File:Beauly Priory Beauly Inverness Scotland (4974376100).jpg

Looking along the side of the building from Sacristy towards the main entrance.

The small town of Beauly (pronounced BEW-lee; a corruption of Beaulieu - French: beautiful place; Scottish Gaelic: A' Mhanachainn - the monastery), is a town of the Scottish county of Inverness-shire, on the River Beauly, 10 miles west of Inverness by the Far North railway line, and is close to the erstwhile border with the county of Ross-shire (Ross & Cromarty). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauly

Beauly is the nearest town to Beaufort Castle (formerly the ancestral home of the Lords Lovat and Clan seat of the Frasers).

'C'est un beau lieu', from the French what a beautiful place, was Mary Queen of Scots reaction to the grandeur of the scene when she stayed in Beauly in the 16th century, and local tradition credits the naming of the village to her. www.visitbeauly.com/

Beauly Priory was a Valliscaulian monastic community located at "Insula de Achenbady", now Beauly, Inverness-shire. It was probably founded in 1230 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauly_Priory

The founding patron of Beauly priory was Sir John Bisset of the Aird, who lived at Redcastle, about 4 miles to the east. He wished to pay tribute to his King, Alexander II, who's father in law was King John of England, and accordingly renamed the site of the Priory to copy the name given by King John to the Abbey he had founded in 1206 at Beaulieu in the diocese of Winchester. Medieval documents describe the land granted to the Valliscaulian Monks and include as one of the markers, the elm tree which still stands at the entrance to the graveyard, west of the Priory. At eight hundred years, this is believed to be the oldest surviving elm tree in Europe.

The oldest surviving part of the Priory is the south transept which already existed and was a small chapel dedicated to St Katherine, or possibly the Celtic, St Cattan. The monks would have used this chapel until they had constructed the rest of the priory. They followed the Cistercian style of a long rectangular church, with a cloistered area to the south. As the records show that large gifts to the order ceased in 1272 it s probable that the building had been completed by that date.

In 1506 Beauly was raided by folk who were aggrieved by the wealth that the Priory had accumulated. They were excommunicated for their efforts, but the Valliscaulians were persuaded to follow the example of their French counterparts and become members of the Cistercian order.

The reformation in 1560 saw the decline of Beauly, and in 1585, the few remaining brothers dispersed to other houses. After Cromwell has raided the Priory for stones which he shipped downriver to Inverness for his Citadel, the buildings were cared for by the Frasers of Lovat and the Mackenzies of Kintail. In 1901, following the death of the sixth Kenneth Mackenzie, Alexander Ross, the ecclesiastical architect, remodelled the sacristy to form the Mackenzie mausoleum. Beauly Priory has been in the care of the state since 1913 www.scalan.co.uk/Beaulypriory.htm