Muthill Saints: a parish of confusion Norval Smith University of Amsterdam 1 General introduction The purpose of this article is to end some of the confusion regarding the dedications of the various churches and chapels of the historical parish of Muthill in Upper Strathearn in Perthshire, and most importantly make a proposal about which saint the parish church is dedicated to.1 I hope in this way to clarify the situation and make it possible to provide a more informed basis from which further conclusions can be drawn. The Appendix gives a fuller listing of references to St Cattan’s Fair in Muthill. 1.1 General historical context The historical context in which these Muthill dedications should be seen has been most succinctly put by Thomas Owen Clancy, with some fine-tuning by Gilbert Márkus. Clancy (2004, 140) has suggested that secular relationships might have existed between the lords of ‘the area around Culross and Strathearn in Perthshire’ and ‘the holders of Pictish kingship’ towards the end of the seventh century and the beginning of the eighth century. Clancy’s thesis is that various leaders of the Dalriadan Cenél Comgaill, including Dargart, who was the father of two successive kings of the Picts, Bruide/Bridei (c. 697–706) and Nec(h)tan (706–729),2 had moved eastwards from their home in the Cowal area bordering the Firth of Clyde in the West of Scotland to Strathearn in the East of the country. Clancy (138) suspects that Bruide’s father Dargart’s family had had interests in the area of Culross at least. He follows this up (140) with the hypothesis of a more general extension to Strathearn, the area of the ‘royal power-base’ at the period of the kingship of these sons, Bruide and Nechtan, of a Pictish mother Der-Ilei and a Dalriadan father Dargart. Márkus (2011, 2012) observes that the early episcopal see at Kingarth in 1 I would like to express my thanks to Rachel Butter and Simon Taylor for their many useful comments on this article. Thanks also to Gilbert Márkus for additional suggestions and advice. Thanks are also due to the National Records of Scotland for permission to use sections of estate plan RHP3485 in the article. I am grateful to the National Library of Scotland for the facility they provide under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence on their Maps Website. I am also grateful to the National Library of Scotland for permission to quote part of a 1712 almanac page containing a reference to St Cattan’s Fair at Muthill. 2 With minor interruptions. The Journal of Scottish Name Studies 11, 2017, 55–92 56 Norval Smith Bute apparently ceases to exist with bishop Iolan, whose death is recorded in the Annals of Ulster in 689. During the eighth century, Kingarth was ruled by abbots and not by bishops. Márkus concludes that it was before AD 700 that the episcopal see dedicated to St Blane, traditionally Kingarth’s first bishop, was moved to Dul Blááin (Dunblane). He interprets this as a sign of the decline of Cenél Comgaill power in the west and an increase in its power in the east. Woolf (2007, 102) takes a different line. He sees the move from Kingarth to Dunblane as a reaction to Norse attacks on the West Coast, taking place in the mid-ninth century, in parallel to the translation of Columban relics to Dunkeld. But the seventh century is also the period that bishops appear in Iona, which Márkus associates with an increase in power of the rival Cenél Gabráin in Argyll. So the first bishop in Iona was Céti/Coeddi before 697, following which time there were no more bishops in Kingarth. For Dargart to be able to marry Der-Ilei, a Pictish princess, implies as Márkus (2017, 107) states, that Cenél Comgaill must already have had significant influence in Strathearn. Macquarrie (1993, 132–33) and Taylor (1996, 100–01; 1999, 66) have both placed the foundation of St Serf’s monastery in Culross in the late seventh century during the reign of Bruide, son of Dargart. The geographical location of Culross is described as follows in Macquarrie (1993) and Reeves (1873), quoting from different variants of the Irish manuscript ‘De Matribus Sanctorum Hiberniæ’: (1)(a) ... Cuillennros hi Sraith Érenn hi Comgellaibh eter Sliabh nOcel 7 Mur nGiudan ‘... Culross in Strathearn in Comgellaig between the Ochil Hills and the Firth of Forth’ (Macquarrie 1993, 124)3 (1)(b) ... Cuilendros hi Sraith hirend hi Comgellgaib itir Sliab Nochel acus muir nGiudan ‘... Culross in Strathearn in Comgellaig between Sliabh nOchel [the Ochil Hills] and the sea of Giudi [the Frith of Forth]’ (Reeves 1873, 242 n)4 Clancy (2004, 138) interprets the term Comgellaig as having the same reference as Cenél Comgaill. Clancy then interprets as a ‘prominent signal of the influence of people from Cowal’ the importation of the ‘cults of various Cowal- area saints into Strathearn’ (ibid., 140), of which the most interesting for Muthill are St Blane of Bute, his alleged uncle and/or tutor St Cattan of Bute, and St Kessog of Luss. 3 Citing Ó Riain 1985, 181. 