Circular tower contains many secrets of the past
A round tower on a Renfrewshire country estate is the rocky repository of secrets 2,000-yearsold.
To most people, the enigmatic edifice is simply a dovecote – but it’s infinitely more than a pigeons’ roosting place.
The mysterious building signifies the site’s historic links with the Knights Templar, those warrior monks, who dominated medieval Europe for two centuries before being suppressed 700 years ago, on Black Friday, October 13, 1307, by French King Philip IV and Pope Clement V.
Surviving Templars found refuge in sanctuaries like Scotland where their religious beliefs live on today in sacred architecture like the 50-feet-high round tower.
The columbarium – the word derives from Latin, ‘columba’ meaning ‘dove’ – stands among trees in Milliken estate between Paisley and Johnstone, which is named after St John the Baptist, the beheaded martyr, venerated by the Templars.
The circular tower is shaped like ancient
Templar churches.
In sacred geometry the circle, with no beginning and no end, symbolises the eternity of God. The Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, where Christ was buried and the Knights Templar were founded in 1118, was circular in shape.
The circle symbolises the world’s spherical shape and its elliptical journey round the ring of the sun.
Inside the columbarium is an awesome spectacle imbued with profound spirituality.
Carved into the wall are 1,000 square neuks for roosting doves. In Christian symbolism, the dove represents the Holy Spirit while 1,000 is a sacred number.
The millennial number evokes the powerful passage in the Book of Revelation where its author, St John the Divine, has a vision of ‘the souls of them that were beheaded for Jesus and who never worshipped the beast, nor had his mark on their foreheads or hands. And they lived and reigned with Christ for 1000 years.’
Belief in this doctrine – known as millenarianism and declared heretical by fourth century Pope St Damasus – was one reason why the Templars were persecuted.
The Knights applied millenarian teachings to themselves and their hero, John the Baptist, who were all decapitated martyrs for Christ.
But millenarian beliefs were only forced underground.
They are proclaimed today in rural Renfrewshire at the round tower with 1,000 sanctuaries for the doves of the Holy Spirit.