A plague on God's houses. Disused and dilapidated, the churches that proclaimed eternal life face an uncertain future

There is a growing dilapidation among old buildings in Scotland, however, and many of the crumbling old piles are of national architectural significance.

Churches are falling apart: there are more of them than any other category of building on the Scottish Civic Trust's Buildings at Risk register, and the trust is sufficiently alarmed about the threat to these once-focal community facilities that it has included a special feature on the issue in its latest bulletin.

Well within living memory, there were twice or thrice as many churches as there now are throughout Scotland. Every village had one or even two, owing to the country's complex ecclesiastical history, featuring such sectarian partitions as the Disruption.

Churches re-unified and parishes began to merge. Churchgoers, though, are getting thinner and thinner on the ground, for various reasons, and there is an ever-dwindling pot of money with which to maintain what is left of religious buildings erected in days when needs were different from those of today.

The Scottish Civic Trust has criticised certain parishes for failing to inspect their buildings properly. They become surplus to requirements and are vacated before proposals are considered for their retention. They sit empty. They are vandalised. They continue to decay. Some are bought by would-be developers.

But the owners of erstwhile churches have to overcome strict planning and listed building obstacles before they can realise their dreams of conversion, and there are plenty of speculators who have either run out of money or given in to officialdom.

In urban areas churches tend to be much larger and, therefore, harder to customise into something secular such as workshops or tea shops, while rural churches tend to deter people with an understandable reluctance to have a cemetery as a garden.

St James's Church in Forfar is typical of the former. Its condition is described as ''poor'', and it has been unused, except by pigeons, for many years. Its leaded lights have been smashed, and plans put forward five years ago to convert it into a community centre evaporated.

Kilchoman Church on Islay is an example of the latter: it has been empty since 1977, and it is in a ''pitiful'' condition. Rot is rampant, and the roof is leaking. An Edinburgh man bought it with a view to restoring it as a house and a visitor centre, but there is no sign of anything happening.

In recent years the former United Free Church in Cumnock stored council supplies. The council wanted to demolish it and to sell the site to locate a health centre, but consent was refused. The Scottish Civic Trust is still against its demolition on the grounds that it is structurally sound.

On Sundays there used to be fire and brimstone preached at the Free Church in Colmonell, but its main body has been used as a garage and workshops; and sliding wooden doors have been slapped into the side elevation. The rear was partially converted into a house in 1990, and the whole building is now on the market. Price: #89,000.

Falconer Grieve used the former West United Presbyterian Church in Selkirk as a joiner's workshop for several years, but the slates began to fall off and he has, unsuccessfully, applied for planning permission to demolish it and build houses in its place.

''It is a total eyesore and there is a limit to how much money I can spend on planning applications,'' he said. ''On the one hand people want to see churches conserved, but when someone comes up with a use for them, you get objections and petitions.''

Petitions also ''flew around'' when Evenrose Ltd wanted to convert the Broughton MacDonald Church in Edinburgh into a theatre and concert hall. The authorities decided that this was not a proper use for an A-listed building within an ''outstanding'' conservation area. Graced by Doric porticos, this former secession church is now only occasionally used as a bar.

''There have been times when we expected to get bookings, during the whisky festival and the jazz festival, for instance, but they went right out of the window because of the unreliability of getting special licences,'' said architect Peter Lindow.

''The roof is okay at the moment, but it won't last indefinitely. Its future must be secured, and you must attract funding for this.''

The St Andrew's/Erskine Church in Dunfermline is also an outstanding conservation area, but its congregation is due to be relocated, owing to its poor condition. It may well suffer a similar fate to the Strathbungo Parish Church in Glasgow, disused for more than 10 years and now derelict after plans for an amateur theatre foundered through lack of capital.

Plans often go agley: the A-listed Old Roskeen Church, near Invergordon, did not reach its new incarnation as an aromatherapy centre; the St Nicholas Congregational Church in Aberdeen, also A-listed and with an apse based on Stockholm's Lund Cathedral, has metamorphosed into neither shop not nightclub. It is boarded-up.

The Wilton South Church in Hawick was also earmarked as a nightclub, but no conversion work has been undertaken.

The future of the burnt-out shell of the Caledonia Road Church in Glasgow hinges on a partnership between the council (its owners), Railtrack, which owns a nearby viaduct, and a regeneration company. It is surrounded by traffic and planning blight, yet it is considered to be ''of national importance''.

If you look hard enough at the Clune Park Church of Scotland in Port Glasgow, you may spot a tree establishing itself out of the roof-tower. It is now for sale by trustees in bankruptcy proceedings. Elsewhere in Port Glasgow, the owner of a carpet and furniture store in West Church has decided that the building is too rotten and damp for his needs.

Often local authorities throw good money after bad in lengthening the life of a church. Braehead Church near Lanark had public money spent on the eradication of dry rot, the reconstruction of the bellcote, and other repairs.

It was sold to a restorer three years ago, but it has silage bags outside the front door, and dry rot has returned to the extent that the building is now ''poor'', notwithstanding suggestions of an arts and community centre.

In Dumfries and Galloway, Solway Heritage has spent #70,000 preventing an eyesore Methodist church in the heart of Dumfries from falling down. During the Burns bicentenary, the crumbling fascia was masked by an enormous illustration of Burns's face, and the organisation is negotiating with the Scottish Youth Hostels Association.

Plans for a centre devoted to Robert the Bruce, who killed the Red Comyn nearby, were dismissed as unrealistic, particularly in the light of a dismal tourist season. That also put paid to plans for a Clan Armstrong centre in the crumbling Erskine Church in Langholm.

Mr Quentin McLaren, of Solway Heritage, commented: ''If there were not an organisation such as ours, these buildings would fall down. There is absolutely no money around to save all the churches that need to be saved throughout the country. Down here we have a very fragile rural economy, and it is an uphill struggle to maintain buildings.''

Ms Mary Miers, of the Buildings at Risk Office, warns that the re-use of churches is a controversial subject, and there are some people who are opposed to the principle of any use other than religious worship; however, compromises can and should be made to conserve buildings which have great potential for sympathetic and imaginative conversion.

''At the end of a century which has seen fundamental changes in approaches to church-going and religious worship, the number of church buildings of all denominations being added to the buildings at risk register is growing,'' she says.

She adds: ''In all cases, the contribution that churches make to our built environment and social history, and the potential that many of them have for sustainable re-use, makes them a valuable resource which is only now being given wider recognition,'' says Ms Miers. ''Yet, though abandonment and demolition are negative solutions to the problem of redundancy, many churches remain victims of this fate and are desperately in need of attention.''

There is occasionally some light at the end of the tunnel: on Friday Pugin and Pugin's St Francis Church in the Gorbals of Glasgow was officially opened as an outstandingly designed community education centre.

And funds are being raised to turn one of Britain's finest churches, St Andrew's in the Square Church, also in Glasgow, into a venue for traditional Scottish music, dance, and song.