So what was his connection with Glengairn? Many dedications of churches were made to St Kentigern all over Scotland and by the 15th century St Mungo had become one of the major Saints of Scotland. In 1449 Glasgow Cathedral was described as “the most stately among cathedrals in Scotland in which the bodies of many saints especially St Kentigern repose”. It would not have been unusual for the country church at Glengairn to have been dedicated at an early date to this most important Scottish saint. There certainly was a church of that name. Its ruins stand near the point where the river Gairn joins the river Dee about a mile west of the old Ballater railway station, and can be reached either by driving to the road bridge which crosses the Gairn where just before the bridge a steep road goes down to the left and the car can be parked beside the church near some farm buildings: or, more interestingly, by walking from the old Ballater railway station westwards along the track formed to take the railway to Braemar. Immediately before the track would have crossed the Gairn you will see the ruin of the pre-Reformation c hurch of St Kentigern on your left. Part of the east gable and most of the south wall remain, but the rest is in ruins, and as is usual in many pre- Reformation churches, the graveyard has moved into the nave. There must have been a settlement near the church, but signs of it are not visible. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Catholic population withdrew up Glengairn and there is the remains of a church up there which is sometimes mistaken for the original St Kentigern’s but is in fact a church used by the Catholics of Glengairn during the post Reformation period right up to the late eighteenth century.

There is evidence of a cult of St Mungo surviving up to the early nineteenth century. In 1892 a Mrs McKenzie in Laggan in Glengairn gave an account of her youth which includes the following paragraph:- “People were afraid not to go and celebrate the feast o’ St Mungo at Foot o’ Gairn because if they didn’t go, there was a saying that they wadna live till next year. There is a well at Foot o’ Gairn called St Mungo’s. The fair held on the hillside near Abergairn was known as Fel McCha The district was dedicated to St Mungo. Every church had a saint’s name and a holiday”.

“Fel” is Gaelic for “fair”, but who or what is McCha? There is a school of thought which maintains that McCha or Mo Cha as it is sometimes written is Machar. Professor Colm O’Boyle of Aberdeen University suggests albeit tentatively that the Brythonic name Cunotigerno may have metamorphosed into MoCho or MoCha or MoChu by the common practice of the day namely that first the possessive Mo or Ma (my) was added at the front, and then all but the first syllable of Cunotigerno is dropped (as in Al for Alexander) to give MoChu. And with nasalisation that became Mungo. And then O’Boyle argues that in Gaelic the second vowel –u would normally be very unclear so –a is a possible variant giving Mocha or Macha which with the stress on the second syllable is not all that far from Machar! Furthermore, in some local histories of Glengairn Mungo was called Mocha.

So, what are we to make of this? If we accept the arguments, we must conclude that Mungo and Machar are variants of the same name the one through the Brythnic language route, and the other through the Gaelic language. And furthermore, the evidence for the very existence of St Machar has come under scrutiny. The traditional story of his being sent to the Picts by St Columba with instructions to build a church where a river formed the shape of a crozier does not appear until the date of the Aberdeen Breviary in the late 15th century. There is no mention of St Machar in any of the biographies of St Columba There is no evidence that either St Mungo or St Machar ever went to Glengairn, but both were honoured there, Mungo in the name of the annual fair and in the name of the church (Kentigern) and Machar’s name was used in the Confiteor (prayer of public confession) in Glengairn. If we don’t accept the arguments, then two separate saints have been honoured there.