Author : John R Hume
ISBN : 9781840338126
Cover : paperback
Price : £10.95

The author is former Chief Inspector of Historic Buildings at Historic Scotland, academic and author of many books on Scottish architecture and industrial history published over the last decade. Furthermore, he was and is a photographer par excellence and he has been recording buildings and structures and industrial archaeology since the 1960s. This series of six volumes using his own photographs, in black and white and in colour, evolved from a lecture given in 2014 for the Scotland’s Churches Trust. Apart from ‘a handful’ that ‘ought to be here’ this is a personal selection of churches that the author describes as having ‘a particular meaning to me’ and as a ‘love-letter to the Church Universal’. Of course these words are deceptive in the nicest possible way as the author is possibly the most humble expert extant. These books do so much more than he implies and are arranged chronologically and by epoch. The six books combined comprise of 576 photographs in total.

The second of this series of six volumes deals with the century that follows the Reformation. Although this prompted the building of many new Presbyterian churches other social, religious and economic changes also resulted in church building. The Reformation was just over 40 years old when the First Secession occurred in 1733, quickly followed by John Glas’s secession. The government response backfired, causing another split, between the Burghers and the Anti-burghers, the Secession of 1747. In 1761 another split occurred resulting in the formation of the Relief Church. On top of the collapse of the monolithic Church, after the failure of the two Jacobite risings religious tension eased and Roman Catholic and Episcopalian churches began also to be built. Planned tows and villages and population migration caused by the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions also acted to make this a century when many new and bigger churches were built. Again in this volume each photo has a caption of a few sentences outlining when the church was built, often why, later developments and alterations and notable characteristics.