Tour Scotland travel video of an early Winter dreich road trip drive, with Scottish music, on ancestry visit to the Parish Church in the village of Dalmeny in West Lothian. Dreich is a Scots word for dull and cloudy. The present church building was built around 1130, possibly by Gospatric, Earl of Dunbar, and is recognised as the finest Norman, Romanesque parish church still in use in Scotland, and one of the most complete in the United Kingdom, lacking only its original western tower, which was replaced in a sympathetic style in 1937 having been long absent. The aisleless nave, choir and apse survive almost complete from the 12th century. The refined sculptural detail of the chancel and apse arches is notable, as is a series of powerful beast-head corbels supporting the apse vault. These features are also extremely well preserved, with the original tool-marks still visible. The elaborate south doorway is carved with symbols representing a bestiary and an "agnus dei", enlivened with blind arcading above. The door is comparable to the north door at Dunfermline Abbey in Fife..
The core of the village dates back to the early 1800s. It was planned as an estate village to serve the new Dalmeny House, built between 1814 and 1817, and overlooking the River Forth a mile and a half to the east. Until then the resident Earls of Rosebery had lived in the medieval Barnbougle Castle, standing on the shore of the river. Part of the village green is home to a war memorial erected in 1920, whose deliberate likeness to a mercat cross gives the impression that the village might have a much older history. Dalmeny is a small village located immediately to the south east of Queensferry, and just north of the road linking Edinburgh to the Queensferry Crossing.
All photographs are copyright of Sandy Stevenson, Tour Scotland, and may not be used without permission.
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