Did you know… ..that the Manse in Cairneyhill was once a Seminary for Young Ladies? by Elaine Campbell Mrs More was the wife of the Rev John More and they ran a residential school in the Cairneyhill Manse from the 1830’s until the 1860’s. The pupils came from all over Scotland and abroad. The census records of that time show the manse had around 12 students in residence. The Seminary was well known in the district and not always for its educational achievements. Daniel Thomson in his ‘Anent Dunfermline’ gives an account of an incident in the vicinity of the school regarding the Rev Thomas Smith of the UP Chapel in the Maygate. One day in 1839, the Rev Smith disappeared in a western direction towards the village of Cairneyhill where the girls from the Seminary were a feature in the village. “On this particular day of Smith’s transit, a number of these Seminary lovelies were on ‘out lease’ and enjoying themselves in the ‘twa staney acre’ in front of the two houses constituting ‘Thimble Ha’ – where lived the steady-going, sober-minded John Bruce, elder in the kirk and weaver…….. Smith having got a dram, had gone to a livery stable in Dunfermline, hired a horse and made up his mind he would ride west and see the girls at Cairneyhill – he had enjoyed their company before. He dashed along by Pittencrieff Street, through the Cut down Kate Simpson’s Brae,…
Burns and the Abbey’s Black Stool
by Dr Jean Barclay DID YOU KNOW…. that Robert Burns once rebuked his friend on the Abbey`s Black Stool? The Ministers and Elders of the various Kirk Sessions of The Church of Scotland were hot on immorality and their answer to fornication outside marriage was to rebuke the offenders on the `black stool` before the Congregation on the Sabbath, as many times as deemed necessary to bring about repentance. For some intransigent individuals this might mean Sunday after humiliating Sunday. We all know that Robert Burns liked the ladies and it is on record that he had to appear before the congregation in his native Ayrshire on more than one occasion. According to biographical accounts, in 1787 when Burns was 28, he visited Dunfermline with a friend and, patriot that he was, when shown Bruce`s grave in the Old Kirk he knelt down and kissed the stone. Then Burns got his friend to mount the black stool and, having climbed into the pulpit opposite, he harangued him in the way that he remembered from his wild West Coast youth. Above there is a painting by David Allan, supposedly (according to Henderson in his Annals, p. 517)`representing a real occasion of this sort as it took place in this Church in the time of the Erskines`. (Given that Allan was not born when Ralph Erskine seceded from the Abbey, `representation` is the right word!) But on the question of moral backsliding, how times have changed!