On a warm spring day, a rarity in Scotland, I took a trip on the train from Edinburgh down the East Coast to the small town of Dunbar. There, I went for a wander along to the glamorous location of the Co-op supermarket. Not that I had any intention of shopping there, rather I’d come along to have a look at an old ruin standing in a grassy bit of land just a few metres away from the supermarket entrance. A red stone building that was once the tower of a priory church and was later converted into a dovecot.
The church that once stood here was founded in around 1240 by Cristiana de Brus, the Countess of Dunbar, for the Trinitarian Order of Friars for the Redemption of Christian Captives. They also went by the shorter name of the Trinitarians, though were more commonly known as the Red Friars. The Trinitarians were founded in 1193 by John de Matha with the purpose of buying back Christians captured during the crusades and held for ransom. The order was then confirmed by Pope Innocent III and instructed that its revenues were to be divided in three ways; to support themselves, to help the poor, and finally to pay the ransoms for Christians captured by ‘infidels’. Altogether the Trinitarians had eleven houses in Scotland and England, but all these establishments were quite small and consisted only of three friars and three lay brothers.
It is believed that the Trinitarians based at Friarscroft may have been responsible for founding an early hospital at Dunbar. Little else is known about them and the priory itself fell out of use in 1529.
Recent excavations showed that the Dovecot was originally the central tower of the church, with the church building being thirty-nine metres long and eight metres wide, so pretty big for that time. Excavations of the area also showed there had been a cemetery to the south of the building, and that there was evidence of ‘medieval ploughing’ to the north.
As I had a look around the building and dodged the low hanging branches of the trees growing around it, pigeons flapped past me up to the entrance holes on the roof. There they strutted and cooed, and ever so often peered down at me to see what I was up to. Maybe they were hoping that I wouldn’t notice the huge mound of pigeon poo at the entrance to the dovecot. A mound so big that it had jammed open the small iron gate there. A mound so big and smelly that I decided against trying to peer up through the doorway to see what it looked like inside, and to see if there was anywhere to leave a Skulferatu. Instead, I went to a gap in the crumbling cement on the outside wall where I left the Skulferatu that had accompanied me.
The coordinates for the Skulferatu are -
Latitude 56.001388
Longitude -2.518205
what3words: wedding.sweat.shipwreck
I used the following sources for information on Friarscroft –
The Ecclesiastical Architecture of Scotland
From the Earliest Christian Times to the Seventeenth Century, Volume Three
David MacGibbon and Thomas Ross
1897
English Monastic Life
Francis Aidan Gasquet
1904
Friarscroft and the Trinitarians in Dunbar
John Wordsworth
1983
