The first mention we have of Charles Leys in the parish of Kemnay is the recording of his marriage in the Parish Register in 1811 to Christian Winehouse, daughter of one of the gardeners at Kemnay House, and the baptism of their children thereafter. From 1841 to 1891 we can note the changes to the family in the census books. The deaths of various family members are recorded on gravestones in Kemnay Churchyard. Further research in the death registers of Kemnay would shed more light on the family

Information regarding James Downie and his family can be found in documents held by the family. These include the valuations taken at the time of his entry to the property in 1898, as well as a list of the purchases which he made at the roup. A copy of the original lease may be found amongst the papers of the Burnett Archive in Kemnay House. The title deed of 1926 when the property was purchased from the estate, vaguely shows the boundaries, but gives no measurements. Tales of most of the twentieth century developments were handed down by W Grant Downie, son of James Downie and father of the writer, who was born at Kirkstyle in 1903 and who lived and worked there until his death in 1991. He was blessed with a very clear and retentive mind.

James Downie, grandfather of the writer, came to Kemnay in 1898 following the death of Charles Leys, the previous joiner, whose father had come to Kemnay in 1800 following the death of George Stevenson in June of that year. Whether George Stevenson stayed at the site in question or not cannot be proved, but according to the 1792 estate map of Kemnay, a George Stevenson had a piece of land in the area, and according to entries in the Kirk Session records, he is designated as 'in Parkhill',

Charles Leys Sr, was born at Bendauch in the parish of Dyce. He married Christian Winehouse, daughter of Alexander Winehouse, Gardener at Kemnay House, on 14 April 1811. They had five of a family, Elspet, baptised 18 November 1812, Alexander, baptised 24 February 1814, Anne, baptised 15 Nov 1818, Christian, born 31 Aug 1821, baptised 9 September 1821 and Charles, born 18 Oct 1827 and baptised 31 October 1827.

Little information can be gleaned on the Leys family until the 1851 census, by which time the family had grown up and moved on. Charles is listed as a 'house carpenter, cart and plough wright'. Also in the household are his wife Christian, daughter Anne and grandson Charles aged 4 and born in St Clements. Charles Jr, was at that time working at Port Elphinstone Inverurie with George Walker, a carpenter employing 5 men,

By 1861, Charles Jr had returned home and was the only change in the household of ten years previously. The house, according to the census, had three rooms with windows and according to legend was thatched and was situated beside the road at the foot of the present garden. By 1871 the house had 4 rooms with windows and it is understood that the present dwelling was built towards the end of the 1860s. The smiddy house next door is reputed to have been built in 1871 and the standard is considerably higher than that of the joiner's house, which would bear out the above suggested date. According to a plan found in the Burnett archive in Kemnay House, it was a rather spartan dwelling, and quite typical of the mid 19th century. The plan itself is equally basic, giving only an elevation of the property, two sections and a plan. Sadly, maybe, there is no site plan. It is possible that the estate mason of the time had done the building work. Site planning seems to have followed no plan at all, inasmuch as the house was not laid down parallel to the nearest boundary, the churchyard dyke, nor was it even laid out square, it is more rhomboid, being possibly three inches off the square.

