As the beautiful old stone is expertly replaced around the front of the Pluscarden Lodge, our builder Colin Thomson has made another remarkable observation.
Clearly when the Earl of Fife built our Lodge in 1820, his builders re-used stones from a previous building.
Stones that once made a chimney were turned around, so that their blackened surface, now facing inwards, would be completely invisible.
So it seems safe to presume that an older house once stood on this spot, or on one very near it, and that its stones were re-used in 1820.
Presumably also, many of those stones would have been taken from the crumbling ruins of the mediaeval Priory.
If only those stones could speak...
Of course Colin has been careful to keep those black surfaces out of sight: though the soot that marks them would now be more than two hundred years old.
Our attached pictures of the front door area show how a couple of the shaped stones, on the right side of the doorway arch, are modern. Their predecessors had to be replaced, having cracked under the pressure of the subsidence.
