Cairness House.

Our neighbours across the fields, taken from our sitting room window.

A bit closer.

Cairness House, 4 miles (6.4 km) south of Fraserburgh in the County ofAberdeenshire, is the largest and finest country house in Buchan and one of the great houses of Scotland. It was built between 1791 and 1797 to designs by architectJames Playfair and replaced an earlier house of 1781 by Robert Burn, which was largely incorporated into the Playfair scheme. Sir John Soane assisted in the final stages of the construction following Playfair’s death in 1794. The park was laid out by Thomas White, a follower of Lancelot 'Capability' Brown.

After the Second World War, the house was used as a farmhouse and gradually fell into serious decline. The park was destroyed from the early 1950s onwards with the mass clearance of trees in order to reclaim land for agricultural use. In 1991, the house was listed as a Building At Risk by the Scottish Civic Trust. A major long-term restoration programme of the house and grounds was instigated by new owners in 2001.

In 2009, the project won the Georgian Group Architectural Awards prize for best Restoration of a Georgian country house in Britain. The Georgian Group stated that: "From being a moribund building at risk riddled with dry rot, Cairness is now a magnificent private home." The prize was given by HRH the Duke of Gloucester at a ceremony at Christie's, London in November 2009.

Cairness House now contains a very fine collection of furniture and works of art and is open to groups by appointment. It is protected as a category A listed building.

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From the rear of Cairness, the DP took this photograph of an oil rig out in the North Sea.

Currently up for sale.  We shall miss Julio and Khalil if and when they do sell.  They have done an enormous amount of work at Cairness.  They also do bed and breakfast!  Also self catering in one of the gate houses.

You weren't expecting that!

And the rear of the house.

I have to say that I have no desire to live in such a place.  The responsibility, heating!, cleaning, oh no.

It is lovely to visit, particularly around Christmas time when we join the other neighbours at Cairness.

Quite happy to look at it from the window the rest of the year.