Trinity Apse: The Church That Moved House
Why is it significant?
Find the small, dark Gothic chapel end squeezed into Chalmers Close, with its tall pointed windows and stubby buttresses, looking oddly out of place among the tenements, as if somebody had dropped it here from somewhere else. That is more or less what happened.
Key Facts
| Place | Trinity Apse: The Church That Moved House |
|---|---|
| Address | Chalmers Close, off Jeffrey Street, Edinburgh EH1, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.95100, -3.18570 |
| Part of Walk | Crowns, Kirks and Sanctuary: Edinburgh's Canongate and the Palace of Holyroodhouse |
| Generated | Generated |
Find the small, dark Gothic chapel end squeezed into Chalmers Close, with its tall pointed windows and stubby buttresses, looking oddly out of place among the tenements, as if somebody had dropped it here from somewhere else. That is more or less what happened. This fragment, the Trinity Apse, is a church that moved house.
In 1460 King James II of Scotland was killed at the siege of Roxburgh, when one of his own cannons burst beside him. His widow, Mary of Guelders, a duke's daughter from the Low Countries, suddenly became one of the most powerful people in the kingdom. That same year she founded a great collegiate church, Trinity College Kirk, in the valley below the Old Town, and three years later she was buried in it.
For that church its provost, Edward Bonkil, commissioned one of the treasures of Scottish art: the Trinity Altarpiece, painted in Flanders by Hugo van der Goes in the 1470s, with King James III and his queen, Margaret of Denmark, kneeling on its wings. Against all odds it survived the Reformation, and today it hangs in the Scottish National Gallery on the Mound, lent from the Royal Collection.
Then came the railway. In 1848 the North British Railway needed the valley for what became Waverley Station, and a medieval church stood in the way. Its stones were numbered and stacked on the slopes of Calton Hill, waiting to be rebuilt. Years passed, and stones went missing. When a new Trinity College Church finally went up here in the 1870s, only the old apse was reassembled as part of it, and later even that Victorian church was pulled down, leaving this lonely piece behind.
And the queen? When the old church was dug up, bones believed to be hers were lifted and carried down to the royal vault of Holyrood Abbey, which is exactly where this walk is heading. Whether they really were Mary of Guelders, nobody can prove. Walk back to the High Street and turn left, downhill, past the World's End pub, where we will finish. Carry on into the Canongate until you reach a church with a curly Dutch gable on your left.