St Nichola's Church Aberdeen City
Like most Scottish burghs, Aberdeen has many churches. However, in the Middle Ages there was only one burgh kirk, St Nicholas' Kirk, one of Scotland's largest parish churches. Like a number of other Scottish kirks, it was subdivided after the Reformation, in this case into the East and West churches. The large kirkyard of St Nicholas' Kirk is separated from Union Street by a 147 ft (45 m) long Ionic facade, built in 1830. The divided church within, with a central tower and spire, forms one continuous building 220 ft (67 m) in length. It contains the Drum Aisle (the ancient burial-place of the Irvines of Drum Castle) and the Collison Aisle, which divide the two congregations and which formed the transepts of the 12th-century church of St Nicholas (architectural detail survives from this period). The West Church was built in 1775, in the Italian style, on the site of the medieval nave, the East originally in 1834 in Gothic-revival style on the site of the choir. In 1874 a fire destroyed the East Church and the old central tower with its fine peal of nine bells, one of which, Laurence or "Lowrie", was 4 ft ( m) in diameter at the mouth, ft ( m) high and very thick. The church was rebuilt and a massive granite tower erected over the intervening aisles, a new peal of 36 bells, cast in the Netherlands, being installed to commemorate the Victorian jubilee of 1887. These were replaced in 1950 with a carillion of 48 bells, the largest in the UK. Aberdeen, often called The Granite City, is Scotland's third largest city, with a population of 212,125. Aberdeen is the chief commercial centre and seaport in the north-east of Scotland. The city is often referred to as the Oil Capital of Europe thanks to becoming, in the 1970s, a major service base for the extraction of crude oil in the North Sea. The city forms the Aberdeen City unitary council area, and it is surrounded by the Aberdeenshire council area. It mostly stands between the mouths of the rivers Don and Dee.
Size: 3512px × 5288px
Location: , Aberdeen. Grampian Region. Scotland. United Kingdom.
Photo credit: © David Gowans / Alamy / Afripics
License: Royalty Free
Model Released: No
Keywords: architecture, belief, building, centre, christ, christian, christianity, city, clock, congregation, face, faith, god, grampian, house, parish, pray, prayer, preach, region, religon, scotland, spire, stucture, worship
