The Earliest Part of the Cathedral
The Eastern Limb

One of the best ways of gaining a first idea of how a complex medieval building grew is to look at the moulded base courses which run around the bottom of its walls. This was necessarily the first feature of each part to be laid out, and successive masons working on a building tended to use their own preferred types in the parts for which they were responsible. At Dunkeld there were five types of base course.

The first of them underlies the eastern limb and the eastern walls of the nave aisles, which shows that there was an intention to start work on rebuilding the nave at the time the eastern limb was begun. The second runs around the rest of the nave, and the others around the chapter house, the tower and the south porch.

It is possible to date most of these phases of the work from what we are told by Abbot Myln, though, as has been said, Myln appears to be largely mistaken about the date of the eastern limb. The architectural details of the finely designed wall arcade, which runs along its north and part of its east wall, point to a date around the middle decades of the thirteenth century for this feature. The arches of this arcade are of the type known as trifoliate (three-lobed), and most of its capital have had the sort of foliage known as stiff leaf - with deeply undercut three-sprigged leaves — although the majority of the foliage has been broken off.

Arcading like this was often used in the thirteenth century simply as a form of architectural enrichment, as in the nave aisles of Holyrood Abbey. It is possible, though, that at Dunkeld some of the arches were originally intended to serve as recessed seats for the use of the canons during their long services.

Work on the eastern limb seems to have continued over an extended period and it is unfortunate that, since many of the details which would have helped us to place a date on the building were replaced in the course of restorations in 1762 and 1814, we cannot be sure just how extended it was. Nevertheless, we can see from the great size of its windows - in which the tracery is modern - that the continuing work was in the same tradition which also produced the eastern limb of Dunblane Cathedral in the later thirteenth century. Similarly the detail of the arches which frame the windows — so far as it is reliable — is also essentially of the type which was in use around that time.

Considered together this suggests that most of the eastern limb was rebuilt from the mid to the later thirteenth century, and that the total rebuilding by Bishop William Sinclair (1309—37) which Myin tells us about must be an exaggeration. But a feature which does appear likely to be the work of Sinclair is the sedilia inserted in the south wall of the presbytery area, since their mouldings are of a later type than those of the windows. These three recessed and arched seats were provided for the priest and his assistants who were celebrating mass at the high altar to sit upon at certain parts of the service. They serve as a reminder of the great richness of liturgical furnishings which were once provided around the high altar.

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