St. Triduana's Well, Restalrig

Image: © kim traynor Taken: 5 Dec 2009

The building in front of the kirk dates from the 1460s-70s when James III founded a collegiate chapel whose priests were to say masses for him. Only the lower of two storeys survived it falling victim to the Reformation ordinance that as a "monument to idolatrie" it should be "raysit and utterlie castin downe and destroyed". The surviving chamber continued in use as a burial vault. During later restoration its propensity to flood led to the realisation that this was St. Triduana's Well, famed as a place of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages. Before the Reformation the chapel had housed an altar dedicated to the obscure Pictish female saint who was credited with the ability to cure the blind. Pilgrims with eye afflictions came here to bathe their eyes in the hope of a miraculous cure. The chapel was extensively restored in 1836, and again in 1906 when the present roof was added. "The ministers and commissioners forsaids being assemblit, finds that the ministrie of the word and sacraments of God, and assemblie of the peiple of the whole parochin of Restalring, be within the kirk of Leith; and that the kirk of Restalring, as a monument of idolatrie, be raysit and utterlie castin downe and destroyed." -- General Assembly, 21 December, 1560

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