Kilwinning and the Mother Lodge

Lodge number nothing, and the claim to be the first Freemasons

The ruined abbey in the middle of Kilwinning was founded by Tironensian monks between 1162 and 1188, and a legend of Scottish Freemasonry starts with its builders: stonemasons from Europe, the story goes, who formed a lodge here while they worked. The lodge that claims descent from them, Mother Kilwinning, sits at number 0 on the roll of the Grand Lodge of Scotland, a number read as nothing rather than zero, and is reputed by some to be the oldest lodge in the world. No evidence proves it. What is on record is that William Schaw’s statutes for the craft named the warden of the lodge of Kilwinning in 1599, and that in 1677 Kilwinning chartered the Canongate lodge, the first known case anywhere of one lodge chartering another. When the new Grand Lodge of Scotland refused in 1736 to accept Kilwinning as the oldest, it walked out and ran its own lodges in Scotland, Ireland and Virginia until it returned in 1807. The abbey’s stone was carted off to build Eglinton Castle, where dressed blocks in the old stables still carry masons’ marks.