Levels did not seem to be of much concern either as the fireclay slabbed floor sloped from the fireplace to the door. On entering the door, straight in front was the milkhouse, little more than a passage three feet wide with a small window high up in the back wall. To the left was the kitchen which contained a box bed and a sink on the back wall. The room to the right of the door was the only room that had the walls and ceiling lined, the rest of the house walls being plastered directly on to the stone. It was about eight feet wide and contained a box bed and a closet or wardrobe. How one got upstairs is unknown as no stair is shown in the plan. During the 1880s, a room was built on to the back, supposedly for Anne. This room was built to a far higher standard than the rest of the house, the room having a plaster cornice and shutters to the windows. It had also the forerunner of a Ramsay ladder; the wooden stair could be pushed up by means of a counterbalanced weight and thus cleared space in the lobby for movement. The stonework of this portion is quarried stone whereas the earlier building is mainly land gathered stone. Again the person who laid out the building was not too fussy. The back wall was built parallel and about twenty inches away from the kirkyard dyke, which reached almost to wallhead level. The ground level at that time was about thirty inches higher than at present. This room is also rhomboid, the window wall being about three inches shorter than the opposite wall. The floor of this room is also about two inches higher than the front doorstep. Between the time the property had been built and the arrival of grandfather in 1898, various internal changes had taken place. A stair had been built in and the room (as opposed to kitchen) had been enlarged by about a foot. This had been achieved by removing the box bed and closet. In other words the inside had been totally remodelled. There was still no ceiling to the kitchen; the flooring of the upper room had to suffice. One big problem in the house was smoke; it went everywhere but up the chimney. The underside of the upstairs flooring was black; right up the roof sarking was the same. To try and alleviate the problem, a brick chimney had been built up the outside of the wall but with little success. The problem was eventually solved in the 1930s when father built in a more modern stove and closed up the massive hole at the base of the flue which had been the cause of the smoke swirling around and not going up the chimney.

The small steading adjoining the house consisted of a bire [sic] for three cattle, a turnip shed the whole width of the building (14 feet) and three feet wide and the barn twenty two feet long. The workshop was at right angles to this and was 16 feet 4 inches wide by 24 feet 4 inches long. It had an earthen floor which sloped about a foot from the barn end to the door and had four windows, two on each side, some three feet wide. The door was eight feet wide and was in two unequal halves, one three feet wide, the other five, the smaller half being split horizontally as in a stable door.

Charles Sr died on 30 January 1865 and the household at the time of the 1871 census consisted of: Charles Leys, master wright, his mother, sister Anne, nephew Charles, by then a journeyman shoemaker, William Sutherland (20) an apprentice wright and Mary Clark (14) a domestic servant.

The Leys family must have seen considerable changes in their time, most of which can only be imagined. The 1792 estate map seems reasonably accurate, and there is a building on it which could be the original workshop. This is more accurately shown on the OS map of 1866, by which time the boundary is defined. The original workshop was a sizeable building, constructed of wooden uprights sunk in the ground, having timber walls and a pantiled roof. It contained a sawpit which was supposedly used by sawyers who travelled from Aberdeen. By the early part of the twentieth century, the uprights had begun to decay and to prevent the building from toppling over, it was anchored to the wall of the newer building by a wire fixed to a harrow tine driven into the wall. All that remains today is the harrow tine, the building having been demolished in the late 1920s.

Little has come down to us of the Leys family except for an entry in the Kirk Session record of 18 Dec 1859 where C. Leys was paid for window rollers and Messrs Allan & Sons for cloth for window blinds. On 17 June the following year is the entry: 'The church window blinds having been miscut and misfitted by a local carpenter so as to be quite unserviceable were now repaired and fitted properly with new rollers &c by Allan & Sons Aberdeen at an expense in all as per acct. of £l. 0. l.' In the Kirk Session record of 10 Sep 1871 we find: … Rodger appointed Precentor in room of Charles Leys – retired.

Affairs must have been settled rather quickly as the roup was held on 23 April 1888 and grandfather purchased goods to the value of £30. 18. 2. His sister purchased on his behalf household goods to the value of £4. 7. 10. The valuation of the property and stock came to £77. 8. 5. and the rent payable was ten guineas. Grandfather was twenty eight and single. He was born at Cluny on 2l Sep 1870 where his father was carpenter at the Castle, and served his apprenticeship at Waterton near Ellon with a David Laird. Following this he managed the firm of Alexander Shepherd, Millbank, Cluny for some eight years.

The above picture taken in 1908 shows the joiner's workshop and house in front of and to the right of the church. The smiddy is on the nearside of the road. The old wooden workshop can be seen in the corner of the feu. Seen over the top of it is another shed in the back corner of the feu which was little more than a roof perched on top of the dyke. This was the gig shed.

 A comparison between the 1866 and 1900 ordnance survey maps shows that the North West boundary had been moved, possibly at the time the new buildings were erected. Space was still rather cramped and a further extension took place around 1915 which gave room for a muck midden. More land was acquired when the croft was purchased from Kemnay Estate in 1926, resulting in the site as it is today.

