Deer Abbey

The Ruins of Deer Abbey

Deer Abbey was founded in 1219 by William Comyn, the Earl of Buchan, who invited the Cistercians at Kinloss Abbey in Moray to set up a daughter house here. Comyn chose to found Deer Abbey on the site of a Monastery established here some 600 years earlier by St Drostan, a follower of St Columba.

Wall of the Refectory Abbot's House Outline of Transepts and Crossing, Abbey Church Doorway into Abbey Kitchen

Indeed, Deer's main claim to fame dates from the earlier monastery rather than the abbey whose remains you see today. It was here that the Book of Deer (or Deir) was written some time in the first half of the 900s, with later additions in Gaelic in the 1100s describing the foundation of the original monastery (though 500 years after the events they reported). The Book of Deer was discovered in 1860 and is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum Library in Cambridge.

Deer Abbey was always a small community, with never more than 15 monks at any one time. The abbey church was cruciform in shape, some 157ft long with an aisle on the north side of the nave. Today nothing remains above a course or two of stonework indicating the outline of the church.

Better preserved are some of the buildings to the south of the cloister. The abbot's house, refectory and kitchen all survive sufficiently to give some idea of what they might have been like, though all floors and ceilings, including some that were obviously vaulted, have long gone.

Carved Stone in Surrounding Wall

Gate from the A950

Carved Stones Display

Like the abbey church, most of the buildings to the west and north of the cloister are nothing more than lines of stone in the grass. To the north of the remains themselves is an odd wooden construction of a portico and Doric columns (echoing the grand gateway you entered by). This provides shelter for a display of carved structural stonework found during investigations of the abbey.

Nearby are a line of grand yew trees that look as if they might well have stood watch over much of the abbey's active life as well as its subsequent decline and fall.

Like other Scottish abbeys, Deer's useful life came to an end with the Reformation in 1560. And in common with many, it then became the property of secular lairds. Deer Abbey ended up in the hands of the Fergusons of Pitfour.

The abbey buildings were said to have remained structurally complete (if not in good repair) until 1809. But then the Fergusons turned the site of the abbey into a walled garden, apparently recycling much of the stone from the abbey to build the magnificent wall that still surrounds the ruins that remain.

Then in 1854 Admiral Ferguson of Pitfour used much of what remained to build a family mausoleum where the east end of the abbey church had stood. The mausoleum has since been removed, but a sense of what it might have been like is gained from the grand entrance portico facing the main road, moved here from its original role as part of the mausoleum.

And it seems reasonable to suppose that any stonework from the abbey that survived the building of the garden wall and the creation of the mausoleum was seen as fair game when material was needed for other developments on the Pitfour Estate, which lies to the north across the A950 from the abbey site.

These included Pitfour House itself, demolished in 1927, an observatory designed primarily to watch over the neighbouring racecourse rather than the night sky, a canal linking the estate to the sea, a large loch built to give the excuse to build a large bridge, and on the loch's banks, the remarkably grand Temple of Theseus, a six-bay Greek Doric temple with 36 pillars and containing a pool said to be home to Admiral Ferguson's pet alligators...