The Aberdeen area has seen human settlement…

1532 CE

The Aberdeen area has seen human settlement for at least eight thousand years.

The city began as two separate burghs: Old Aberdeen at the mouth of the river Don where it enters the North Sea; and New Aberdeen, a fishing and trading settlement, where the Denburn waterway enters the river Dee estuary.

Saint Machar is said to have been a companion of St Columba on his journey to Iona.

A fourteenth-century legend tells how God (or St Columba) told Machar to establish a church where a river bends into the shape of a bishop's crosier before flowing into the sea.

The River Don bends in this way just below where the Cathedral now stands.

According to legend, St Machar in about 580 founded a site of worship in Old Aberdeen.

Machar's church had been superseded by a Norman cathedral in 1131, shortly after David I transferred the See from Mortlach to Aberdeen.

Almost nothing of that original cathedral survives; a lozenge-decorated base for a capital supporting one of the architraves can be seen in the Charter Room in the present church.

After the execution of William Wallace in 1305, his body had been cut up and sent to different corners of the country to warn other dissenters.

His left quarter ended up in Aberdeen and is buried in the walls of the cathedral.

The city’s earliest charter had been granted by William the Lion in 1179 and confirmed the corporate rights granted by David I.

The Great Charter of Robert the Bruce in 1319 had transformed Aberdeen into a property-owning and financially independent community.

Granted with it was the nearby Forest of Stocket, whose income formed the basis for the city's Common Good Fund, which still benefits Aberdonians.

During the Wars of Scottish Independence, Aberdeen had been under English rule, so Robert the Bruce had laid siege to Aberdeen Castle before destroying it in 1308, followed by the massacring of the English garrison and the retaking of Aberdeen for the townspeople.

The city had been burned by Edward III of England in 1336, but had been rebuilt and extended, and called New Aberdeen.

At the end of the thirteenth century Bishop Henry Cheyne had decided to extend the church, but the work had been interrupted by the Scottish Wars of Independence.

Cheyne's progress included piers for an extended choir at the transept crossing.

These pillars, with decorated capitals of red sandstone, are still visible at the east end of the present church.

Though worn by exposure to the elements after the collapse of the cathedral's central tower, these capitals are among the finest stone carvings of their date to survive in Scotland.

Bishop Alexander Kininmund II had demolished the Norman cathedral in the late fourteenth century, and had begun the nave, including the granite columns and the towers at the western end.

Bishop Henry Lichtoun completed the nave, the west front and the northern transept, and made a start on the central tower.

Bishop Ingram Lindsay completed the roof and the paving stones in the later part of the fifteenth century.

Further work was done over the next fifty years by Thomas Spens, William Elphinstone and Gavin Dunbar; Dunbar, who dies in 1532, is responsible for the heraldic ceiling and the two western spires.

Images

St Machar's cathedral with watch house. The small house-like building was used in the 1800s to watch out for body snatchers seeking corpses for the University anatomists. (Photo taken February 25, 200