Cumrue Farmhouse, near Templand

Cumrue Farmhouse is an early 19th century two-storey, three-bay symmetrical farmhouse near Templand, built to the south of an earlier house of similar form, doubling the original building's depth. The farm is shown on Roy's Military Survey of Scotland of 1752–55, indicating occupation of the site well before the current buildings were constructed. The steading is believed to date to around 1827, with the farmhouse extension likely carried out at the same time, and work is known to have taken place at Cumrue after 1822. The steading was built by the contractor C. Halliday, as recorded in the Register of Entailed Estates held at the National Records of Scotland. In the 19th century the farm was owned by the Duke of Buccleuch, who made substantial improvements to his land from 1822 onwards, notably by constructing farm steadings. Some of these were designed by the Duke's architect Walter Newall, an eminent Scottish architect of the period who contributed designs to J.C. Loudon's Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture, first published in 1835. There is no direct evidence that Newall was involved at Cumrue, but elements of the design may reflect his influence on the estate. The listing category was changed from B to C and the record revised in 2019; the building was previously listed as 'Cumrue Farmhouse and Former Cartshed/Barn'.

The farmhouse is built in rubble stone and painted throughout, with contrasting smooth painted window and door margins. The south (principal) elevation has painted ashlar corner margins. The openings in the north elevation are irregular, and there are two single-storey outshots at each corner of the rear, each with a monopitch slate roof. The windows are predominantly plate glass in timber sash and case frames. The roofs are finished with grey slates and straight stone skews. There are wallhead chimney stacks: those to the south, earlier-fronted part of the house are ashlar and coped, while those to the older rear part appear to have been rebuilt and are rendered. At the centre of the front elevation is a late 20th century single-storey porch with a piended slate roof. Although this porch is a fairly imposing addition, the original proportions, symmetry and openings of the front elevation remain clearly legible.

The interior was inspected in 2018. The entrance hall has a shallow arch with scrolled consoles. The ground floor southwest room has a basket-arched buffet niche in its north wall. The walls of this room carry a mural of hunting scenes, signed by Karl Ruckgauer of Mainz and dated 1946. Most rooms have plain moulded cornicing and panelled timber window shutters. The doors are predominantly four- or six-panel timber with moulded architraves.

The hunting scene mural is of particular social and historical interest. The previous listed building record notes that Ruckgauer was a prisoner of war held at the former Kirkmichael House (now the Barony, part of the Agricultural College), nearby. The date of 1946 is consistent with the period before repatriation, as some prisoners of war remained after the end of the war or chose to stay. Prisoners of war frequently produced artworks — ranging from music to carvings and paintings — as gifts or in return for good treatment. The people portrayed in the hunting scene are understood to include a previous owner of Cumrue Farm. The artistic style can be described as naïve art, characteristic of prisoner-of-war artwork, and the mural is comparable in type, if not in scale, to works such as the Italian Chapel on Orkney and the Ukrainian Chapel at Hallmuir near Lockerbie. Little is known about Ruckgauer or whether he produced other works in Scotland or in Mainz.

To the rear (north) of the house is a farm steading comprising a series of rectangular-plan barns, byres and sheds arranged around an open courtyard. The steading buildings are rubble-built with tooled stone around the openings and have slate roofs, though there are a variety of 20th century later additions and alterations. The interior of the steading is plain, with no historic agricultural fixtures and fittings surviving, although some long feeding troughs remain in the north range.

At the southwest corner of the steading is a cartshed with a barn above, built in 1827 by C. Halliday, contractor. The south elevation has eight arcaded segmental-arched openings. The opening to the left (west) is a narrower arch with a later door, behind which stairs lead to the upper floor. The cartshed is largely unaltered. Its design, with tooled stonework and stone columns supporting arches, is typical of cartshed design in southeast Scotland. The scale of the structure is significant: seven of the openings function as cartshed bays, and since one bay approximated to between 20 and 32 hectares of arable farmland, this indicates that Cumrue was a very large farm. Cartsheds, often with granaries above, were a late 18th century innovation that spread across Scotland by the 1820s and 1830s, replacing packhorses and sledges as carts became indispensable for transporting goods to local markets.

At the northeast corner of the steading is a circular horsemill. The threshing machine was invented by Andrew Meikle in East Linton in 1787, and by 1800 such machines were replacing less efficient hand threshing at larger farms. Counties including Dumfries and Galloway were at the forefront of this development. Horse-powered mills were driven by four to six horses tethered to long beams and walked in a circular path, turning a central axis to power the machine; the structures housing them were of oblong or circular plan. By the 1850s most horse mills were rapidly converted to steam power, and only a handful survived after that date, mostly on smaller farms or crofts. In Dumfries and Galloway there are around 30 other listed examples surviving as part of steading complexes, and their survival is now rare across Scotland. The horsemill at Cumrue retains a significant proportion of its fabric, including a conical roof structure supported on timber beams radiating from a central post, as well as the central timber shaft, clearly demonstrating its original use. No machinery was present when the building was inspected in 2018.

The plan form of the farm, with steading buildings arranged around an open courtyard and a detached farmhouse with its principal elevation turned away from the working buildings to face south, is characteristic of improvement-period farm design of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This arrangement reflects both practical efficiency — a compact layout of barn, byres, stables and storage — and the social status of the farmer, who maintained a degree of separation from the day-to-day work of the farm. The footprint of the farm buildings is first shown in detail on McCallum and Dundas's Plan of 1854, on which the circular horsemill is depicted. Various additions have been built to the west, north and east of the steading, but the 19th century footprint remains legible. With the exception of the porch addition, the footprint of the house itself is largely unchanged from that shown on the 1854 plan and later Ordnance Survey maps.

Cumrue Farm is located on raised ground and is a prominent feature in the landscape, given the scale of both the farmhouse and the steading. Large agricultural sheds have been built to the north and west, but these have not adversely affected the setting of the listed buildings to the point where the 19th century layout of the farm can no longer be read. The connection between the farmhouse and the steading remains clear. To the northwest of the farm is a very long row of farm labourers' cottages built for Cumrue Farm, described as one of the longest rows of farm labourers' cottages in Scotland; its size reflects the considerable scale of the farm in the 19th century. These cottages are not listed and were not assessed as part of the 2018 listing review.

Kirkmichael parish, in which Cumrue Farm sits, was one of the best grain-growing parishes in the area because of its relative flatness and dryness. The New Statistical Account of 1845 records that the greatest gross amount of produce in the parish at that time was 1,350 acres of oats, with 1,650 cattle grazed. The General View of the Agriculture of the County of Dumfries of 1812 noted the need for good farmhouses with suitable steadings to attract incoming tenant farmers, and surviving farms from this period are an important part of the area's agricultural history.

All 20th century and later additions to the steading and separate ancillary buildings are excluded from the listing in accordance with Section 1(4A) of the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) (Scotland) Act 1997.