A steading is a Scottish farm building, so our ‘steading conversion’ is like a ‘barn conversion’ in England.
Ours is not far off the A90 between Ellon and Peterhead and is 20+ miles from Aberdeen and family. East Byreleask is shown on the OS 1:50000 map and labelled on the 1:25000 map. Our plot is half of former East Byreleask farm.
The steading
Is a south-facing ‘U’-shaped rubble-built Aberdeen (grey) granite steading with slate roof, dating from around the 1890s, around 400m down a track shared with our immediate neighbour. The steading was designed for keeping cattle, with wooden stalls and a hayloft. Of course it is not really U-shaped, it is like three sides of a wide rectangle:
- The north leg is single storey, 23m long and 5m wide. It has a row of 13 or so cattle stalls down the north wall.
- The west leg is 1.5 storey and about 13m long by 5m wide. The ground floor is in two rooms. The southern-most looks as though it would have had some small pens, possibly calving pens. The back room is cobbled and has what looks like a later opening in the side, so it is not clear what it was for. The upper floor has a floor level opening at the gable end, so might have been a feed store.
- The east leg is the same size and shape as the west leg, but was single storey with a large opening in the gable end, big enough to get a cart in, it was probably a hay/straw store.
These three ‘wings’ enclose a wide but shallow south-facing courtyard. Here is the layout of the building at the time we bought it.
Once converted, the long northern leg will have around 4.25m usable width internally. The west and east sections will have full-height ground floors around 4.5m wide, the upper storeys will narrow down to 3.5m and will have the ‘coombs’ or lie-ins typical of so many Scottish properties. The walls are a good 45-50cm thick.
Directly to the south of the steading is another, smaller, building (10m x 5m external) which is a mix of Aberdeen and Peterhead (pink) granite, currently covered with corrugated concrete/asbestos sheets. We call it the Bothy. It is older than the steading proper and was probably the original farmhouse, before the now-demolished successor was built on the adjacent plot. It is positioned the same distance from the north section as the west section is from the east – we could easily extend the courtyard to a roughly 22m x 22m open area by. If we did, we would want to screen the area from wind, for example with hedging and trees.
The location
Our plot is roughly 3/4 of an acre and is a sort of irregular square, with the steading against to the west boundary and closer to the north boundary than the south.
The steading faces due south on a gentle southward slope and backs on to Lochlundie Moss – rough ground – but with views over gently hilly farmland right down to the North Sea – it is a geomorphologists dream (cue Jill’s brother Neil who understands these things). Looking south, we can just about see down the coast past the Ythan estuary, down past Balmedie and right down towards Aberdeen. Looking west, we can just, from the right position, see Bennachie.
We share some 470m of track with our immediate neighbour. It runs eastwards from the local unclassified road, round a right-angle bend, then due southwards to the steading, curving to the right past the steading and into the neighbouring plot. In fact West Byreleask steading shares the first 75m or so of the track with us.
Our neighbour
Our property was part of former East Byreleask farm, which was sold as two plots. The western one containing the now-demolished farmhouse, is our (only) immediate neighbour. The farmhouse was knocked in 2013 and a holiday let built, this is East Byreleask Cottage. We got the bigger plot, about 0.75 acres. The surrounding farmland was sold off many years ago, to Mains of Leask farm.
Accessibility
The new Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route will run dual carriageway to within six miles of us, with fast access to the UK motorway network and Aberdeen airport. So although we are very much in a rural corner, we have much better access to the rest of the world than we have in Suffolk. Buses run to Ellon, Aberdeen and Peterhead from the both the A90 and the A975.
The Leask name
East Byreleask is one of a number of locations in the area that share the Leask name, collectively the Hills of Leask.
From west to east:
- Mill of Leask is a cluster of buildings that include the old mill, converted, and a steading, part-converted.
- Milltown of Leask is just to the east and has in recent years been developed, complete with fishing lake and rather English-style hedging alongside the road, with mown verges. Not really in the vernacular any more.
- Nether Leask is an active farm that has the local highway running through the farmyard.
- Hillhead of Leask is on the OS map just as Hillhead, however planning application BW/2010/3693 is in the full name. It was a farm steading, now converted.
- House of Leask (also called Pitlurg House) is a rather splendid mansion house. It was built in 1828, designed by Archibald Simpson. It burnt down in 1927. It was roofless in 1989 but has been partly rebuilt and is inhabited, still with adjacent ruins. It has outbuildings and a listed doocot.
- Mains of Leask is an active farm.
- West Byreleask is a converted steading.
