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Trust restores derelict hill-top Roman Catholic chapel

A derelict Highland chapel where Australia’s first potential saint once worshipped has been given a new lease of life.

A charitable trust has turned back the pages of history and restored the hill-top St Columba’s Roman Catholic Chapel to its condition when first completed in the mid-1840s.

It is just over a year ago that Derek Lewis, former director general of England’s prison service and Home Office adviser, launched the St Columba’s Drimnin Trust. Mr Lewis, who also has a home in Brentwood, Essex, wants to restore the chapel as a place for non-denominational Christian worship and as a centre for music and the arts. The B-listed ruinous chapel on the Morvern peninsula overlooking the Sound of Mull had come with the 5,000-acre Drimnin Estate, which he bought around 2003.

It had been a place of worship for Blessed Mother Mary MacKillop, whose parents emigrated from Nether Lochaber to Australia where she was born, but who returned to Scotland in 1873 after founding convents and schools. In 1995 she was beatified by the then Pope at a ceremony in Sydney and there are now calls for her to be made Australia’s first saint.

Full story at the Aberdeen Press & Journal.