Details |
Former Drainine Manse and associated farm buildings, depicted on the historic OS maps and still in use. Both buildings are listed with the former manse being B Listed, and the steading as C Listed. The manse was built by A. and W. Reid in 1853 who also built additions in 1877. It is a 2-storey, asymmetrical 3-bay house that is harled with painted stone margins. There are projecting west bays with a canted window in ground floor from after 1877. There is a square porch at the re-entrant angle and a tripartite in the ground floor east bay. Glazing is 8-pane, and there is a stair window to the rear. There are deep corniced stacks, bracketted eaves and a piended slate roof. The single storey drying room, which is now a garage, was added 1877 at the west. There are further, later alterations to the rear. A pair of square ashlar gatepiers, with moulded pyramidal caps, and quadrants, is also present. The garden wall is a high coped rubble construction. The steading building was also built by A. and W. Reid in 1853. It is a symmetrical U-plan steading and gighouse constructed of rubble with tooled dressings and painted margins. The buildings all survive, but the steading is shown on current maps as largely unroofed. The manse was purchased by the Navy in 1954 (a new manse being founded on James Street) as the residence of the first Naval Captain of Lossiemouth Airfield (NJ26NW0045) after it became a Royal Naval Air Station after WWII, as a result it became known as 'The Captain's House'. Local tradition tells the story of a servant in the 1880s, coming back to the manse late one night after out courting a boy from the local village, found herself locked out. She climbed up to the first floor balcony, but couldn’t get in. Her body was found the next day, having died of exposure. One of the glass panes retained the outline of one of her hands, said to be from where she tried to open the window. The outline of the hand could still be seen when the Navy purchased the house, but despite efforts to clean it off they couldn’t. The pane was removed and sent for testing down at Rosyth Naval Base. It is not clear whether anything was found which could explain the imprint, but the pane was later reinstated in the window. Later RAF Commanding Officers confirmed it was still visible in the house, though noting that the pane had been reinstalled upside down so the fingers of the handprint now pointed downwards.
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