- East Byreleask was a farm. It was split in two in 2012 into a farmhouse plot and a steading plot. The farmhouse has since been demolished and replaced with a Heb Homes frame house built elsewhere on the site, as a holiday let.
- Knapsleask is an active farm. What may have been the farmhouse is on the other side of the road from the farm buildings but is now privately owned. The steading was demolished in 2014 and replaced by a modern farm building.
- Moss Leask Croft is the eastern-most property, within Lochlundie Moss. It is shown on older maps as just Moss Croft.
The derivation of the name ‘Leask’ is disputed. If you believe ‘Celtic Place-Names in Aberdeenshire, John Milne, 1912’, Leask is from leasg as in ‘place or piece of land’. Byreleask is from bior (stream, burn) and leasg (piece of land), so it means ‘land at a burn’. Similarly Knapsleask means ‘Knoll of Leask. Alternatively you may prefer the opinion of ‘Collins Scottish Clan & Family Encyclopedia, George Way and Romily Squire‘ and believe that Leask is from Anglo-Saxon Lisse, meaning happy, or Norse, meaning ‘Stirring fellow’, or gaelic lasgair meaning active or brave. Finally, one Professor Keith Leask believed the name derived from Liscus who was chief of the Haedui, a tribe of Gauls. Yer pays yer money and takes yer choice.
We had assumed that the ‘Byre’ reflected the purpose of the steading, which was indeed designed for holding cattle.
Clan Leask
See http://www.clan-leask.org.uk/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clan_Leask and http://www.leask.co.uk/ for more information on Leasks than you can shake a stick at. A cursory inspection on Google shows that Leask is still quite a widespread surname.
Clan Leask do believe their name does come from the Aberdeenshire Lands of Leask, Leskgoroune.
History of the Leask area
The first recorded Leask was supposedly William de Laskereske in 1296. The now-ruined Chapel of Leask (also known as St Adamnans Chapel, close to Knapsleask farm) is also believed to date from the 13th century. In the 1340s William Lesk was designated the first Chief of the Leasks in Aberdeenshire. The estate grew over the years. In 1698, the thirteenth and last chief, Alexander Leask raised money from a cousin, Robert Cumming (or Cuming) of Birness, invested it in the Darien scheme, lost it all and forfeited the estate to the Cumming family. Robert had a daughter, Barbara. The Leasks moved elsewhere.
Meanwhile in 1546, the Gordons of Pitlurg in Banffshire (near Keith) had come on the scene. The 10th Gordon of Pitlurg, John Gordon-Cuming, was born in 1734 and inherited from his mother, the above Barbara Cuming, the entailed estates of Birnes and Leask. The following Gordon also inherited Skene estate. His son, one General Gordon, in 1815, dropped the name Leask in favour of Pitlurg and had Pitlurg House built. The following John Gordon Cuming Skene of Pitlurg, Dyce and Parkhill was born 1827 and renamed the house back to House of Leask. He had a son, Alexander, born in 1857. At his point my source fades. The estate was said to have been broken up and sold-on around 1921.
The remainder of the parish of Slains, the Slains Estate proper, had been bought in 1792 by Gordon of Cluny. They held ownership until 1942, selling on to Sir Ian Walker of Osmaston Manor and Glenmuick, becoming part of the Walker Scottish Estates. They, in their turn, sold the estate on in 1964 to Sir Richard Sutton Settled Estates, at an auction at the Station Hotel, Aberdeen. At this point the estate of 7574 acres had “a 5-mile frontage to the East Coast of Scotland, immediately north of Newburgh and bounded by the River Ythan Estuary on its southwest side. Comprising Forty-seven Mixed Farms ranging from 934 Acres to 5 Acres, the Estate also boasts Moorlands, Lochs and Foreshore totalling 1,865 Acres, 6 Cottages and the Sporting Rights over the whole Estate.” The image of the Slains Estate map from 1964, unfortunately rather small, was ‘borrowed’ from here. It looks like it just about covered the whole of Slains parish including all the Leasks, bar House of Leask. They may have been bought up in 1921 from the Gordons of Pitlurg.
We bought East Byreleask Steading from Sir Richard Sutton Settled Estates in 2014. During a visit to our solicitor in 2014 we did get to see an enormous paper 6″ OS map of the estate, more recent than the 1964 one. East Byreleask is near the northern limit of the estate. This runs from Lochlundie Moss, along the track to the north of the steading, to the public road at Mains of Leask. It follows the public road just to the south of the farm then follows field boundaries. West Byreleask steading, on that map, was not part of the estate but was just about completely surrounded. We do know that the fields around East Byreleask were sold in recent years by the estate, to Mains of Leask farm, leaving East Byreleask owned the estate, but isolated from the remainder of the estate.
