The Old High Church is the oldest church in Inverness and stands on a low hill known as St Michael’s Mount. The present church was begun in 1770 to a design by George Fraser of Edinburgh but tradition says that St Columba preached from this hill by the banks of the River Ness in AD 565.

According to tradition, St Columba converted the Pictish king Brude to Christianity, and Brude gave him a plot of land on St Michael’s Mount to build a church. Columba’s church would have been a simple wooden structure and no trace of it remains today.

There have been several churches on the site since Columba’s day, but the first documented reference comes from a charter of William the Lion in 1171. In 1199 the king granted the ‘Church of St Mary’ to Arbroath Abbey, but it was quickly transferred to the Bishopric of Moray. In 1233 the Dominican ‘Black Friars’ set up a monastery immediately to the north of the Old High Church.

The oldest part of the present church is the base of the tower, which dates to the 14th century. That makes the tower the oldest built structure in Inverness.

As the official town church of Inverness it is the site of an annual ceremony known as the ‘Kirking of the Council’, when the Provost and councillors walk in procession from the Town House to the church for worship.