Visitors who know the Abbey will at once be struck by the newly exposed mediaeval foundations on the North side of our Nave.
Previously these were all but buried under rubble, and bushes, and grass.
Now the site of the Pluscarden Nave can more clearly be seen, as placed in 1230 by King Alexander II. Its line of dressed foundation stones is remarkably intact.
Much of the rubble that has been moved is of interest.
Among the stones are various carved pieces, including bits of window tracery, and part of what seems once to have been a nave pillar. A row of these would have stood on the South side, where the public toilets are now situated, marking out a processional Aisle on the South of the Nave.
The opening to the clerestory passageway over this Aisle can still clearly be seen, together with a magnificent narrow arch (currently boarded up) marking its entrance from the South Transept.
Large windows above the South Nave Aisle would have allowed light to flood in.
A blocked off doorway in the West Transept wall shows where a much more modest aisle would once have run alongside the North of the Nave.
Most likely the Nave would have been severely damaged in the attack by the Wolf of Badenoch in 1390.
When the Benedictines reconstructed the damaged Church buildings from 1454, probably they simply abandoned the Nave, sealing off almost the whole of the West wall of the Transept with rubble fill.
Monastic life came to an end following the 1560 Reformation Parliament, and our Church ceased to have any function, other than as an animal enclosure, or picturesque ruin. Since the main entrance to the Priory ruins was from the West, not the East as now, during those centuries local folk would have come to cart off quantities of building material, in the first place from the Nave site, for their own use.
The stones, previously buried, that once stood as the foundation of the ornate West doorway of the Nave can also still be seen, just opposite the shop. They await more clear marking for the sake of visitors.