Looking at old OS maps:
The 1:2500 map from 1867 shows the farm comprising three buildings on the north, east and south sides of a square. The building on the south edge is probably the smaller one still on the property. It has a blocked-in chimney breast and short chimney, so our architect thinks this was the original farmhouse or bothy. The other two buildings on the map no longer exist and the current steading had not been built. The whole area looks as though it was more settled than today. Todays roads and tracks are still there but there are others which have gone.
The 1878 map is not such good quality, but not a lot changed over 11 years.
The 1:2500 map from 1899 shows a lot of change. The old farmhouse is still there, the other buildings have gone and the current steading has been built. Furthermore the plot boundaries are uncannily like our boundary today. Both West Byreleask and Mains of Byreleask show similar levels of change. It appears that the Slains estate undertook major improvements in the 1880s or 1890s.
The 1:25000 map from 1938 unsurprisingly shows much less detail, but I do believe that the new blob to the left of the bothy is the new farmhouse, which survived until 2012. It does seem that some of the now-vanished roads and tracks remained into the first half of the 20th century.
I cannot find more recent maps that are large-scale enough to really see what subsequently disappeared and when.
The state of the steading
The site must have been used actively until much more recently, but eventually fell victim to changes in farming practices and economics. At some point the land fell under the management of Mains of Leask and the farm buildings became surplus to requirements.
One event is very relevant to ourselves, there was a fire in the east leg of the steading which damaged the south gable end enough that it needs to be demolished and re-built. When, is less clear. The floor has the year 1932 stamped into the concrete. The architect thinks the fire was shortly after WW2. The local farmer, Mr Jamieson, thinks it was in the 1950s.
The steading courtyard at some point was largely covered over. It must have had corrugated concrete/asbestos roof panels – we found large numbers of pieces as we tidied up, along with roofing nails and brackets. The southern edge of the courtyard still has the sidewall – a very substantial concrete wall, with an enormous concrete lintel bedded into one of the steading gable ends. The north side of the steading became part of a large silage clamp, with the north wall rendered in cement mortar and, running parallel, another very substantial concrete wall. There is a concrete base to the east of the bothy, another down the south end of the property with a lean-to shed. The plans show another one near the west boundary of the property – it may have been covered over as the adjacent property was re-developed. The biggest expanse of concrete is the large hardstanding to the east of the steading, running right up to the eastern boundary of the property. Last, and by no means least, is a concrete ramp running down the slope on the east side of the property. This is around 8 feet wide, runs right down to the southern boundary and has a pit at the bottom with a goodly depth of water. This is covered over by concrete slats. One side of the ramp is low wall, the other is a rather massive concrete structure with steel railing. We are told it is cattle-related.
With the land now part of Mains of Leask, the farm buildings were used for storage and were not maintained. The later additions and the lack of care explain why the site looks a bit of a mess, even compared to some of the other properties we looked at. Those parts not covered in concrete have mature trees that must be preserved but need quite a bit of TLC. The ground between is covered in perennial weeds. Pride of place goes to a thriving plantation of Japanese Knotweed, which we found out about after we bought the property. Our architect assures us it was not there some six years ago. This will amuse us for at least the next three years – hello glyphosate in industrial quantities!
Civil Administration
East Byreleask Steading is in Slains parish. It is just in the Formatine (for-mah-teen, stress on the first syllable) administrative district within Aberdeenshire Council. It is in the Aberdeenshire East Scottish parliamentary constituency. It is just within Gordon UK parliamentary constituency (currently Sir Malcolm Bruce, who will stand down in 2015, it is rumoured that Alex Salmond may make a bid for the constituency). The area was Gordon district up until 1996, unsurprisingly named after the family.
The Geology
The underlying bedrock in the area is mostly metamorphosed sediments (Collieston formation). The Lochlundie pluton is a granodiorite instrusion that forms the raised ground immediately to the north and east of the East Byreleask. It breaks the surface in several places, but most of the area is covered in boulder clay (the Hatton Till formation) and, in the case of Lochlundie Moss, with peat. East Byreleask is solidly boulder clay. This explains the high water table – there is nowhere for the water to go other than off the surface. The two maps show the same area. One shows the geology, with an arrow pointing to the steading. The other shows enough aerial photography to just about see the geography, but does not display the geology so well.
East Byreleask Steading 