of Easter Strathkinness. He willed it to his widow who in turn willed it to

her son, also Robert Dow, hotel proprietor, who resided in the house until his

death in 1979 when it was bought by its present owners.

The house on the corner of Sunnyside and Main Street was built sometime

in the 1830s. It was a public house until Andrew Thom came to Strathkinness

in 1850 to set up in business as a joiner. He lived in this house on the corner

which was next to the place he used for his workshop. When the Free Church

built their new church he obtained the old Free Church building as a workshop

and built a new house in its grounds in 1867. The building on the corner

reverted to being a pub again and continued as a public house until the middle

of the 1940s. It was called ‘The Strathkinness Arms’ in its earlier days and

from the 1930s it became known as ‘Laing’s Inn’. After the end of the war it

was a bakery for a short while, it then became a house for letting to the R.A.F.,

and then became vacant and was becoming derelict, until its present owners

took it over in 1968, and are painstakingly renovating it themselves.

The feu of one of the properties on The Pleasance, which was at one time

part of Kellock (or Skelloch) Loan, recorded in 1746,is one of the first feus

to be found in Strathkinness which was feued by David Meidrum of Kincaple.

There are Meldrum feus of other pieces of ground in The Pleasance but they

mostly date from 1800. No dates of buildings are given on these deeds but

it seems likely that the houses were built, for the most part, soon after 1800.

Their leases were for one thousand years, and the usual annual rental was ten

shillings and six pence.

Main Street was not built on until after other houses had been built in

other parts of the village; the first building on Main Street was the Secession

Church, built in 1801 and since demolished. Most of Lower Main Street was

built around the time of the Disruption in 1843 when the Free Church took

over the Secession Church building. After the new Free Church building was

erected in 1867 more houses followed on Main Street. Most of the property

on the west side of Upper Main Street was Melville property, while the whole

of the east side was part of the school glebe. At the division of Strathkinness

Commonty in 1777 part of the land given to the school was across the main

road. In 1788 General Melville exchanged some of his land on the east side

for some land on the other side, and consequently all the school land was now

situated on the same side. The school glebe feus were granted mainly

between 1829 and 1860. Although the deeds show the date of feuing the

land, they rarely show the date when a house was built on the land. Nor is it

possible to know for certain where people lived. As late as 1881 the census

report states, ‘This village is divided by the turnpike road...the divisions and

streets having no names except a very few houses, the remainder all going under

the name of Village of Strathkinness’.

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