My focus for this brief survey of the development of Church institutions in south-west Scotland is the region now known as Dumfries and Galloway, and the period under consideration is the early eighth to the tenth centuries AD. I have taken wide liberties with the lack of documentary evidence and the almost complete lack of archaeological evidence for the physical presence of an organised church in this region during this period. I turn instead to the place-names and the scant surface remains in the large number of deserted and partly abandoned churchyards throughout the area. In order to make sense of these scarce resources I also call on the work of Daphne Brooke in her discussions of the mediaeval arrangements for the parishes in both Galloway and Carrick (Brooke 1987, 1991a, 1991b), Geoffrey Barrow in tracing the significance of the placenames in ‘eccles’ in south-east Scotland and the existence of the small ‘scir’ in the administrative arrangements of the northern territories of the Anglian kingdoms (Barrow 1973, 1980) and Steve Driscoll for the archaeological survey of the power centres of both local chiefdoms and thanages in Scotland (Driscoll 1991, 1998).

I take some previous assumptions with a generous pinch of salt, especially those concerning the antiquity of church dedications, circular churchyards and land boundaries. The indications of an early foundation suggested by dedications to early saints of both the Celtic and Roman churches have proved to be of little use. An example is the list of dedications to St Kentigern in Dumfries and in present-day Cumbria. Many of the churches in Annandale have been associated with this saint in the medieval period and some of these appear in the list of lands thought to have belonged to the see of Glasgow. The list of names of the land holdings which the see of Glasgow thought ought to be rendered back to them as of ancient right in the twelfth century is, almost certainly, a bogus claim (REG, 4–7). This claim is reinforced in the twelfth-century biography of St Kentigern by the monk Joscelyn of Furness, a biography drawn from at least two earlier narratives, which might seem to add a legitimacy to the fabulous foundation of the see of Glasgow (Vitae, 32–119). The dedications are a more reliable source for the situation during the twelfth century, rather than the sixth.