What is now a churchyard was originally the church itself. Our Lady of the Snows derives from Bishop Elphinstone’s veneration of the Virgin Mary and his familiarity with the second-ranking church in Rome – Sancta Maria Maggiore ad Nives. There is a chapel at Corgarff, still in use, named for the same miracle of snow in a Roman August. So much for the name, which has come down through five centuries as the Snow Kirk.
It was built as the parish church of Old Aberdeen so that the Cathedral and King’s College Chapel could be left free for more ceremonial functions. The relationship can be described in terms of bells. St Machar boasted a peal of 14; King’s began with 15 but relinquished two of the smaller ones to the Snow. Sundays and feast days must have been joyful with these many chimes. Only the two Snow bells were popularly identified by name: ‘Schochtmadony’ meaning pull Modanus (a local saint whose name is in Pitmedden) and ‘Skellat’, which simply means a small bell.
Although built as a parish church, the Snow lost that function when its congregation was merged with St Machar’s in 1499. Although intended for students it continued to draw local people to worship, so that the merger had to be proclaimed again some eighty years later. The Rector of Snow was the University Grammarian who taught Canon Law as well as Latin. His position was described in the University’s founding charter:
‘Foreseeing and knowing that the fruits of the said church will be slender ... every student in our said new College shall pay to the Rector of St Mary and his successors ... at the Paschal feast four pence: and with the poor [students] the said rector or vicar shall compound amicably.’ In return for his church’s slender endowment the rector said mass once a year for the souls of King James IV and Bishop Elphinstone.
The building’s plain appearance and reputation caused Protestant Reformers to ignore it when the Angus men marched north to assail St Machar’s. Quarter of a century after Edinburgh’s Reformation Parliament the congregation had to be placed more firmly under Kirk control, along with their neighbours from further up the road to Aberdeen:
‘The parochinneris of Snaw and Spittal be compellit to resort to the said kirk of Machar to heir thair the evangel preichit, the sacraments ministrat and discipline exercisit, as their awin proper parochin in time to cum ... with power to the said college of Aberdene to dimoleishe and tak doun the ruinous walls and tymber of the present kirkis of Snaw and Spittal now abusit to superstition and idolatrie.’
Catholic worship survived in an area where many influential people, starting with the Marquis of Huntly, were none too keen to carry through the intentions of southern politicians. And whatever state the Spital’s church may have been in, the Snow was far from ruinous in the illustration of 1688. By then, however, the state of the walls was less important to the ‘Aulton folk’ than what had become hallowed as a place ‘within the whilk their friends and foirfathers were buried’.
Burying was controversial. Edicts of the local authority give us an idea of the battle for hearts and minds which went on for more than a century after Mary Queen of Scots was executed. Aberdeen Burgh Council repeatedly sought to limit the number of people attending funeral wakes, and to deny the bereaved family’s right to offer hospitality: the sweetmeats known as ‘drogues’ were banned, along with desserts, but it was the liberal offering of strong drink on these occasions which really offended the burgesses.
Seventeenth-century Presbyterians regarded all burial services as ‘popish’, and more so when they took place by torchlight. The authorities took strong exception to the night-time burial at the town’s kirk (St Nicholas) of the Laird of Drum’s daughter. The Irvines of Drum were prominent papists. Thirty-five years later (in 1705) the pressure was still on to discard old customs when the Council demanded ‘from each person who shall burn incense or perfume at the burial of their friends in church £4 Scots, or in the churchyard 40/- Scots’. As in medieval times, the gentry were buried indoors and commemorated by armorial monuments, while ordinary people lay in unmarked graves outside. In 1671 King’s College started to charge £8 for the Snow Church and ‘ane dollar’ for the cemetery beyond the walls.
No record of burials exists prior to 1776, but by the beginning of last century (when the charge was 13/4 for burial - within the walls only) 160 names were registered. All but 13 date from before 1880, and the graveyard was declared full in 1934 when an 85-year-old spinster was buried alongside her parents. Fraser the librarian, making an exception of the Pitfodels stone, dismissed the rest as having ‘singularly uninteresting inscriptions’.
The members of Aberdeen’s family history society, currently undertaking a graveyard survey of north-east Scotland, would probably disagree. Bulloch’s discovery, through King’s College, of a Catholic record of burials made all the difference. This remarkable document can be consulted in the April 1906 issue of Scottish Notes and Queries. It is remarkable for the way it gives meaning to stones and even to unmarked graves. There can be nothing like it in north-east Scotland. One of the earliest recorded interments was that of Bishop James Grant. Previous bishops had been buried inside a roofless chapel near Fochabers, but he died in the Castlegate of Aberdeen. Bishop John Geddes, who shares the grave, suffered years of painful paralysis in the same house before his death in the last year of the eighteenth century. His nephew Charles, who was to win the affection of Aberdonians as ‘Priest’ Gordon, nursed him through the last stages:
Background Photo © Martyn Gorman (cc-by-sa/2.0)