by Florence Boyle

The Inverclyde Heritage Fair held earlier this year was an opportunity for a wide range of passionate enthusiasts ranging from the Friends of Wemyss Bay Station to the Greenock Gaelic school to showcase their efforts and attract support. The group which left the biggest impression with me were the volunteers from Scotland’s Churches Trust. They seek to advance the preservation, promotion and maintenance of Scotland’s historical church architecture.

The following is an extract from a blog written Dr Peter Christie, one of the Inverclyde volunteers at the Trust, who writes about what his volunteering role means to him and why this mission has significance for our shared national heritage.

Peter’s blog

Church closures are always a sad event within their communities, and a heavy (and often discounted) bereavement for many of their parishioners. A friend of mine, a Church of Scotland minister, on seeing the photos from our first church survey, was moved to comment: ‘To think that for so many generations of souls, this was the very gate of Heaven’.

‘This is nothing less than the house of God; this is the very gate of Heaven’. (Genesis 28:16-17)

So, why do I volunteer?

‘This is nothing less than the house of God; this is the very gate of Heaven’. (Genesis 28:16-17)

I was brought up in the Church of Scotland, and even as a child I was fascinated by the fixtures and fittings of what I now know to be a somewhat plain church – a large organ case covering the East wall with integral pulpit, the old pews with locking bible boxes, the gold lettering around the galleries – the one opposite ‘our’ pew. I remember to this day proclaimed ‘A day in thy courts is better than a thousand’; as a child I remember wondering ‘a thousand whats’?

Out of my experiences there I became a church organist, with my first post at the tender age of 14 in a Congregational Church in Paisley (now closed) – a musical career of over 50 years now, which has seen me working with the Church of Scotland, the Congregationalists, the Methodists, the Baptists, the Roman Catholics and (currently) the Episcopalians.

Since those early days I’ve had a lifelong interest in churches, especially their interiors. The outsides of churches are in general well documented, with photos and architectural histories easily available in the public domain online, and their exteriors often left still intact even after repurposing. I am always more interested to see pictures of the interiors – particularly the organs of course! But I’ve been serially disappointed that for so many churches there are no online records of the appearance of their internal furnishings and decorations – which enhanced worship for so very many decades – far less, of the donors and families commemorated in memorials of various sorts. There will be old photos in drawers and in boxes up in the lofts of parishioners and office bearers of course, but that is essentially a lost archive and inaccessible to anyone else.

So, when I stumbled across the Scotland’s Churches Trust recording project, I seized upon the opportunity to help create a publicly available heritage record of at least some of these otherwise lost artistic, cultural, spiritual, social and historical treasure houses.

First visit

Our first team visit was to St Bartholomew’s Scottish Episcopal Church in Gourock, where I had played the organ in a couple of services for a congregation in single figures. A pretty little church in a stunning location by the Firth of Clyde, the contents were so interesting and rewarding to document and photograph, an ideal project to cut our teeth on. A very fine white sandstone altar has had too many years of damp soaking it, and it’s gradually returning to sand – it won’t be as impressive e’re long, but at least it’s now photographically recorded in detail.