Not to the manor born

Six years ago I embarked on a little redecoration of my husband’s family house, over 200 years old in south- west Scotland. ‘Ah’, said a knowing friend from the Highlands, now a neighbour, who would soon embrace the same task, as we ripped up floorboards, struggled with ancient heating systems and filled skips; ‘ah’ she said, ‘the generational refit.’ It is the same exercise which lies at the heart of Belinda Rathbone’s well-observed description of ten years of similar effort near Arbroath in the Scottish Highlands, at her new husband’s ancestral home, a Georgian mansion called the Guynd.

‘Mansion’ is a word not much used in the description of country houses these days; it is more favoured by estate agents in reference to large early 20th-century blocks of flats. But ‘mansion’ is a word commonly used in America, and Belinda is a New Yorker historian who meets her Scottish cousin-by- marriage at a family wedding.