Finding St Peter’s is not straightforward. I approach the wrong way, driving up a pot-holed farm track between a golf club and a wood until a fly-tipped sofa blocks my way. Beyond the sofa, behind padlocked security fencing, stands an old stone bridge. Someone has sprayed ‘Go Home’ on the pillar. I prowl through the wood, hoping to find a way in, and scramble across a gorge to the rear edge of the building. More security fencing, through which I see tantalising glimpses of brutal, and brutalised, architecture. Two workmen appear, dressed like crime-scene investigators in blue hooded overalls, and I lean nonchalantly against the fence and talk about the site. I propose a quick tour of the interior but receive an emphatic response, ‘Not a chance, hen.’ They disappear and I am left behind the fence, looking at Scotland’s greatest modern building from a distance.
St Peter’s Seminary is both the country’s most important 20th-century structure and its most embarrassing architectural story.
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