Ghost Writing

When we first arrived here in 2023, the house had been empty for quite a while. The gardens and grounds were overgrown, outbuildings dilapidated and inside, the rooms sported a variety of wall coverings of questionable taste! We quickly began to strip walls back, as although we weren’t yet ready to start re-decorating, we wanted to get the house back to its bare bones. This was partly to uncover any serious renovation problems we would have to deal with at a later date, and partly because we thought it was preferable to live with stripped lime plaster than 1970’s vinyl Kitch!

One of the first rooms we attacked was above the old stone-slabbed utility, described in the sales particulars as ‘the maid’s room’. You approached it via a secret back staircase concealed behind a wood panelled wall, once painted olive green. The room was low-ceilinged and very gloomy. The walls had also been green, but at some point I think it had suffered some vandalism as there had been an attempt to daub over some illegible graffiti in black. Nice. Out of the whole house, this was the one room that had a vaguely spooky feel to it, so I was keen to crack on and clear the place out. We had decided to open the room up by bringing the ceiling down and adding roof lights to what turned out to be boarded rafters. We also brought down a dividing wall opening the stairwell and as we steadily brought more light into the space, we began to notice markings on the old crumbling plaster.  On closer inspection these ghostly inscriptions turned out to be people’s names, addresses and dates. One Dennis Boyle, from Lettermacaward, Donegal, Eire and one O’Donnell from the same village. Why would a farm house in the Scottish Borders have the names of Irishmen inscribed upon its walls? Intrigued, I got onto my laptop and did some research. After learning to navigate various genealogy search engines I eventually found a Dennis Boyle, from Lettermacaward in an 1880 census residing in East Lothian with a wife and eight children. Could this be our man? I delved deeper and found his mother’s maiden name had been O’Donnell, which was the other inscription on the same section of wall, over the fireplace. Could it be that Dennis was in our house during the late 1800’s with a cousin or uncle? This mystery developed further still when we found a further inscription on another wall, this time an illegible name, but the same village in Ireland with the date 1957. To this day I still don’t know why these men were here, but I have developed theories about farm labouring and perhaps for Dennis, wall building during the latter part of the enclosure’s movement here in Scotland. Ireland had suffered enormous poverty since the famine of 1845-52 and many men left to look for work elsewhere. I suppose we will never know.

However, after this intriguing discovery, we started to find signatures and dates all over the house and even in the garden. We have found signatures from a ‘paperhanger’ and his apprentice from 1899 and again from1926 in the drawing room, the names Scott and Elliot, which are local names, dated 1891 in the utility and we have found one W. E 1899 carved expertly into a stone on the garden wall. Ghosts from the past.

Taking the time to uncover and read the social history that permeates every slab of stone, every cracked and crumbling, cobwebby corner of country houses like this one, is the greatest reward of renovation. It isn’t the installation of new kitchens or the replacement central heating boiler. It is getting to know those who went before, restoring the pride they had in what was once their home, or place of work. More than bricks and mortar, more than house or home. Renovating an old country house is about giving yourself up to it, at first, unrequitedly belonging to it, and eventually, if you work hard enough and are respectful of its past, and all who went before, eventually, you will be rewarded by being belonged. That’s why renovation is about the long haul and having the vision for what will be, long into the future.