East Lodge, St Colme House

East Lodge, St Colme House

Designed by J Maitland and Wardrop in 1870, East Lodge is a two-storey, three-bay rectangular-plan gate lodge to the former Donibristle Estate. The building consists of a main block with an advanced porch and rear outshots. It is constructed in coursed stugged ashlar with droved arises, a base course, mullioned windows, overhanging bracketed eaves, and decorative bargeboards to all gables.

The principal east elevation features a short flight of steps leading to the entrance, with a full-height gabled porch projecting at the centre. The door is set back behind a moulded basket-arched doorpiece, with a window to its left return. To the left is a bipartite window with a consoled sloping hood, and to the right a canted tripartite window with side lights. A slightly advanced section at first-floor level above the entrance contains a bipartite window at the centre, with a cavetto moulding and centred decorative square motif separating the storeys. A first-floor tripartite window with a consoled sloping hood is centred above the canted ground-floor window to the right.

The south elevation displays a ground-floor tripartite window with a consoled sloping hood, with a tripartite first-floor window centred above. A plain elevation of an outhouse projects to the far left.

The west elevation features a single-storey outhouse to the right with an adjacent service courtyard containing openings to store cupboards and a defunct WC. To the left is a single-storey gabled outshot (possibly later), with the gable of the house set above, including a window and door to the right return.

The north elevation has an outshot to the right with a window to the left. A central ground-floor tripartite window with a consoled sloping hood is matched by a first-floor tripartite window centred above.

The boarded entrance door features decorative hinges. Windows throughout have stop-chamfered surrounds with stone mullions, predominantly three-pane timber sash and case windows to the ground floor and two-pane timber sash and case windows to the first floor, with lattice glazing to the porch window. Decorative timber bargeboards with scrolled leaf details adorn the steeply pitched gables, which feature tie braces and pendants in the apices, crowned by finials. The pitched grey slate roof is pierced by a two-pane rooflight to the west. An off-centre shouldered clustered polygonal ridge stack with moulded cornice and circular clay cans sits at the apex, with a shouldered twin polygonal stack to the west pitch, also with moulded cornice and polygonal clay cans.

The screen walls, gates, gatepiers and railings form an integral part of the design. A pair of large droved ashlar gatepiers with chamfered square plans on plinths and corniced caps are surmounted by finely carved urns topped with coronet finials. Pedestrian gates of highly decorative wrought and cast iron feature stylised star motifs to the outer edges, guilloche detailing, and a large central circular design crowned with a gold-painted coronet and radiating spokes, some terminating in golden spheres. Quadrant railings rest on an ashlar-coped base with stylised star motifs, supported by decorative console brackets, and decorated with gold-painted arrowheads. Screen-wall piers match the main gatepiers but without finials. Curved screen walls are constructed in ashlar stone with a base course and moulded ashlar coping. A long boundary wall running west along the High Street to Sandhaven is built in random rubble with slaister render and crenellated with ashlar coping. A shorter boundary wall running east to Park Lane entrance follows the same construction, though some ashlar coping was missing as of 2002.

The lodge stands as part of a group with Donibristle House, Donibristle Stables, Donibristle Chapel, Donibristle Ice-House, Donibristle Estate Boundary Wall and Fordell Railway within Dalgety Parish. It marks one of the grand entrances to the Earl of Moray's former estate at Donibristle, which comprised approximately 2,000 acres of parkland. The main estate house, an 18th-century mansion overlooking Donibristle Bay, was gutted by fire in 1858 and subsequently abandoned, though its service wings were later converted to flats and a new central section was built in the original style. Despite this loss, the Earl of Moray's Fife estates, totalling approximately 7,000 to 8,000 acres, remained well-maintained through substantial income from the family's coalfields at Cowdenbeath and Kelty.

The East Lodge was built after the house fire but nonetheless reflects the wealth and status of the Moray family. Its plan and elevations are an inverted but otherwise identical version of the East Lodge at Darnaway Castle, Morayshire, built in 1868, sharing the same distinctive gatepiers and detailed wrought and cast-iron gates. The West Lodge at Donibristle, with its triumphal arch and thirteen iron railings, was reportedly equal in design and workmanship to those at Buckingham Palace; its pillars, gates and railings were transported to Darnaway Castle in the 1950s.

The closure of Fife's coalfields in the 20th century rendered the Moray estate in Fife no longer economically viable, and the majority was sold in the 1960s. Today the lodge and gatepiers remain among the few reminders of the grand Donibristle Estate. The avenue that once led through parkland to the site of Donibristle House now leads nowhere, with most of the parkland built over as the new town of Dalgety Bay. Notably, the roof finials have survived at the Aberdour lodge, an outcome less common at comparable estates where such features are typically lost and not replaced.