For well over a millennium, Brechin has been an important religious centre. The area was a key location for the Picts and many examples of their magnificent legacy of stone carving are housed in Brechin Cathedral. This fully-illustrated booklet provides an excellent introduction to the collection.
A pocket-sized guide that describes what is known about the history of the Picts, listing the best symbol stones and museums to visit with many illustrations and maps.
Elizabeth Rees, using this archaeological and literary evidence, has produced a guidebook to major sites in the British Isles where the Celtic saints lived and worked. Most biographies of the Celtic saints are filled with legends and were written centuries after they lived. But the places where they lived and worked, generally in the more remote parts of their home or adopted countries can still be visited. Their chapels and huts are often placed in beautiful landscapes: sheltered valleys, sacred springs, peaceful lakeshores, sea caves, headlands and offshore islands. Archaeology, the study of sites and place-names, inscribed stones, and early texts can bring us closer to how these men and women lived and to the unique ideals they held. Brigid and Patrick in Ireland, David in Wales, Columba in Scotland, and Aidan in Northumbria are among those who have left monasteries and hermitages, chapels and holy wells dedicated to them. The 250 sites examined here are listed alphabetically by area, with some fifty described in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and the rest of Britain. Accurate descriptions are given, with a history of each site, directions how to find it, and, where relevant, useful directions such as sailing times or where to find the key. A final section gives an outline of the lives of the saints with whom these places are associated.
The wealth of St. Andrew's diocese, the richest in medieval Scotland, was reflected in its ecclesiastical art and architecture. Religious changes in the sixteenth century led to the ruin of the cathedral and monastic houses and to the stripping of churches. Much important, although often fragmentary, architecture still remains; and there are significant if tantalising survivals of the furnishings. This volume consists of papers on the history of the medieval diocese, on the cult of St Andrew, on the eleventh to thirteenth century churches of St Andrews, Dunfermline and Arbroath as well as on facades and piers and distinctively Scottish architecture of the later Middle Ages. Other papers deal with Romanesque sculpture, sixteenth-century woodwork, the metalwork of the university maces of St Andrews and an altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes and there are surveys of the surviving stained glass and floor tiles of the diocese.
