FORT AUGUSTUS, ABBEY OF

Benedictine abbey at the south end of Loch Ness, Diocese of Aberdeen, Scotland; dedicated to St. Benedict. The fort, built by the English (1729) to keep the Highlanders in check after the Jacobite rising (1715) and named after the third son of George II, was abandoned and sold (1867). The new owner, Lord Lovat, offered it to the English Benedictines (1876), who transformed it into the present abbey and school. The foundation was the successor and continuation of the pre-Reformation Scottish abbey at Regensburg, which had become a seminary (1862), and whose last returning monk was a member of the new community, which had ties also with the English abbey at Lamspring, Hanover. The abbey, still part of the English Congregation, has produced several archbishops and bishops. The Priory of St. Andrew (Edinburgh), founded from Fort Augustus in 1930, has since moved to North Berwick. St. Anselm (Washington, D.C.) and St. Gregory (Portsmouth, R.I.) were founded as priories from Fort Augustus, though both are now independent. In 1964 Fort Augustus had 31 priests, three clerics, and 14 brothers; its school, opened in 1878, had 157 boys.

Bibliography: o. blundell, Kilcumein and Fort Augustus (Fort Augustus 1914). m. dilworth, "Two Necrologies of Scottish Benedictine Abbeys in Germany," Innes Review, 9 (1958) 173–203. Fort Augustus Abbey, Past and Present (Fort Augustus 1963). The Catholic Directory for the Clergy and Laity in Scotland, 1964 (Glasgow 1964). o. l. kapsner, A Benedictine Bibliography: An Author-Subject Union List, 2 v. (2d ed. Collegeville, Minn.1962): v. 1, author part; v. 2, subject part, 2:256.

[l. macfarlane]