Our year started very well, with the Trustees of the Church of Scotland confirming our status as preferred buyer - phew, that took a long time, but it was a very welcome news, which were able to share with our case officer at the Scottish Land Fund.
We are also progressing with the analysis of the features we want to conserve, like the very fine joinery details uncovered by BARD.. Ruairidh Moir, our lead architect was visiting last week and looked at all the issues in details and walked with us around the site to choose the best point of entry for our vehicular access. It's a balance between avoiding trees and avoiding destroyed sound parts of the boundary wall and making the case for this with the planners. On the plus side, making an opening in the wall will provide stones to repair it in other places!
One exciting thing also is the discovery that the proportions of the church are perfectly aligned to the Golden ratio, which means that whoever built the church - and we are still trying to work out who it was - had a fair bit of architectural knowledge and very definite intentions. We are currently looking at locating the Heritors' records, as they might provide a clue of who the heritors ( landowners) of the parish at the time paid to erect the building.
We also want to thank Comunn Eachdraidh Eige, our local history society partner, for continuing with their donorbox fundraiser - link provided on the website . Every little helps as - fingers crossed - summer 2025 is scheduled to see the start of the repair phase!
