Fowlis Easter Quotes

“For the majority of Scots and people living along the Tay, the rich visual culture of religious art, though once an integral part of Scotland's spiritual and cultural life, has been almost totally lost because of its destruction by the hardline Calvinist zealots who directed Scotland's reformation in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Shrines and sculptures, holy wells, crosses like that on the Forteviot arch, or McDuff's, paintings and alterpieces - all were destroyed by religious fundamentalism on a par with Isis in Syria and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Yet like the flower that survives the inferno, a tiny bloom, if a bloodied one can still be found. Inside the medieval church at Fowlis Easter, between the Sidlaws and the Tay, are unique artworks from before the Reformation: a carved fleur-de-lis decorates the 'women's entrance' in the north wall and has a 'stoup' for holy water; an octagonal font sculpted with the baptism of Christ; a sixteenth-century painting on copper of the dove of peace, with Noah's ark grounded in the background; and, amazingly, a remnant of a large Crucifixion that has survived from c.1450.

Measuring thirteen feet by five feet, and painted in tempera on eighteen oak panels, it survived only because it was overpainted with whitewash. Now cleaned, t is a unique survivor from a different past.”
― Robin A. Crawford, The Sound of Many Waters: A Journey along the River Tay