The older religious community at Deer was small - never more than fifteen souls - and Scottish to its core. Tradition, recorded in the margins of the Book of Deer itself, claimed it had been founded centuries earlier by Saint Columba and his disciple Saint Drostan. The marginal notitiae list grants of land made to the Deer monks through the twelfth century by local lords, in a Gaelic prose that has since become the oldest substantial witness to the spoken language of the period. When the Cistercians arrived in 1219 to found a new abbey two miles westward, on lands granted by William Comyn, jure uxoris Earl of Buchan, the old Scottish community was absorbed into the new foundation. The book travelled with them, or was left behind, and eventually found its way south to Cambridge.

William Comyn brought his Cistercian monks from Kinloss Abbey, near Elgin on the Moray coast, to staff the new abbey at Deer. The Cistercians were the reformers of European monasticism - white-habited, austere, agricultural, the order of Bernard of Clairvaux that had reshaped western Christianity in the previous century. They specialised in settling marginal land and bringing it into careful cultivation. Buchan in 1219 was that kind of land: under-farmed, forested in patches, far from royal centres. Deer Abbey was dedicated to the Blessed Virgin and never grew large - the community stayed at fifteen monks or fewer through most of its history. William Comyn himself was buried in the abbey he had founded, and his son Alexander Comyn, Earl of Buchan, lies here too, along with a younger Alexander who died in 1308 at Inverurie fighting against Robert the Bruce.

The Reformation took the Cistercians out of Deer. The abbey was turned into a secular lordship in 1587 for Commendator Robert Keith II, who became Lord Altrie, and the religious community ended. Two centuries later, in 1766, the abbey lands passed to James Ferguson, Lord Pitfour, advocate and judge. His son the third laird built a five-metre enclosing wall around the ruins in 1809 and used the abbey grounds as an orchard - apples and pears trained against medieval stone. A four-columned Doric portico was salvaged from an earlier family mausoleum and grafted onto the site. The mausoleum itself was removed in the 1930s and parts of it repurposed as an entrance, though the graves of Lady Langford and Eliza Ferguson within were carefully left undisturbed.

The Pitfour mansion house that once oversaw the abbey ruins was in such poor repair by the early twentieth century that it was demolished. Much of its stone, by local tradition, was carted off to build council housing in Aberdeen, twenty-eight miles to the south. The abbey itself is now in the care of Historic Environment Scotland and is open to visitors free of charge. The footings of the church and cloister can be traced through the grass. There is considerable evidence of much earlier human presence in the area: the Catto Long Barrow and clusters of tumuli lie to the south, marking burials from millennia before the Cistercians ever arrived. And in Cambridge, the Book of Deer sits in a climate-controlled case, with its eleventh-century Latin gospels and its twelfth-century marginal Gaelic, written by monks in this windy patch of Buchan when the Cistercians were a Continental rumour and Deer was still its own kind of Scottish house.