had extended to other churches included in these
dioceses.[138] From this old Pictish diocese the bishopric of Brechin
was formed, towards the end of King David's reign, about 1150.[139] The
Church of Brechin has no claim to represent an old Columban
monastery:[140] its origin as a church is clearly recorded in the
Pictish Chronicle, which states that King Kenneth, son of Malcolm, who
reigned from 971 to 995, gave "the great city of Brechin to the Lord,"
founding a church to the Holy Trinity, a monastery apparently after the
Irish model, combined with a Culdee college. We hear of it next in two
charters of David I. to the Church of Deer, and in the second of these
the "abbot" of the first appears as "Bishop of Brechin" (about 1150).
The abbacy passed to lay hereditary bishops, and the Culdees were first
conjoined with, next distinguished from, and at last superseded by, the
cathedral chapter.[141]

The early Church of Brechin emanated from the Irish Church, and was
assimilated in its character to the Irish monastery. Of the early
connection, there still survives at Brechin the famous Round Tower,
which now occupies the place of a spire at the south-west angle of the
present church. This, with the older one at Abernethy, and the ruined
one at Egilshay in Orkney, are the only surviving types in Scotland.
There were said to have been four others, which are no longer existing,
viz. Deerness in Orkney; West Burray, Tingwall, and Ireland Head, in
Shetland.[142] Dr. Skene gives the date of the Abernethy one as about
870, or between that year and the close of the century, and asserts that
the date of the Brechin tower can be placed with some degree of
certainty late in the succeeding century.[143] Probably it was erected
in the reign of Kenneth (971-995), or about 1012, when Brechin was
destroyed by the Danes.[144] Egilshay probably dates about 1098.[145]
The Brechin tower is capped by a conical stone roof. Dr. Joseph Anderson
shows that those round towers are outliers of a group of which Ireland
is the home;[146] and they were erected during the time when the Celtic
Church was much perplexed by the pillaging attacks of the Danes, that
the ecclesiastics might protect their valuable illuminated manuscripts,
and other costly possessions. The Brechin one corresponds with the Irish
ones, and is built in sixty irregular courses, of blocks of reddish-grey
sandstone, dressed to the curve, but squared at neither top nor bottom;
within,