List of civil parishes in Scotland
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

This is a list of the 871
civil parishes in Scotland Civil parishes are small divisions used for statistical purposes and formerly for local government in Scotland. Civil parishes gained legal functions in 1845 which parochial boards were established to administer the poor law. Their local governme ...
. *The 871 parishes are listed here


Context

From 1845 to 1930, parishes formed part of the
local government Local government is a generic term for the lowest tiers of public administration within a particular sovereign state. This particular usage of the word government refers specifically to a level of administration that is both geographically-loc ...
system of Scotland: having parochial boards from 1845 to 1894, and parish councils from 1894 until 1930. The parishes, which had their origins in the ecclesiastical parishes of the
Church of Scotland The Church of Scotland ( sco, The Kirk o Scotland; gd, Eaglais na h-Alba) is the national church in Scotland. The Church of Scotland was principally shaped by John Knox, in the Reformation of 1560, when it split from the Catholic Church ...
, often overlapped
county A county is a geographic region of a country used for administrative or other purposes Chambers Dictionary, L. Brookes (ed.), 2005, Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd, Edinburgh in certain modern nations. The term is derived from the Old French ...
boundaries, largely because they reflected earlier territorial divisions. In the early 1860s, many parishes which were physically detached from their county were re-allocated to the county by which they were surrounded; some border parishes were transferred to neighbouring counties. This affects the indexing of such things as birth, marriage, and death registrations and other records indexed by county. In 1891, there were further substantial changes to the areas of many parishes, as the boundary commission appointed under the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1889 eliminated many anomalies, and assigned divided parishes to a single county. Parishes have had no direct administrative function since 1930. In that year, all parishes and parts of parishes outside
burgh A burgh is an autonomous municipal corporation in Scotland and Northern England, usually a city, town, or toun in Scots. This type of administrative division existed from the 12th century, when King David I created the first royal burghs. Bur ...
s (technically known as ''landward''), were grouped into districts with elected district councils. These council districts were abolished in 1975, and the new local council authorities established in that year often cut across parish boundaries. In 1996, there was a further reorganisation of Scottish local government, and a number of civil parishes lie in two or more council areas. The counties and county place-names are retained for Land Registrations, Lieutenancy areas, Chambers of Commerce, and various community organizations, although their administrations were taken over by Regional Councils. Civil parishes are still used for some statistical purposes, and separate census figures are published for them. As their areas have been largely unchanged since the 19th century this allows for comparison of population figures over an extended period of time. There have been many variations in the spelling of some parish names over the historical period. In this list the names as used in the reports of the
General Register Office for Scotland The General Register Office for Scotland (GROS) ( gd, Oifis Choitcheann a' ChlĂ raidh na h-Alba) was a non-ministerial directorate of the Scottish Government that administered the registration of births, deaths, marriages, divorces and adop ...
for the 2002 census are used.


List


Modern-day statistics of historic counties

This is determined from the above data.


See also

* List of community council areas in Scotland *
List of Church of Scotland parishes The Church of Scotland, the national church of Scotland, divides the country into Presbyteries, which in turn are subdivided into Parishes, each served by a parish church, usually with its own minister. Unions and readjustments may however re ...
* Local government in Scotland


References


External links


Scottish Civil Parish Maps at ArcGIS
*scotlandsplaces.gov.uk displays parish maps for individual counties, as i
this example of Dumfriesshire parishes.
{{Administrative geography of the United Kingdom ! History of local government in Scotland Administrative divisions of Scotland