Autumn Road-Trip 1: Ardclach Old Parish Church

Back in early Autumn, Raven, Suzy_Bugs, Hemlock (another Goth and photographer) and I went on a road-trip around the area between Nairn and Elgin, looking for interesting parts of the local historical landscape to photograph - old buildings, old bridges, graveyards, churches and interesting places from an architectural and historical point of view. A disused chapel and graveyard in the middle of nowhere seemed like the perfect start. 

Photograph by HouseCat. A surprisingly sunny day for Autumn in Scotland.

Instead of a rectangular, hall-like floor-plan, like many chapels of the period, or the traditional cruciform shape, it is T-shaped, with the side wing probably being an extension to an original hall-style church. It's in quite a lovely secluded location and is enclosed, along with its churchyard, with low stone wall - or rather, low from the churchyard perspective, as it is built on a terraced plateau and is significantly higher than the flood-plain below. There was apparently a church on the site before this current building, which according to the Buildings At Risk Register, was dedicated to St. Luag. 

 have tried to take the graves at angles where they're not readable,
but I think it is too shallow, sadly. No disrespect ended to the deceased or relatives.

It hasn't been used in decades. It is boarded up with the 'windows' painted onto boards over the real windows (if they're still there). The building is not open to the public, so I have no idea what the interior is like. The graveyard has some fairly recent graves for a cemetery at a disused church. I found out that the building was put on the Buildings At Risk register. The entry has a few interesting details about the building - as to its age, it was built in stages from 1626 onwards, with a lot of work done in the 19thC, and it has been unused since 1958.

A very bright day in Scotland. Photograph by HouseCat. 

The weather was particularly mild for autumn. There were light showers, but otherwise it was quite sunny. We went for a short walk in the surrounding countryside.  The river is very close by, and quite fast flowing over rock - it reminds me of the river Teifi in Wales. My next blog entry will be photographs of the river. We also took photographs of creepy-crawlies (mostly spiders, but none of my photographs of spiders came out right), plants and the countryside, which while very pretty, I do not feel fit in with the theme of this blog, so I am not posting them here. I will only be posting about the river because I like the textures and blackness of the water in the photographs I took, and feel like they are better suited to aesthetic of this blog. 

A photograph more akin to my usual style. Photograph by HouseCat.

In one far corner of the graveyard, there was a small tree, and beneath the tree were candles, a horse-shoe, some ribbons and other items that seemed to either indicate a rather unorthodox memorial, or some kind of folk-magic.  I left it alone, and did not photograph it as I did not wish to be disrespectful to the intentions of whomever person put them there.

This was just the first part of the Road Trip, and there were many more places I visited that day - all of which will be featured on my blog. 

In full colour! The sky was grey with clouds but bight. 

The area was pretty green and lush, and the rain showers really made everything seem so bright. Something about the pine woodland reminds me of parts of Canada. It really is a lovely location. For a place so secluded and long-disused, and with a graveyard, it didn't seem creepy outside. Hemlock told me a rather creepy story about inside, however, that doesn't exactly include a ghost, more something that I will simply term an "entity". Maybe at some point I will get him to write it up and share it here. 

Looking down the broad side of the church. Photograph by HouseCat

That is all for this instalment, but I will post the rest up shortly. I do hope you enjoy my architectural photographs of disused and ruined buildings. I especially like chronicling the various local graveyards, are they can so easily fall into disrepair, and I hope that maybe if that happens, my photographs may at leat be a record of what once was.