Not to the manor born

Six years ago I embarked on a little redecoration of my husband’s family house, over 200 years old in south- west Scotland. ‘Ah’, said a knowing friend from the Highlands, now a neighbour, who would soon embrace the same task, as we ripped up floorboards, struggled with ancient heating systems and filled skips; ‘ah’ she said, ‘the generational refit.’ It is the same exercise which lies at the heart of Belinda Rathbone’s well-observed description of ten years of similar effort near Arbroath in the Scottish Highlands, at her new husband’s ancestral home, a Georgian mansion called the Guynd.

‘Mansion’ is a word not much used in the description of country houses these days; it is more favoured by estate agents in reference to large early 20th-century blocks of flats. But ‘mansion’ is a word commonly used in America, and Belinda is a New Yorker historian who meets her Scottish cousin-by- marriage at a family wedding. John Ouchterlony, 53 (to her 39) and a bachelor, represents something of a mystery to Belinda. He has the easy manners and deep inner-core confidence of ‘an upper-class British background’ combined with eccentricity and obvious ambivalence of feeling towards his inheritance, the house and 400-acre estate. Love, or perhaps passion, overtakes them, Belinda is offered ‘it all, if you want it’.

With the enthusiasm, energy and efficiency that Americans so often bring to a challenging project in a foreign land the new bride attacks the quantities of clutter accumulated by acquisitive forebears. In a house of 36 rooms, at one time requisitioned by the Wrens (‘gentler tenants than men’) she counts 72 assorted chairs, five vacuum cleaners, drawers full of ancient underwear and much else. She hacks at the wild, overgrown abandon of a once tended walled garden and landscaped grounds.