Background to the John Crane dig of 2022
Saline is a small village in West Fife, close to the county of Clackmannanshire. Our Heritage Society was founded in 2011 by the late John Crane, a local historian, to help celebrate the bi-centenary of the church in 2012. John’s long-held wish was to find the location of our lost medieval church and, being a very active society, we were able to do this with The John Crane Dig of 2022.
The ‘lost’ church
Saline has had more than one church over the centuries – the current one was built in 1810 to replace an earlier one that had fallen into a ruinous state.We knew that this earlier one had to exist somewhere within the village and the challenge was to find it. Documental evidence was sparse but the earliest evidence of a church in Saline can be found in the book written by Alexander Myln in the early 1500s. Myln stated that Bishop Geoffrey (1236-49) gave the church at Saline to assist with the maintenance of the canons residing at Dunkeld, indicating that a
