Friday January 24 2014

Looking Back: The Floating Church of Loch Sunart

Writing in 1954, Alastair Borthwick tells the story of the "Strangest vessel ever seen in Highland waters."

The Floating Church of Loch Sunart was conceived on a windy hillside in Ardnamurchan in the year 1845, and perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is that it has been almost completely forgotten. No stranger church was ever built and no stranger vessel ever left the Clyde, yet to-day it is little more than a name, a legend imperfectly understood, in the district where it once played so large a part. Elsewhere no one has heard of it. Even the yard which built it has no records to show that it once stood upon the stocks there.

The Floating Church was born in the Disruption. When the Free Church broke away, it did so after a lengthy period of argument; and the argument was so bitter that it did not die down when the final decision was taken and the Free Church stood on its own. The opposition did not greatly inconvenience the new Church – indeed it probably helped to strengthen it – but there was one way in which die-hard members of the Established Church could make a great nuisance of themselves.

It was, as the Seceders rapidly found, one thing to create a new Church, but quite another to build new churches. In several parts of Scotland, particularly in the Borders and in the Highlands, there were landowners who refused to sell any building plots whatever; and, as these were the days of vast estates, it was often possible for a single landowner to exclude the new Church from several parishes and prevent the people worshipping under a roof of any kind.

In Torosay on Mull, for example, the congregation was reduced to gathering each Sunday on the shore between high and low watermarks, and when the spring tides were running they sometimes ended the service ankle-deep in the sea. There were other cases as bad; but the most extraordinary one occurred in the parish of Strontian, on Loch Sunart.

“The sea is His…”

The landowner was Sir James Milles Riddell, an Episcopalian gentleman who controlled a stretch of country forty miles long and was so violently anti-Disruptionist that he refused to allow so much as a tent to be erected upon it. The congregation met on the hillside, frequently in the rain and at least once in deep snow. There were about five hundred of them; and at the end of the first desperate winter someone – no one knows who – had a brilliant idea. Sir James did not own the sea, and the sea was at their doors. They would build a church which floated.

The idea was taken up so enthusiastically that £2,000 was quickly raised and an order was placed with the Glen Shipbuilding Yard of Port-Glasgow. In the end all the money was not needed: the price paid was £1,400.

It was a bargain. For their £1,400 the congregation got a church complete with pulpit, vestry, and seats for 750 people. Contemporary prints do not show much detail, but it appears to have been a cast-iron Noah’s Ark of no great beauty but immense solidity which to-day would probably have cost £25,000.

A hazardous voyage

It was not over-difficult to build this strong craft, but it was another matter to deliver her. In July, 1846, she was taken in two by two tugs and made the journey from the Clyde to Loch Sunart. The opinion of the tugmasters on this operation is, perhaps fortunately, unknown; she had no lines to speak of and the wind resistance must have been appalling. On several occasions she nearly dragged the tugs on to the rocks. But in the end she arrived safely and was moored 150 yards offshore and about two miles from Sir James’s house.

In this position the church gave long and faithful service. Once account says: “It was a singular spectacle on each Sunday morning, to see the boats coasting along from north and south, while numerous groups could be descried far inland wending their way down from the hills to where the Floating Church lay moored. Men speak of it as a stirring scene when ropes and cables were run out from the beach and the boats were rapidly passed backwards and forwards, conveying the worshippers abroad…”

Plimsoll line of church attendance

The church was, to say the least of it, unusual; but in one respect it was unique. It could estimate the popularity of a preacher instantly and visible.

“The people,” says the record, “Had their own way of testing the esteem in which the different clergymen were held. It was found that for every hundred hearers the vessel sank an inch in the water. They could tell to an inch the popularity of every minister who came.”

The Floating Church was eventually driven ashore in a storm, but continued in use in its beached state until a proper building site was offered by Sir James’s successors in 1869.

Odd fragments are still picked up from time to time on the beach at Strontian, but the last man who worshipped there is long since dead and even the oldest people remember it now only as a broken hulk. It is a faint memory now, though they sometimes point out to strangers the place where it once was moored – a monument to the determination of a parish, and the strangest vessel ever to leave the Clyde.

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