Girgenti House

Girgenti House was a small, rather eccentric mansion built on part of the old Barony of Bonshaw

Barony of Bonshaw

The Barony of Bonshaw, previously known as Bollingshaw, was in the old feudal Baillerie of Cunninghame, near Stewarton in what is now North Ayrshire, Scotland.-The Irvines and Boyds:...

in the parish of Stewarton

Stewarton

Stewarton is a town in East Ayrshire, Scotland. In comparison to the neighbouring towns of Kilmaurs, Fenwick, Dunlop and Lugton, it is a relatively large town, with a population of over 6,500. It is 300 feet above sea level.Groome, Francis H. . Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland. Pub. Caxton. London....

, East Ayrshire

East Ayrshire

East Ayrshire is one of 32 council areas of Scotland. It borders on to North Ayrshire, East Renfrewshire, South Lanarkshire, South Ayrshire and Dumfries and Galloway...

, Scotland

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

Bonnyton

Bonnyton, a part of the Barony of Bonshaw, had belonged to the Reids of Stacklawhill and also to several generations of the Watts family, who were joiners and cartwrights. Born there was Doctor Robert Watt

Robert Watt (bibliographer)

Dr Robert Watt was a Scottish physician and bibliographer.-Early life:The son of a small farmer in Bonnyton near Stewarton in Ayrshire, Watt attended school from the age of six to twelve. After working as a ploughman, aged seventeen he went to learn cabinetmaking with his brother...

, the eminent Scotsman who published the Bibilotheca Britannica in 1824, shortly before he died; it records more than 200,000 books, pamphlets and periodicals printed from 1450 to the early nineteenth century and took him 25 years to compile. His portrait hangs in the entrance hall of the Royal Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, and his direct descendants still live in the Stewarton area.

Captain John Cheape, the builder of Girgenti House, belonged to the Fifeshire family represented by George C. Cheape, Esq., of Strathtyrum, and was the seventh son of James Cheape, Esq., of Sauchie

Sauchie

Sauchie is a village in the Central Lowlands of Scotland. It lies north of the River Forth and south of the Ochil Hills, within the council area of Clackmannanshire. Sauchie is located north-east of Alloa and east-southeast of Tullibody.- History :...

, in Clackmannanshire. He was in the Scots Fusilier Guards and had served in the Napoleonic Wars

Napoleonic Wars

The Napoleonic Wars were a series of wars declared against Napoleon's French Empire by opposing coalitions that ran from 1803 to 1815. As a continuation of the wars sparked by the French Revolution of 1789, they revolutionised European armies and played out on an unprecedented scale, mainly due to...

.

Bonnyton (not Muirhead as sometimes stated) was renamed Girgenti by the well-travelled Captain Cheape, perhaps in honor of a visit to the ancient Greek ruins of Agrigentum (the name of the town has become Girgenti in modern Sicilian

Sicilian language

Sicilian is a Romance language. Its dialects make up the Extreme-Southern Italian language group, which are spoken on the island of Sicily and its satellite islands; in southern and central Calabria ; in the southern parts of Apulia, the Salento ; and Campania, on the Italian mainland, where it is...

). In 1827 he paid Thomas Reid £1350 for the property, totaling 50 Scotch acres, and at a cost of £6000 he demolished the old Bonnyton farm steading and built a rather eccentric mansion house and offices and planted extensive plantations and shrubberies on what had been a wild moss-land. It is not known what brought him to the area or why he chose such a comparatively desolate site.

Cheape lived at Girgenti for the last twenty years of his life (1829–1850) after leaving the army. The house had a pillared portico and was basically single-storeyed in appearance, with bays, a capped tower and dormer windows on two different levels; it had a large summer house. The OS maps show associated buildings—presumably the mains or home farm and a coach house, stables, and so forth. The National Archives of Scotland hold a map of the estate made in 1845, surveyed by John Fairlie.
Cheape died unmarried on 10 February 1850, aged 76, and the estate was sold to benefit a number of infirmaries across Scotland (Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Inverness and Dundee). He was buried in the Laigh Kirk, Stewarton

Stewarton

. Cheape's only sister, Marianne, who was first married to Sir Alexander Campbell of Ardkinglass in 1792, became the third wife of Thomas, 11th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne

Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne

The title Earl of Kinghorne was created in the Peerage of Scotland in 1606 for Patrick Lyon. In 1677, the designation of the earldom changed to "Strathmore and Kinghorne". A second Earldom was bestowed on the fourteenth Earl in the Peerage of the United Kingdom in 1937, the title being Strathmore...

in 1817; their residence was Glamis Castle

Glamis Castle

Glamis Castle is situated beside the village of Glamis in Angus, Scotland. It is the home of the Earl and Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne, and is open to the public....

