Chapel Ford
Chapel Ford CLS O NO284135 1
Chapel Ford 1855 OS 6 inch 1st edn [beside ‘site of Chapel’]
SSE chapel + SSE ford
The ford is over the Den Burn shortly after it flows out of Collessie Den. The evidence for the existence of the eponymous chapel is very slight. OS 6 inch 1st edn (1855) shows ‘Chapel (site of)’ at NO284136, a very short distance north-west of Chapel Ford. In 1854 the OS Name Book (54, 42) recorded the testimony of Mr Stewart and Mr Melville, both of Collessie, concerning the remains at this site of a small building which they believed to have been a chapel:
The site of a chapel on a small croft of ground belonging to the Mill of Collessie, it was an oblong building of only small dimensions and its out walls and foundations stones a few feet high and large loose blocks were dug up and removed about thirty years ago by Mr Russell the late tenant, and its site put under cultivation, as it is at present. The two first named authorities pointed out the site of this object and the parish minister, the Rev. Mr Williamson, says that it was formerly a Roman Catholic chapel, but when it was built or became a ruin is not known. No human bones or any indications of a graveyard was [sic] ever found around it or near it – about forty years ago, the first named authority found near it an image of the head, neck, and the top of the shoulders of a man. It was of stone, finely carved, with some fragments of guilding [sic] on it. It is supposed to have formerly ornamented some part of the interior of the chapel.
The authors of the later revision of Fasti, published in 1950, note that besides the parish church of Collessie, dedicated to St Andrew, with its altar of St Laurence (for which see CLS Intro., Church Dedication), ‘[o]n a tree-covered eminence north-west of the village there is the site of a chapel, maybe the Chapel of St Thomas, which existed in the parish; and in the vicinity is a passage across the stream called Chapel Ford’ (Fasti viii, 439–40).
The association with St Thomas probably arose from the fact that at the other end of the parish (near Lumquhat CLS) was *St Thomas Land CLS (q.v.).
This place-name appeared in printed volume 4