When Spence Douglas died in 1830 he was ‘indebted to sundry persons’.

His son John, who was only twenty years old at the time, had within the space

of two months made over the property with all its rights to two separate

parties, one of them acting as Trustee for a group of creditors. They agreed

to sell the property jointly and to share the proceeds. Spence Douglas had

not necessarily failed in business as a blacksmith. As he had been involvec

in the first leasing of feus in the schoolmaster’s glebe in 1811 he may have

got into debt because of land dealings. The public roup for the sale of the

property was held in 1832 in the house itself, with an upset price of £85, with

the ‘person making the last and highest offer at the outrunnino of a half-hnair

sand-glass to be the offerer preferred’ and with payment to be made in full

within one month. John Kaid, who had been Spence Douglas’s partner in

the feuing of the school glebe, bought the property for £87 having offered

one pound more than Spence’s son John.

John Douglas set up another smiddy further along Church Road at the

property now called ‘Morenish’ and which remained a blacksmith’s shop

for many years. John’s son, Spence, is still remembered by some people in

the village. (Miss Marion Brown who lives in one of the old people’s cottages

almost opposite the houses built by the first Spence Douglas is his great-great-

granddaughter.) John Douglas’s lease, which was also Melville property, was

quite different from that which had been given to his father. The initial

lease was for nineteen years only, and his rent was £6 a year, plus the statute

labour tax. (Statute labour had been a means of making roads and keeping

them in repair, but it had been commuted to a tax almost everywhere by

1790.) He was obliged to ‘labour, crop and cultivate the land according to

the most approved rules of good husbandry as generally practiced in the

neighbourhood’. Spence Douglas who did not have as much land to cultivate

had only been given the right ‘to pluck and plant’. (After the division of the

commonties and feuing of the land by the heritors many of the landowners

were insisting that what were termed the ‘new methods of agriculture’ should

be practised by their tenants.)

The property bought by John Kaid in 1832 consisted of several houses

which had been built by Spence Douglas before 1815. When John Kaid died

in 1841 the houses were again sold by his son who needed the proceeds to pay

off his own debts. This time the property was sold at a roup within the house

of James Lyall, vintner, with an upset price of £120. At the outrunning of

the sand-glass, during which there had been several offers, William Peattie,

weaver, of Strathkinness having offered £134, became the owner. William

Peattie probably bought the houses for renting as he already owned property

in Strathkinness.

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