Portal to the Past

St. Thomas’s Chapel and school were built in 1861 following an influx of Irish workers seeking to escape the potato famine in Ireland and in response to a demand from the expanding mill industry of the Levern.

This was the first Catholic Church since the Reformation of 1560 and a new St. Thomas’s School was built in 1964 in Broadlie Road beside the chapel where the old building was demolished.

What is now Neilston Parish Church would have been the first pre-Reformation chapel, recorded in a charter of Walter Fitzalan in 1163 and supported by local landowner Robert de Croc.