Oban St John the Divine Cathedral

Our story in Oban begins with the Victorians, though the Episcopal Church has a long and momentous history in the West Highlands, tracing its history back through the Jacobite times, in which the Episcopal Church took a prominent part and for which it suffered severely, through the medieval period back to the Celtic Church, whose principal saints are commemorated in the names of the Cathedral Choir Stalls.

St Johns congregation was first gathered in 1846, when Oban was only a village and the present site was open fields. The middle zone of the Cathedral was completed in 1864. Two local lairds, MacDougall of Dunollie and Campbell of Dunstaffnage, were crucial to the project of starting a building, and both the families are still connected with the congregation. 

In 1882 a south aisle was added. Bishop Chinnery-Haldane had plans underway for a new church building in Oban, and on his premature death in 1906 the congregation was encouraged to build a new church as his memorial. Plans for a large church of Cathedral proportions to be funded mainly from the Bishops own family, including the cost of the magnificent reredos behind the high altar. Work finished when funds were exhausted in August 1910, and by then only the sanctuary, chancel, one transept and one bay of the nave were completed. The building has remained incomplete ever since, despite two major campaigns to rebuild or complete it. In 1920 it became a Cathedral. In 1988 the high structure was stabilised after 80 years of settlement and pressures, not the least being the noise of Concordes trial flights, which were in part monitored by movement to the Cathedral structure, which lay below the flight path. These last works were financed largely by the residuary bequest.