The Chapel of St. Mary and St. Nathalan is a ruined chapel overlooking the North Sea immediately north of Stonehaven. The founding of this Christian place of worship is associated with St. Nathalan, who lived circa 650 AD. It was dedicated in 1276 by William Wishart, Bishop of St Andrews, and probably stands on the same site as St Nathalan’s early church. The chapel was never a parish church but was included within the parish of Fetteresso. Several Scottish monarchs, in particular James IV, frequently worshipped here and gave generous donations to the chapel.
The chapel is at the point where the Highland Boundary Fault meets the sea and so is on the dividing line between the highlands and lowlands of Scotland. The Chapel of St. Mary and St. Nathalan is one of the oldest surviving structures in Kincardineshire.
References:The Pilgrimage Church of Wies (Wieskirche) is an oval rococo church, designed in the late 1740s by Dominikus Zimmermann. It is located in the foothills of the Alps in the municipality of Steingaden.
The sanctuary of Wies is a pilgrimage church extraordinarily well-preserved in the beautiful setting of an Alpine valley, and is a perfect masterpiece of Rococo art and creative genius, as well as an exceptional testimony to a civilization that has disappeared.
The hamlet of Wies, in 1738, is said to have been the setting of a miracle in which tears were seen on a simple wooden figure of Christ mounted on a column that was no longer venerated by the Premonstratensian monks of the Abbey. A wooden chapel constructed in the fields housed the miraculous statue for some time. However, pilgrims from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and even Italy became so numerous that the Abbot of the Premonstratensians of Steingaden decided to construct a splendid sanctuary.