3 April 2025

On Sunday, I visited Pittenweem Church to speak to the congregation as Interim-Moderator. I had been preaching elsewhere and entered the kirk just in time for the sermon.  I sat in  a pew looking out at some beautiful stained glass on the south wall of the kirk.

The one featured the ‘Parable of the Sower’  and the other the ‘Stilling of the Storm’. The colour was vivid and the sunshine illuminated the features perfectly. I especially noticed the faces of the characters painted onto the glass.

They reminded me of two windows that were commissioned in Logie Kirk during my ministry. They had each been designed and crafted by John Blyth. However, the windows in Pittenweem were not his although the faces looked like his artistry. They had been designed by William Wilson.

His last commission was in Pittenweem. However, towards the end of his working life, he began to lose his sight as a result of diabetes and had to get a couple of his colleagues to finish the work. One of the two  stained glass artists who completed Wilson’s last commission was John Blyth!

As it happens, John Blyth’s last commission was the Bastable window in Logie Kirk. The Bastables travelled from one community to another with the dodgems. They had an only daughter, Valerie. Unbeknown to her parents, Valerie had just got her HGV license to help her dad drive the lorry.

She didn’t make it. She died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage. The window is in her memory. It features the ‘Parable of the Good Samaritan’ along with special features relating to Valerie – tartan, a red robin, snow. Valerie loved the snow. She died in February and at her burial in the Logie kirkyard, it snowed.