Wester Kittochside Farm

Wester Kittochside Farm is a substantial Grade A listed property comprising a farmhouse dated 1783 with a kitchen addition of 1906, extensive farm steading buildings, Dutch barns, boundary walls and gatepiers.

The farmhouse is a two-storey structure with attic, five bays in classical L-plan arrangement with symmetrical design. It is constructed in stugged cream sandstone ashlar with polished ashlar dressings, featuring a base course and dentilled eaves course. Long and short rusticated quoins frame the building, with lugged and keystoned margins to all windows. The principal south elevation is dominated by a pitched-roofed entrance porch at ground level with glazed superstructure over stone, containing two-leaf timber panelled doors that mask a deep-set small-pane door with letterbox fanlight. An oculus window sits within the pediment spanning the slightly advanced central bays. Windows at each floor occupy the bays flanking the entrance and the outer bays set back to left and right. The east side elevation features a single advanced gabled bay to the left with attic window offset to the right of the gable and gablehead stack above; a blocked window serves the lean-to scullery addition in the angle of the L-plan. The west side elevation has an attic window offset to the left within a gabled bay to the right, with gablehead stack, and a first-floor window in the bay to the left. The north rear elevation features a boarded door to a lean-to addition in the angle of the L, with a two-bay gabled elevation advanced to the right containing offset windows and a gablehead stack, and a further first-floor window in the bay set back to the left.

Windows throughout are predominantly 12-pane timber sash and case. The roof is covered in grey slate with stone skews, block skewputts, corniced and panelled stacks, and cast-iron rainwater goods.

The interior contains an encaustic tiled hall with a dogleg timber stair featuring turned timber balusters and timber handrail. Doors throughout are architraved timber panels. Main rooms feature floreate cornices with plain cornices elsewhere. Purpose-built fitted furniture includes an arched display cabinet. The attic has timber partition walls. The first-floor drawing room has a bracketed fire surround with carved rococo cartouches to the overmantle mirror, with hand-painted tiles depicting street scenes inset around the grate. Other period chimneypieces survive throughout.

The farm steading comprises buildings constructed between circa 1860 and 1895 in squared and snecked part-rendered sandstone with ball-finalled gables, forming a courtyard to the north of the main house. Roofs are grey slate with some small rooflights and cast-iron rainwater goods.

The byre and dairy forming the east range of the steading has a sliding boarded door to the north gable, blank south gable with gablehead stack, and regularly disposed ventilation holes along each long side. A boarded door and trough face the courtyard. The interior retains a concrete-lined floor with central slurry channels (greips), concrete cattle divisions with cast-iron tether poles, and exposed timber roof.

The threshing barn forms the north range with sliding two-leaf boarded doors below a round arch to the east gable. Three ledges (possibly dovecote) rise to the gablehead above. The west gable is blank. Two regularly disposed boarded doors with various narrow slit openings face the south (courtyard) elevation, with a boarded door and blocked window to the north elevation. The interior retains largely intact timber threshing equipment with the floor divided at the west end by timber partitioning.

A central linking range rebuilt in the 1930s forms the internal angle of the L-plan with two bays, gabled rectangular plan, windows to the south elevation and a boarded door offset to the left of the west gabled elevation.

The stable forming the west range adjoins the main house at its southeast angle. Roofless lean-to structures span the ground to both south and north gables with small windows above each. Two evenly disposed sliding boarded doors face the east (courtyard) elevation with two windows between, and a small high window sits centred to the west elevation. A lean-to privy block of 1906 with corrugated-iron roof is attached to the left with a timber-panelled door and square-plan ridge ventilator. The interior retains timber stable divisions with upswept upper borders, timber hay racks, timber wall-mounted saddle racks, and wooden privy seats to the addition. Notably, the stable contains an interesting timber ladder with arched footholds cut from solid timber.

Two Dutch hay barns stand to the northwest of the courtyard. The earlier barn has a segmental-arched corrugated-iron roof with iron ribs and Y supports, bearing a manufacturer's plaque reading "A & J MAIN, Glasgow and London". The later pitched-roofed boarded barn along the south side features cast-iron columnar supports with a lean-to addition to the east.

The gatepiers and boundary walls include rendered low coped quadrant walls flanking square-plan piers southeast of the main house, with band course below cornice, large ball finials raised on swept supports, and steel railings lining the drive. Square-plan sandstone ashlar piers to the north of the house have stepped panels to the main face, cornice, and shallow pyramidal cap. A small triangular-plan farm garden with simple stone square-plan gatepiers survives to the southwest of the house.

The property was the home of the Reid family for ten generations and was gifted to the National Trust for Scotland in 1992 by Mrs Reid. The farmhouse, with its symmetrical classical design, rusticated quoins and dentilled pediment, presents a grandiose appearance more akin to a miniature country house than a typical farmhouse. The building has been substantially altered over the years with major works carried out in 1906 and again in 1995 by the National Trust for Scotland.

This collection of late 18th-century buildings represents an important and unique survivor of a traditional farm from a period that witnessed the transition from horse to tractor power. The iron workings of the original horse mill that powered the threshing barn remain intact, as does a substantial quantity of the threshing machinery. The byre and dairy complex are particularly good survivors of their type with fixtures and fittings intact.

The original 110-acre farm has cultural significance through the survival of hawthorn boundaries and dry-stone dykes that demarcate the separate agricultural zones found in the runrig system. Architectural unity is achieved through the repetition of ball finials on the main gatepiers and farm gables. The farmhouse features keystoned window margins and panelled stacks of particular note.

The Reid family worked Wester Kittochside from at least 1567 until the early 1970s. This prolonged single-family ownership has meant the property escaped the massive changes forced upon other farms by constant pressure to increase production. Technological advances and economic pressures elsewhere led to the demolition of original buildings, destruction of field boundaries and loss of surviving cultivation features. Wester Kittochside, however, retains these older features. The buildings together with the surviving field layout provide an important and uniquely complete three-dimensional record of the agricultural revolution in Scotland.