Dunkeld Cathedral, despite its fortunate state of structural completeness, now gives little impression of its original finished appearance. We should remember that, to provide a fitting setting for the services of a great church, costly furnishing and vestments were required, in all of which colour played a very important part. Some of this colour is still present in the surviving paintings, although it was probably in the long-vanished stained glass windows which several of the bishops provided that the colours were richest.

Two items of furnishing do still survive: the sedilia in the presbytery have already been mentioned, and in the chapel at the east end of the south aisle is a piscina, in which the vessels used at a mass at that altar could be washed. We also have traces of some of the timber screens which subdivided the church, and we know that the screen cutting off the choir from the nave that the front of its gallery had paintings of the apostles on one side, and pictures of kings, bishops and benefactors on the other.

Yet these represent no more then a tiny proportion of the original furnishings of the cathedral, and it is only when we read Myln’s account that we gain an idea of all that has been lost, flanking the high altar, for example, were pillars capped by angels, from which curtains probably hung. Rising behind it was an altarpiece showing twenty four of the miracles of St Columba, to whom the cathedral was dedicated. In front of the altar were two great brass lecterns from which the epistles and gospels were read.

Many of these were the gifts of Bishops Lauder (1452—75) and Brown (1483—1515). Lauder’s many gifts also included new stalls for the canons and the vicars choral. These stalls, which probably had lofty canopies, would have extended down the two sides of their choir and turned at right angles against the choir screen, leaving space for a central processional doorway. They would have covered much of the thirteenth century wall arcade, and perhaps necessitated the destruction of some of its carved foliage on the capitals. Lauder also provided many precious vessels for use at the high altar, as well as silver censers and a crucifix believed to contain a fragment of the true cross.

Amongst Brown’s benefactions was a tabernacle for the high altar which was bought in the Low Countries at a cost of £46.5s. The word tabernacle was usually applied to an elaborately carved and painted furnishing which rose from the back of an altar. Since Dunkeld already had one of those for its high altar, however, in this case it could have been a canopy designed to be suspended above the altar.

The many other altars in the church would also have been richly furnished, and there are traces in the chapels at the aisle ends of the nave of where decorated altarpieces were fastened to the walls. The two important altars which stood in front of the choir screen were possibly dedicated to St Michael and St Martin, since Bishop Brown is said to have renewed the altars with those dedications at the same time that he rebuilt the screen. Of the several others Brown founded, one was at the west end of the north aisle. To light it adequately he had a new window cut into the outer wall, above which he placed a heraldic plaque with his own arms. This chapel was probably the one he provided in 1514 as a setting for prayers to the Virgin for delivery from eternal damnation.

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