St. Mungo's Parish Church

The church is named after Saint Mungo (also known as Saint Kentigern), patron saint and founder of the city of Glasgow. It belongs to the Church of Scotland Presbytery of Stirling and serves the parish of Alloa. A chapel dedicated to St Mungo is thought to have been erected during the fourteenth or fifteenth-century, which became dependent upon the Parish of Tullibody. Alloa had grown into a parish in its own right by 1600 when the Act of Assembly united the two parishes. In 1680, the original chapel was rebuilt and enlarged. The current church replaces the old parish church from the seventeenth-century which had been deemed much too small for the congregation for over seventy years and was declared ruinous and unsafe in August 1815. The condition of the old church was so bad that services were often being held in the open air rather than risking injury to the congregation The decision was finally made to abandon the old building and find a site for a new parish church. The Erskine family donated land at Bedford Place and work on the new St Mungo's church began in 1817. The church congregation temporarily worshipped in the Tabernacle until the completion in 1819 of the new church. Since land was judged at the time to have too great a value to the living to be set aside for the dead, no graveyard was planned or added to the new church. The more elaborate scale and design of the new building was intended to reflect the increased size and prosperity of the nineteenth-century congregation. The church was one of the largest in Scotland at the time it was built.