St Margaret's Episcopal Church and Burial Ground, Aberlour

St Margaret's Church is a church of the Scottish Episcopal Church near the village of Aberlour, in the Speyside district of Moray in north-east Scotland. A large and richly decorated Gothic church of pink granite, set in a secluded woodland at the end of a long drive uphill from the village High Street, it is one of the finest Episcopal churches in the region — a Category A listed building, lavishly fitted with polished granite columns, marble furnishings and glowing stained glass. Built in the 1870s as the chapel of an orphanage, it carries a history that is both inspiring and, in its origins, troubling, for the fortune that paid for it came ultimately from the profits of slavery.

The church was built between 1875 and 1879 to the designs of the prolific Inverness architect Alexander Ross, and was largely paid for by Margaret Macpherson Grant, one of the wealthiest women in Victorian Scotland. She had inherited a large fortune from her uncle Alexander Grant, a merchant and planter who had grown rich in Jamaica as a slave-owner — a source of wealth that the church's own history now openly acknowledges, and that places St Margaret's within the wider reckoning of how slavery money shaped Britain. Margaret Macpherson Grant used part of her inheritance for philanthropic purposes, founding an orphanage in Aberlour, and St Margaret's was built as the chapel for that orphanage. The orphanage itself has since been demolished — its work continues today through the Aberlour Child Care Trust, one of Scotland's leading children's charities — but the church survives and continues to be used for weekly services.

Architecturally, St Margaret's is a large cruciform church in the Gothic style, built of tooled pink granite with contrasting ashlar detailing, beautifully sited among trees. It has a tall five-bay nave, oriented east to west, with a steeply pitched slate roof and lean-to side aisles; the west gable is filled with a four-light window of geometric Gothic tracery. A chancel, narrower and shorter than the nave, projects from the east end, its gable lit by lancet windows beneath a continuous hood mould, and there are north and south transepts, each buttressed and lit by tall lancets. At the south-west corner rises a slender octagonal spire incorporating a belfry and topped with copper, beside a large gabled porch that forms the main entrance. The porch's arched doorway is inscribed with the words "This is none other but the house of God", and above it a niche holds a statue of St Margaret, while the arch is carried on columns with ornately carved capitals — a richly wrought welcome to the church.

The interior is as lavish as the exterior promises. The arcades that separate the nave from its aisles are carried on thick columns of polished pink granite, with octagonal ashlar bases and ornately carved sandstone capitals by the firm of Dawson & Strachan, and the central aisle has a decorative tiled floor. The church is fitted with marble chancel furniture and is filled with many stained-glass windows depicting saints and biblical scenes, while the nave is lined with wooden pews with carved ends. The overall effect is one of unexpected richness and quality, far grander than might be expected of a village church — a reflection of the great wealth that built it.

The burial ground that surrounds the church is partially walled and entered through a pair of rubble gate piers. It holds a poignant link to the vanished orphanage: three of the orphanage's foundation stones were preserved here when the building was demolished, together with a war memorial dedicated to the boys of the orphanage who died in the First and Second World Wars — a moving reminder of the children whose home the church once served, and who went out from Aberlour to fight and die in the great wars of the twentieth century.

St Margaret's stands above Charlestown of Aberlour, a handsome planned village on the banks of the River Spey in the heart of Speyside, the most famous whisky-producing region in the world. The Aberlour distillery, the home of Walkers shortbread, the Speyside Way long-distance footpath that follows the river, and the salmon pools and wooded banks of the Spey all lie close by, while the surrounding countryside of Moray — with its distilleries, castles and the Cairngorms National Park to the south — offers some of the most beautiful scenery in Scotland.

From the fortune of a Jamaican slave-owner, transformed through the philanthropy of his heiress Margaret Macpherson Grant into an orphanage and its chapel, through Alexander Ross's richly decorated Gothic church of pink granite and its glowing interior, to the foundation stones and war memorial of the vanished orphanage in its burial ground, St Margaret's Church gathers a complex and moving history into one building above the Spey. A Category A listed church still serving its Episcopal congregation, it remains a place of worship and of memory in the heart of Speyside — beautiful, generous and honest about the troubled origins of the wealth that built it.