Lilliesleaf and Dowanhill

In April 1880 Alexander George Burnett issued a building lease to Miss Jessie Taylor for ninety nine years at an annual rent of £2. 13s. 4d (£2.66).  On the outside of the lease document is written in pencil:
'Margaret Dingwall c/o John Reid, Craigmyle Cottage, Logie, Pitcaple.'

This is the only document relating to this lease to be found in the Burnett Archive.  All that can be said about it is that it was the piece of ground on which Lilliesleaf to the east of Kendall Road on Victoria Terrace was built.  In 1930 a Mrs Margaret Dingwall was staying at Lilliesleaf.

On 28 February 1880 A G Burnett issued a building lease to William Wright, carpenter, Kemnay the entry date of which was Whitsunday 1879 and the annual rental was £2.  The plot of land lay immediately to the east of that piece of ground leased by Miss Jessie Taylor.  Conditions laid down in the lease stipulated that within two years a building to the value of £150 had to be erected on a building line sixty feet from the line of the road.  The front of the building had to be 'built of punched ashlar in regular courses closely jointed window and door openings, the belts, skew tabling and chimney heads of close picked ashlar.'

William Wright was another of the early entrepreneurs in the village.  At the time he took on this building lease he was still only in his late twenties, having spent most of his early life in the village, his parents lived in part of what is now Kirkstyle Cottage, the last house on the right hand side of Victoria Terrace on leaving the village.  In 1881 he was staying at Dowan Hill Cottage, the house which he had recently built, along with his wife Mary, who was the daughter of the joiner at Kinmuck, near Keithhall, son James and daughter Williamina and a female lodger.  There were also two other tenants living in the cottage numbering another eight people.

According to a document dated 19 October 1882, William Wright sold Dowanhill to Mrs Margaret Laing or Panton, who stayed in Blythewood with her son, for £305.   She in turn sold it to William and James Leith, brothers who farmed at Wester Tulloch Midmar, for £295 on 10 November 1884.  In 1891 William and James were staying at Dowanhill with their sisters Jane and Christian.  James Murdoch and his wife Elsie and family, Robert, Alexander and Helen along with Elsie's sister Helen Moir were also staying in the house.  By 1901 only James and Christian remain of the Leith family and Mary Adam a dressmaker born in Midmar is staying there.  James Leith was admitted to the eldership of the Parish Church on 22^nd July 1894, a post he was to fill until his death in 1915.  In his will he left £15 for 'behoof of the Schemes of the Church of Scotland'

In a letter from J & G Collie solicitors in Aberdeen and dated 22 May 1928 it is intimated that Mrs Helen McCombie or Gilbert has now rights to the subjects known as Dowanhill, formerly belonging to William Paterson.