The church in a city valley

THE west end of Princes Street in Edinburgh is marked by the pinnacled tower of St John’s Scottish Episcopal Church.

It is easy to fail to notice another church in the valley below, approached by a staircase immediately to the east of St John’s.

Walk down the steps and turning right you come to a fine marble funerary monument on the base of the clock tower and spire, to find the entrance to the church on its south side. Because the building is tucked into the end of Princes Street Gardens it is difficult to appreciate it as a whole.

The best view of the tower and spire (the oldest part of the building) is from Lothian Road. The lower part of the tower was originally attached to a plain eighteenthcentury church; the elegant spire, designed by Alexander Stevens, was added in 1789

The body of the eighteenth-century building was replaced in the 1890s by the present elaborate church, in Byzantine style, by Hippolyte J Blanc, an Edinburgh architect whose best-known work is the Thomas Coats Memorial Church – the ‘Baptist Cathedral’ – which dominates the centre of Paisley. He also designed Mayfield Salisbury Parish Church and Christ Church Scottish Episcopal Church in Morningside.

His designs are characterised by remarkable architectural embellishment. circular apse dominates and it is this feature (the chancel of the church), which is the focus of attention inside the building.

Just below the half-dome is a magnificent low-relief marble frieze depicting the Last Supper, above the Communion Table. To the left of the chancel arch is an elaborate marble pulpit, and most remarkable of all, an immense marble font in the form of a basin with a figure of Mary, the mother of Jesus with her child, in its centre.

Complementing this rich interior are stained glass windows, including one by the celebrated New York designer Tiffany. To add to this extraordinary magnificence is a little war-memorial chapel off the entrance vestibule, with a gold mosaic semi-dome.

The impression made by all this splendour is that the Edinburgh society that created it was exceedingly wealthy.

Round the church is an extensive graveyard, with some fine monuments, and in its south-west corner a cylindrical watch-house of 1827, built to protect new burials from the activities of the ‘bodysnatchers’ who in the early nineteenth century stole corpses to sell them to anatomists.

Earlier I described the extraordinary building that is the present-day St Cuthbert’s. During Covid I have looked in some detail at St Cuthbert’s life and influence.

He was born in Berwickshire.

As a young man he joined the missionary base of Old Melrose, at the time in the Kingdom of Northumbria, whose king, Oswald, had brought St Aidan from Iona Because of its setting in a valley St Cuthbert’s immediate external visual impact is limited. Blanc therefore reserved his greatest elaboration for the interior, which is laid out for Scoto-catholic worship, typical of much of the Church of Scotland when it was built. From the west end of Princes Street Gardens the large semito convert his Anglo-Saxon people.

The Kingdom of Northumbria extended north to the south side of the Firth of Forth.

The first church in Edinburgh was probably established here in the mid 6th century during Aidan’s mission. There may have been an even earlier church on this site, at the time when the Lothians were Welshspeaking. Cuthbert became Northumbria’s most revered saint, which is presumably why his names attached to this particular site.

When, as I hope you will, you visit St Cuthbert’s, do remember that you are almost certainly on the site of the earliest church in Edinburgh, and remember, too, Cuthbert, a much-loved man, in whom people truly saw the presence of the Holy Spirit. ¤