling after the Reformation that burials should no longer be made in churches. The first of these aisles was added to the east end of the church in 1644, for the first earl of Roxburgh, with a gallery (loft) above a burial vault. In 1661 a north aisle was added for the Kers of Cavers, with an elaborately-carved timber loft front, one of the finest surviving pieces of 17th-century Scottish woodcarving.

The church was substantially remodelled in 1908-09 to designs by Glasgow architect Peter Macgregor Chalmers. A pipe organ was placed within the Ker aisle, whose loft front was moved east. The Roxburghe aisle was made into a raised chancel, with an external stair on its south side. Two windows were inserted in the east end to light the chancel, and tracery placed in its south windows. The present building is described in The Buildings of Scotland: Borders as a ‘highly rewarding building’.

So in this little Borders village, now part of the parish of Bowden and Melrose, we can see a continuous tradition of worship, with physical evidence dating back probably more than 900 years, and before that to the coming of Columban Christianity in the 7th century. And Iona’s Christianity can be traced directly to the early ‘Church of the Incarnation’ formed by people who had known, talked to and loved Christ.

This article appears in the November 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.