St Paul's Episcopal Cathedral, Castlehill, Dundee, Dundee, Dundee

Entry Name: St Paul's Episcopal Cathedral, Castlehill, Dundee

Listing Name: Castle Hill, St Paul's Episcopal Cathedral, Including Steps and Boundary Wall

Listing Date: 12 July 1963

Category: A

Source: Historic Scotland

Source ID: 361138

Historic Scotland Designation Reference: LB24997

Building Class: Cultural

ID on this website: 200361138

Location: Dundee

County: Dundee

Town: Dundee

Electoral Ward: Maryfield

Traditional County: Angus

Tagged with: Gothic Revival Anglican or episcopal cathedral

Description

Sir George Gilbert Scott, 1853. Cruciform-plan, Gothic Revival style cathedral church with canted apse, lateral-gabled aisles and spired entrance tower at (ecclesiastical) W end. Stugged and snecked sandstone rubble with cream ashlar dressings, grey slate roof. Base course, continuous cill course, buttressed aisles and angles; pointed windows with geometric tracery and hoodmoulds, 2-light to apse and chancel, 3-light to lateral gables, 4-light to transepts; ashlar-coped parapet to aisles, sawtooth-coped skews, cross-finials at apse and transepts, weathercock finial to spire. 4-stage tower with vice and cap-house at NE angle.

FRONT (ECCLESIASTICAL W) ELEVATION TO N: tower to centre; multiple-moulded pointed arch doorpiece in pedimented panel with nook shafts, flanked by buttresses terminating with baldacchinos at 2nd stage, 2-light window to centre of 2nd stage with 2 small windows above, corbelled pierced-parapet walks with gargoyles at angles between 2nd and 3rd stages and at wallhead, paired louvred apertures at 3rd stage in recessed panels rising through 4th stage to further large, paired 2-light louvred apertures (also at S and W elevations); set-back

octagonal stone spire with baldacchinos at angles and gabled dormers, lucarnes. Aisles recessed to left and right with 2-light window.

E ELEVATION: 4 aisle gables to right with windows, transept gable to left with window at left return, lower pentice-roofed chapel (organ chamber) at left re-entrant with chancel window above and to left.

W ELEVATION: similar to E elevation.

S (ECCLESIASTICAL E) ELEVATION: canted apse with buttresses and windows to centre, window to pentice-roofed chapels recessed to left and right.

INTERIOR: ashlar entrance porch with rib-vaulted ceiling, paired pointed trefoil-headed doors to nave, single door to vice; ashlar cluster columns and moulded pointed arches to nave, painted plaster walls, timber collar brace roof, ashlar rib-vaulted chancel. Marble altar, cluster columned crocketted pediment with flanking finials, mosaic reredos by Salviati (of Venice); paired marble piscina; marble sedilia with colonettes and pedimented canopies; marble tomb of Bishop Forbes with supine figure and pedimented canopy. Pulpit with decoratively carved timber sounding board; ashlar font incorporating parts of a font from Lindores Abbey, Fife. Lady chapel has marble dado and altar removed here from the former St Paul's Chapel in Castle

Street (also listed), later mosaic reredos; St Roque's chapel altar

and reredos removed here from the former St Roque's Church, lackscroft. 3-manual organ by Hill and Son, London, 1865. Stained glass windows by Hardman of Birmingham, Scott and Draper of Carlisle, and Gibbs of London. Armoir incorporating carved panels originating from Lindores Abbey. Various memorials, including a plaque commemorating Patrick Chalmers, and his father James Chalmers, a stationer of Castle Street who invented the adhesive postage stamp. (See NOTES at 10 Castle

Street).

STEPS AND BOUNDARY WALL: flight of steps with coped flanking walls to main entrance; coped rubble boundary wall adjoining similar wall to Castle Hill House at E, with plaque recording the site of Dundee Castle, and events connected with William Wallace, the Chevalier de St George, and Admiral Duncan.

Statement of Interest

St Paul's Cathedral is an ecclesiastical building in use as such, built for the high churchman Bishop Alexander Penrose Forbes on the castle rock of the medieval castle of Dundee.

External Links

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