Qualla: St Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh (Episcopal)

St Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh (Episcopal): Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Artista, CC BY-SA 4.0. Barbara and Mary. The names belong to the two western spires of St Mary's Episcopal Cathedral, sixty-six metres of carved stone each, looking out over Edinburgh's West End. They are also the names of the two unmarried Walker sisters whose bequest paid for the whole cathedral beneath them. Barbara and Mary Walker had inherited the Drumsheugh Estate from their father, an officer of the Court of Exchequer, and the Coates lands their mother brought as a Drummond. When they died, they left it all to a denomination that had been pushed out of Scotland's establishment more than a century before. The result is the only three-spired cathedral in Britain outside Lichfield and Truro, and the tallest building in the Edinburgh urban area.

Image: Michael Artista | CC BY-SA 4.0

St Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh (Episcopal): A Church Pushed Out

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Mebanana at English Wikipedia., Public domain. Scotland's religious history can be hard to follow because the establishment changed hands so many times. In 1633, Edinburgh's medieval St Giles' was raised to cathedral status under Bishop of Edinburgh William Forbes. By 1689, after the Glorious Revolution removed the Catholic-l...

Image: The original uploader was Mebanana at English Wikipedia. | Public domain

St Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh (Episcopal): The Walker Sisters

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephencdickson, CC BY-SA 4.0. Barbara and Mary Walker were the granddaughters of the Reverend George Walker, Episcopal minister of Oldmeldrum from 1734 to 1781. Their father William bought the Coates estate from the Byres family around 1800 and is remembered in the names of William Street and Walker Street, a...

Image: Stephencdickson | CC BY-SA 4.0

St Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh (Episcopal): Scott's Gothic

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Original uploader was StaraBlazkova at cs.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Sir George Gilbert Scott designed the cathedral. He was the leading Gothic Revival architect of Victorian Britain, responsible for the Albert Memorial and the Midland Hotel at St Pancras. The foundation stone went down on 21 May 1874, laid by the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry...

Image: Original uploader was StaraBlazkova at cs.wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

St Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh (Episcopal): Daily Choral Tradition

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Blu ranger, CC BY-SA 4.0. St Mary's is the only cathedral in Scotland to maintain a tradition of daily choral services for most of the year, with choristers drawn from its own choir school. In 1978, under the organist Dennis Townhill, it became the first cathedral in Britain to employ girls in the treble ...

Image: Blu ranger | CC BY-SA 4.0

St Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh (Episcopal): The Paolozzi Window

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Artista, CC BY-SA 4.0. Edinburgh's most modern stained-glass window sits in this Victorian Gothic shell. Eduardo Paolozzi, the sculptor born in Leith to Italian parents in 1924, reworked an existing window as a millennium artwork in vibrant colours that project onto the stonework when the sun hits righ...

Image: Michael Artista | CC BY-SA 4.0

St Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh (Episcopal): Memorials and a Labyrinth

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kim Traynor, CC BY-SA 3.0. Above the nave altar hangs the Lorimer rood cross, designed by Sir Robert Lorimer in 1922 as part of the National War Memorial: a figure of Christ crucified against a background of Flanders poppies, surrounded by golden winged angels. Among the memorials are Captain James Dundas ...

Image: Kim Traynor | CC BY-SA 3.0