Tullibardine Chapel

Tullibardine Chapel was built by Sir David Murray of Tullibardine and his lady, Margaret Colquhoun, as a monument to the piety of their family.

Sir David was the ancestor of the earls of Atholl, and this chapel shows us how they and other elite members of Scottish society approached their spiritual welfare.

The building was originally probably a plain, rectangular church. It was built near the main family residence of Tullibardine Castle, though this is now completely lost.

It’s likely Sir David intended to found a college of priests, though the chapel never attained collegiate status. He died shortly after its completion.

Their grandson, Sir Andrew Murray, enlarged the chapel in about 1500. He added a squat bell tower and transepts to the north and south, giving the church a cross-shaped layout.

The chapel served as the private church of the Murrays until the Protestant Reformation of 1560.

In addition to meeting the daily spiritual needs of family members and their household and tenants, the clergy serving chapels like Tullibardine would be expected to offer prayers for deceased members of the family in order to speed their passage through Purgatory. At Tullibardine an extra priest was endowed in 1455 by Sir David’s son, William, possibly diverting funds that had initially been destined for Muthill Church.

Although no pre-Reformation memorials have survived, we know it remained the family’s burial place into the 1900s.

Bonnie Prince Charlie’s general Lord George Murray buried his infant daughter here in 1740. Lord George would have been buried here too, were he not forced into exile after leading the Jacobite army to defeat at Culloden in 1746.

Tullibardine Chapel stands almost unchanged since Sir Andrew’s extensions in about 1500, and is one of the few medieval churches to have survived the Reformation unaltered. Its setting, among a neat graveyard in a wooded area, is similar to how it appears in a map in the 1590s.

Medieval features of the church include the timber roof, niches once reserved for statues and coats of arms of the Murray family, both inside and out. You can also spot masons’ marks, left as a form of signature by the masons who worked on the chapel.

Because of its completeness and unaltered state, Tullibardine is an invaluable resource for students of architecture, liturgy, heraldry and genealogy. 

In 1816, James Drummond, later Viscount Strathallan, bought the Tullibardine estate from his father-in-law, the 4th Duke of Atholl.

Drummond (1767-1851) was a writer with the East India Company in Canton in 1786. He became head of the British settlement there, making a considerable fortune. It's not clear if Drummond invested any of that wealth in the conservation and maintenance of the chapel, though it is possible it allowed him to buy the estate. 

Today, the chapel is no longer in use for worship, but the Earls of Perth still have rights of entombment in the burial chamber below the chancel area.

Several Viscounts and Viscountesses of Strathallan and Earls and Countesses of Perth were laid to rest there. The last known deposition was that of the ashes of Anna, Countess of Perth, who died in 1967.