In
the tiny village of Spott, near Dunbar, there sits a small, picturesque church. Though very little, if anything, of the
original building remains, a church has stood on that spot in Spott since the
early 14th century.
Spott Parish Church
I
wandered up there on a warm and blustery day to have a look around. It was a very peaceful place of old
gravestones, trees and birds singing away merrily. While inside the church a few members of the
local community had met up for a bit of a get together. Of course, I wasn’t there for socialising, I
was there to leave a Skulferatu in a place with an unexpected dark
history…especially if you were one of the early clergymen who preached there.
Gravestone at Spott
Detail of gravestone at
Spott
Gravestone at Spott
Spott
Church didn’t have a great deal of luck with several of its early clerics. Around 1530, Robert Galbraith became the
Rector of the church. He was also a judge
in the High Court and Court of Session at Edinburgh. In 1544 he made a judgement on a case that did
not go down well with the defendant. So,
unfortunately for Galbraith, while he was about his business in Edinburgh, the
disgruntled defendant spotted him and murdered him.
View of Spott Parish
Church and graveyard
In
1559, John Hamilton, the brother of the Earl of Arran, was appointed as the
Parson of Spott. He later went on to
rise up the ranks of the church and became the Archbishop of St Andrews. However,
in 1571 he was tried and found guilty of aiding and abetting in the murders of the
Earl of Moray and also Lord Darnley, the late husband of Mary, Queen of Scots. He was hanged by the Mercat Cross in Stirling
a few days after his trial.
Gravestone at Spott
Gravestone at Spott
View from Spott Parish
Church Graveyard
In
1567, John Kello became the first protestant Minister of Spott Church. He is also the most notorious. John Kello was born in Linlithgow and as a
young man married a local girl, Margaret Thomson. John, who was an ambitious and eloquent man, decided
to enter the Presbyterian Church and was ordained as a Presbyterian
Minister while attending the first General Assembly in Edinburgh in1560. He soon required a reputation as a powerful
and stirring preacher and in 1567 was appointed to the Parish of Spott. So, there he moved with Margaret and their
three children.
At
Spott, John’s reputation grew as a preacher, preachers being the rock stars of
those days. However, unlike rock stars,
preachers weren’t paid very well. John had soon come to realise this and looked
for ways to better himself as he wanted the finer things in life, he wanted land,
prestige, and wealth. When he had married
Margaret, she had brought a small dowry with her. John thought he could maybe use her dowry to
make some money and so he used it to buy and sell land. Unfortunately, a couple of his land deals
went wrong, and he ended up in debt.
While
he fretted about his debts and ways to make more money, John’s sermons still
attracted a good crowd to the church.
One of his congregation was a rich young woman who had recently been
widowed. Being a very pious type, she
would often seek John out for spiritual advice.
John found that he enjoyed her company and soon his thoughts turned to
how his life would be if he was married to her and had her fortune as his
own. She would make him a rich man of
some social standing. If he were married
to her, he could achieve his ambitions.
The more he thought like this, the more he began to despise his own wife,
Margaret. He became bitter and began to
blame her for his failings.
Margaret,
who by all accounts was a cheerful and likeable person, and a loving wife, soon
bore the brunt of John’s anger at his thwarted ambitions. She, however carried
on in her sunny and loyal way assuming that John’s moods would soon pass, and
he would be her loving husband once again.
This annoyed John even more and he began to wish she would just
die. If she were dead, then he could
marry again and marry well. He then
began to think about ways to kill her and decided that he could achieve his
ambitions in life if he murdered her.
Once
he had made the decision to murder Margaret, John acquired some poison and used
that in an attempt to kill her. It
didn’t work. She was a fit, healthy
woman with a strong constitution and the poison had no noticeable effect on
her. On the Sunday morning after his
first attempt at killing his wife, John tried again. Knowing that she would pray in their bedroom in
the morning, he sneaked in behind her with a length of rope in his hands. As she prayed, he pounced, pulled the rope
around her neck, and strangled her. He
then hung her lifeless body from a beam in the room, locked the door from
inside, leaving the key in the lock and then slipped out of the bedroom window,
shutting it behind him. As the church
bells rang, he walked through the graveyard greeting members of his
congregation as they arrived. In the church he stood in the pulpit and gave a passionate sermon.
After
the sermon was over, John invited several members of the congregation to come
over to his house to eat there. He told
them that lately his wife had been very depressed, and it would cheer her up to
have some company. Off they went to the
house where John called out to his wife, but there was no answer. He then went to their bedroom and called out
to his guests that the door was locked.
Then in front of them, he kicked the door open, and all saw poor
Margaret hanging dead from the beam.
John collapsed to the ground sobbing as they cut Margaret down. His tears of anguish seemed so real to those guests
he’d invited in, that no one suspected anything other than Margaret had taken
her own life.
For
the first few days after Margaret’s death, John was a happy man. He was free to marry again, maybe in a few
months’ time he could propose to his widowed parishioner and then settle down
to the life he deserved. A life with
money and property and status. But then
the gnarly issue came up of Margaret’s burial, as a suicide she could not be
buried on consecrated ground and so she was instead buried in an unmarked grave
in a nearby field. Her reputation ruined
and her soul damned forever, people no longer spoke of her, and her and John’s
children were told to forget her. The
guilt of it all began to weigh heavy on John’s mind. What had he done? He began to remember the Margaret who he had
loved and had loved him. He remembered her
terrified and disbelieving eyes looking up at him as he had killed her. She had always trusted him, looked after him,
believed in him and he had betrayed it all.
He had betrayed her, and he had betrayed his God. After a few weeks John could take the guilt
no more and so he set off to Edinburgh where he called on a judge and made a
full confession to him. John was then
taken to the Tolbooth in Edinburgh to await trial.
John’s
trial was a quick affair where he again made a full confession, was found
guilty of the murder of his wife, and was sentenced to death. On the 4th of October 1570, John
was taken to Gallow Lee on the outskirts of old Edinburgh. There he preached his final sermon where he
basically blamed Satan for making him do it, and then he was hanged. Once dead, his body was cut down and burnt to
ash.
After
John Kello, Spott Church had many more Ministers, though no more who were
murderers, murdered or executed.
I
left the Skulferatu that accompanied me on my walk in a gap in a wall outside
the church.
Skulferatu #108
Skulferatu #108 in a gap
in the wall outside the church
Skulferatu #108 in a gap
in the wall outside the church
Map showing the location
of Skulferatu #108
The
coordinates for the location of the Skulferatu are –
Latitude
55.9722
Longitude
-2.524426
what3words:
masses.flags.settle
I used the
following sources for information on Spott Parish Church –
The
Examiner
No.843,
Sunday, March 28, 1894
Twelve
Scots Trials
by
William Roughead
1913
Spott
Church Website