4 Citing the Irish version in the Book of Lecan, fol. 43 bb. (following Reeves’s tran- scription). The Journal of Scottish Name Studies 11, 2017, 55–92 Muthill Saints: a parish of confusion 57 1.2 Churches in the historical parish of Muthill The pre-reformation parish appears to have contained at least four churches and chapels. According to Rogers (1992, 34–42), these four churches and chapels were (2)(a) The parish church in Muthill; (2)(b) A chapel near Struthill (Muthill parish); (2)(c) A chapel in Blairinroar (Muthill parish); (2)(d) A chapel at Braco (formerly in Muthill parish, now in Ardoch parish).5 Discussion has been inconclusive regarding the dedication of the parish church of Muthill, and while several potential dedicatees for Struthill have been proposed no consensus has been reached.6 I will present evidence below to suggest that the saint of Muthill parish was in fact St Cattan.7 It seems fairly clear that the saint involved in the case of the chapel near Struthill was St Kessog. In the case of the former chapel in Blairinroar, we have the 1837 New Statistical Account (henceforth NSA) notice for Muthill parish with the tradition recorded there, to support a dedication to St Patrick. For the chapel at Ardoch we have no clear relevant historical information beyond the fact that there is mention of an ‘incumbent cleric’ in 1531 (Rogers 1992, 342), although archaeological work suggests it might be at least two centuries older.8 Place-name information now suggests that there is a possibility that this chapel might have been dedicated to St Blane. In other words it is conceivable that all three of the Cowal-area saints mentioned by Clancy have dedications within the pre-1891 bounds of the former parish of Muthill. This could be seen as a possible indication of the importance of Muthill in the diocese of Dunblane. 5 The present Ardoch parish church dates from 1780, when it was erected as a chapel of ease (Van Ballegooijen 2015). 6 See the Corpus of Scottish Medieval Churches <http://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/ corpusofscottishchurches/site.php?id=157804>. 7 I will use the spelling Cattan in English and Catan in Gaelic. Further, in quoting forms from sources, I will stick to the forms given in the sources. 8 An archaeological description is given in Ross 1898. Dunbar (1966, 163) suggests that the remains are of fourteenth-century date. See also <https://canmore.org.uk/ site/25248>. On NLS map Pont 21, dated c. 1583–1596, the chapel is (very approximately) indicated as Chapp: larach (not Chappelarach as given in the list at <http://maps.nls. uk/pont/placenames/a-d.html>). Pont uses the symbol ‘:’ to indicate abbreviations. Compare K: of Kreef for Kirk of Crieff. The real significance of the name Chapp: larach is ‘chapel ruin’, where larach is a Scots word larach ‘site or foundation of a building, the remains of an old building’ (Concise Scots Dictionary; Scots larach is a loanword from Gaelic làrach). At some time between the 1530s and the 1590s, the chapel seems to have been abandoned. The Journal of Scottish Name Studies 11, 2017, 55–92 58 Norval Smith In what follows I will set out the structure of the rest of the article in greater detail. 1.3 Claims made regarding dedications to St Patrick in Muthill parish Apart from the case of Blairinroar mentioned in §1.2, there are several other churches or chapels whose dedications to St Patrick have been discussed in the literature: (3)(a) Strageath (3)(b) Blackford (3)(c) Dolpatrick All of these were mentioned by Forbes (1872, 336–37) as possibly representing the three (unnamed) churches alleged by the Aberdeen Breviary to have been founded by St Fergus in the area of Strageath. Forbes finds a connection with Patrick in all three, which he takes as supporting evidence for a link with the allegedly-Irish Fergus. In fact, as I will show, only one (Strageath) has an early (1200) dedication to Patrick; one was not a church at all (Dolpatrick) but does contain Patrick’s name; and one was built in the late sixteenth century (Blackford) and its dedication to Patrick transferred from Strageath. None of these three was actually located in the historical parish of Muthill. Nevertheless, Forbes’s invocation of Patrick in the area has exerted an undue influence on subsequent writing on the subject, as I will demonstrate in §§2.1–3.