A unique opportunity to acquire the world’s only significant provenanced Knights Templar artefacts: Two bells sponsored by an early Templar Master from a Scottish preceptory, including an eighteenth century church with the archaeology from a twelfth century Templar built church.

Since our remarkable discovery in 2020, we have endeavoured to seek new appropriate owners for Holywood Church and its bells.

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We were sold the dilapidated church in 2019, together with its Historic Building Record of two sixteenth century bells, and a conservation and planning proposal for a three-bedroom house conversion.  However, the dream turned into a nightmare thanks to the incompetence and dishonesty of historians, professional services and governmental heritage management.

 

The 1779-built church sits over archaeology remaining from a previous twelfth-century built abbey.  Deep sited voids, filled with ground heated water, cause extreme humidity throughout the building.  Above this archaeology lies the deliberately interred decorative stone from the abbey’s demolished Templar-built church, hidden under the church floors.  The cost of necessary investigation and remedy will be well over a million pounds Sterling.

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For hundreds of years, one of the two church bells was understood to be twelfth century in origin, the other being a confirmed pre-thirteenth century design.  However, all this understanding was wiped away without any consideration by a Victorian historian redefining the bells as sixteenth century, despite evidence to the contrary.  Despite challenge to this re-interpretation by a 1920 government audit, it incompetently allowed the spurious redefinition of the bells’ ages to remain and form the Historic Building Record.  The site was also understood to be a former twelfth century Templar preceptory/infirmary in the early nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, until this understanding was also lost within the unresearched theories presented in Victorian publication, forming the foundation of academic understanding of Holywood Abbey and its bells.

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Since 2021, we, the present owners have fought to have the record of the bells and the site returned to what the evidence offers rather than allow spurious theory presented by Victorian historians stand, simply because it became the ‘accepted’ academic view.  We wished to correct past mistakes and present the truth, so the church and its extraordinary bells may find more appropriate keepers.  However, we have been deliberately obstructed by transparent academic and institutional bias and its reluctance to criticise the academic record, no matter how ill-formed it is.

 

We intended to give the bells the opportunity to be presented in Scotland for the enjoyment of the public.  In turn, hoping to influence the next owner of Holywood Church to invest in its sustainability; to provide both a publicly accessible archaeological project to expose what lies beneath the church and create a signpost to the area’s rich spiritual heritage.  However, following four years of frustration with an establishment doubling down on the mistakes of the past, including a deeply flawed academic philosophy refusing to present authentication or any scholarly counter, and bureaucracy that is beyond redemption - after four years experience of the sheer breadth of prevarication, incompetence, indifference and ignorance placed before us with regards to safeguarding a nation’s heritage, we deem the Scottish authorities not worthy of the bells’ keep for the nation.

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Our patience has been tested.  Our finances exhausted. We have neither the will nor the desire to spend millions of pounds to put matters, mismanaged by former keepers, right—only to maintain the responsibility for some of the most precious medieval artefacts ever found in Scotland.

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With the reality the church can never be our home, we need to seek new owners for the church. Consequently, to allow us to procure agents and sell the church and bells without further misrepresentation, we are currently having to raise finance to raise the profile of our case, and so in turn, raise more money to facilitate objective authoritative authentication of the bells via legal action against the Scottish government.  The government’s agent, Historic Environment Scotland, has deliberately misrepresented the church’s historic building record in terms of its bells; firstly, by an errant understanding, incompetently created by their own audit, then by creating a narrative on the dating of the bells that is not formed from any historical record, but by its own arbitrary view, created to excuse its incompetence and its prejudice against the architects of the discovery.

 

We have lost faith in our dealings with the local community, voluntary, legal, religious, and government sectors, and declare there is obvious disinterest in Holywood’s history and the discovery.  It is in this environment of indifference, well illustrated by behaviours exhibited to our discovery (documented on our website), that we are now seeking to sell the church and its bells.

 

Interrogate our investigation, journals and appeals and you will find only peerless merit revealing the bells’ true provenance, as opposed to previous badly drawn, superficial opinion and speculation, obfuscation and prejudice... allowed to corrupt historical understanding.  Denial of this truth is fostered by intellectual prejudice, cowardness, and fear that the recognition of merit in others will expose the errant nature of academic historical enquiry and the mismanagement of Scotland's heritage sector.

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We appreciate we do not have the immediate support, public and institutional influence or the financial resource to wage an effective campaign.  We also realise others are in a far better position to procure authentication, provide care for the bells and consideration for the church and its attending archaeology.  How these potential new keepers treat the church, in terms of community benefit will no longer be the current owners’ prime concern, other than the retention of their intellectual property regarding the discovery, and their assuredness the bells will find safety in those who have both the resources and appreciation of the bells' extraordinary origins.

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We are open to serious approaches in context of the evidence we present, and this unique opportunity offered within the constraints of authentication the establishment negligently fails to provide.

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To help us determine the serious from the shallow, we ask that any offer is made through authorised and recognised third party agents.  However, you are welcome to ask questions through; info@hiddenhertiage.info

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(Updated 6 October 2025)