(where the Queen Mother would spend a great deal of her childhood and where Princess Margaret was born). She was to have inherited Girgenti; however, she predeceased her brother.

Cheape's tower

Cheape is said to have believed in reincarnation

Reincarnation

Reincarnation best describes the concept where the soul or spirit, after the death of the body, is believed to return to live in a new human body, or, in some traditions, either as a human being, animal or plant...

, or transmigration of the soul, and to have been so convinced that he would return in the form of a bird that next to his mansion house he built a large tower with an octagonal roof, housing a dovecote on top. Finished in 1843, it stands 80 feet (24.4 m) tall, has four clock faces, a coat of arms and a motto—Didus Fructus ("Let it spread its fruit abroad")—all on the outer surfaces. A shield on the tower records that it was "Designed and built by Captain John Cheape, 1843". A local tale is that Captain Cheape was in league with smugglers and would light a lamp in the top of the tower when he knew the coast was clear. The nearby ruins of Auchenharvie Castle

Auchenharvie Castle

Auchenharvie Castle is a ruined castle near Torranyard on the A 736 Glasgow to Irvine road. It lies in North Ayrshire, Scotland.-The Castle:...

and Darnshaw Farm are linked to stories of smuggling corpses for dissection by Glasgow medical students.

Later owners and residents of Girgenti House

William Broom, an ironmaster in Glasgow, purchased the estate, after which it passed into the hands of Alexander Cochrane of Verreville in Lanarkshire. The estate was later purchased by a Glasgow businessman, Allan Gilmour of Eaglesham

Eaglesham

Eaglesham , is a village and parish set in the west central Lowlands of Scotland - population 3,127 . Today it is chiefly a dormitory town for commuters to nearby Glasgow. The village is distinctive in being based around a large triangular green...

, for private use. The 1881 census records the coachman's house as being occupied by James Young of Glasgow and his wife, mother and six children. Christina Fergusson is recorded as a laundress living in the mansion house, as well as a Janetta R. Moffat from Dingwall

Dingwall

Dingwall is a town and former royal burgh in the Highland council area of Scotland. It has a population of 5,026. It was formerly an east-coast harbor but now lies inland. Dingwall Castle was once the biggest castle north of Stirling. On the town's present-day outskirts lies Tulloch Castle, parts...

. In 1900 it was sold to Glasgow Corporation for use as a reformatory for female inebriates, which opened in January 1901. (That by 1903 seventy-one inmates had been treated there, with about forty-three in residence on the average, shows the scale of the condition at that time.)

After less than 10 years as a reformatory, the estate was sold again and transformed into a privately owned training centre for homeless boys between the ages of 14 and 20. It was next sold to the Scottish Labour Colony Association, which continued its use as a training centre. In 1918 it changed hands yet again, and this time it returned to farm use. The owner was now a Mr Muir, who was a great-grandson of the Thomas Reid of Stacklawhill from whom Cheape had purchased the estate in 1827.

The farm was next sold in 1932 to Mr Sword, chairman of the Western SMT

Western SMT

Western Scottish Motor Traction Co. Limited was a bus operator in south-west Scotland from 1929 to 1985.The company was formed in 1929 by the renaming of Scottish General Transport Co. Ltd, after the British Electric Traction subsidiary formed in 1913 was acquired by the Scottish Motor Traction...

Company, who took considerable interest in the outbuildings and had the tower restored and the clock repaired. The two Italianate lodges, East and West, survive, together with part of the walled garden; the house itself was demolished in the 1940s. The farm steading is mainly original; a cottage is also present. A Mr and Mrs Smith owned and worked the farm from around 1960.

External links

Ayrshire + Photographs. Accessed : 2009/11/20
Photograph of Girgenti House. Accessed : 2009/11/20
Girgenti tower on flikr. Accessed : 2009/11/20
James Beaton, ‘Watt, Robert (bap. 1774, d. 1819)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 19 Dec 2007

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