A derelict Highland chapel where Australia’s first potential saint once worshipped has been given a new lease of life.
A charitable trust has turned back the pages of history and restored the hill-top St Columba’s Roman Catholic Chapel to its condition when first completed in the mid-1840s.
It is just over a year ago that Derek Lewis, former director general of England’s prison service and Home Office adviser, launched the St Columba’s Drimnin Trust. Mr Lewis, who also has a home in Brentwood, Essex, wants to restore the chapel as a place for non-denominational Christian worship and as a centre for music and the arts. The B-listed ruinous chapel on the Morvern peninsula overlooking the Sound of Mull had come with the 5,000-acre Drimnin Estate, which he bought around 2003.
It had been a place of worship for Blessed Mother Mary MacKillop, whose parents emigrated from Nether Lochaber to Australia where she was born, but who returned to Scotland in 1873 after founding convents and schools. In 1995 she was beatified by the then Pope at a ceremony in Sydney and there are now calls for her to be made Australia’s first saint.
Restoration of the chapel, which was deconsecrated in the 1940s, has come on apace, having been re-roofed in recycled local slate along with the tower roof, which has been renewed and re-leaded, and now boasts a flagpole to mark its completion.
Once design approval has been granted by council planners, windows will be installed, making the building completely weather-tight and looking from the outside as it did more than 160 years ago, said Mr Lewis.
“At this point it will once again be the prominent landmark that it was in the 19th century, as the shroud of scrub-like trees that had grown up and partially concealed it from the Sound of Mull have been cut back,” he added.
“Before the end of the year we hope that the belfry will once again contain a recently restored bell dating from 1862, so that it is capable of marking the start of 2009.
“The second phase of the work involves the restoration of the interior as a working chapel and arts centre, again looking as it would have done in the 1840s. Commencement of this phase is dependent on successful fundraising, which is the trust's next task.”
The chapel was bought in 1835 by wealthy Edinburgh lawyer Sir Charles Gordon. A staunch Catholic, he horrified the local, exclusively Protestant population by demolishing the 16th-century Maclean of Drimnin castle and building the Catholic chapel, one of the first on the west coast, in 1840 at a cost of £520. After the death of Sir Charles in 1845, the chapel fell into disuse.