Originally the boundary to the north east with Kirkstyle farm was a dry stone dyke. When the property known as Louisville was built in 1906 the builder, Donald Stuart, was required to build a wall enclosing his property, totally within his feu. The wall along the roadside was built in 1908 by the Council -- ground for a pavement was taken off at that time. The wall along the boundary with the smiddy house, now known as Chester Cottage, was erected mutually in the 1930s, half being built by the joiner, the other half by the blacksmith.

Snippets from OS maps which show the acquisition of land by the tenant or owner over the years.

Change in property is an ongoing process and over the years these have been considerable. When grandfather took over the property, he swapped the back and front doors. The original front door was in two halves, whereas the back door was double margined and panelled and made of pitch pine. The two leaved door was eventually replaced in 1995.

As will be seen from the photograph on page 5, the original roof windows were simple skylights. Father fitted dormer windows to the front in 1934 and at the side in 1954. Around 1930 he erected a wooden building which comprised a coal shed, wash house and toilet. The size of this building was determined by the length of timber left over from a job. A brick coal shed was built shortly after the war with salvage bricks from a chimney stack at the quarry and the former coal shed was incorporated in the wash house. The original milk house had been enlarged and eventually became the scullery; when the floor of this gave way in the late 1940s, mother moved to the wash house outside supposedly temporarily, but never moved back. Cooking facilities and a hot water circulation were installed and mother kept it as a very snug little room. There was a bath in one corner which was simply curtained off when in use. A bathroom was built in the house in 1960.

Over the years, minor improvements were made, but following father's death in 1991 the whole inside of the house was gutted, with the exception of the back room, and remodelled with the front door giving access to what was the room end. It was actually reduced to its original width. The rest of the house was made into a self contained flat having access from the former back door. During this time several problems were solved. I had often wondered why father, when he replaced the original tiled kitchen floor with a wooden one, did not lay it level. It turned out that when the floor was removed, the floor level was the line of the bottom of the stone wall of the house and this was on the slope. The level of the room at the back of the house was continued throughout the rest of the dwelling. This was about two inches higher than the level of the floor of the room end, but it did not matter as the two were now separate, When the room floor was taken out to the front door it was about a half inch above the bottom of the door. To overcome this, a large matwell was sunk. The whole of the inside was finished in a style similar to that of the back bedroom and the house was let in January 1992.

Grandfather was never one to spend much money on his property. The division between the barn and the workshop was a simple wooden partition. When an extra stall was required for a young colt, he simply removed a portion of this and had it erected elsewhere. Considerable time elapsed before it was eventually replaced by a young apprentice. There could not have been much room in the original workshop, but then there was not much in the way of machinery. A turning lathe and mortice machine are all that appear in the inventory, and any big job had to be worked on outside,

Father extended the workshop by some twenty two feet in 1951 and was most annoyed that one of the planning conditions stated that he had to complete the building in granite or synthetic stone. Some five years later a shop in the High Street in the village was built in concrete blocks. Part of the floor of the extension was laid with sleepers and in 1963 concrete was laid to support the planing machine. When the Alford Valley Railway was lifted in 1966 a load of sleepers was purchased and these were used to complete the floor of the workshop. This proved to be quite an undertaking as the earth floor rose some twelve inches from one end to the other, and had all to be excavated by hand. During the course of the excavations a skeleton was unearthed, which, on further examination it proved to be that of a pig. Few structural alterations were carried out after this except that, as father continued to extend his farming interests with new buildings to the back of the feu, the barn was taken on as a store and a rest room was incorporated in 1987.

The production of the above research document has given me greater insight into the area than I had previously, along with a more intimate understanding of the people involved. With more time and effort it could be developed to show the position held in the community of the past by the local craftsmen. They were interdependent on each other, and the community was dependent on them. It also leaves me with the regret that I did not ask sufficient questions of father when he was alive. This, however, is a common regret, but it has to be balanced with the fact that quite often, these questions or thoughts do not arise until time is too late. It is also a document to hand down to the following generation, who, because of their tender years, cannot absorb the extent of time, by that I mean two centuries, which the research covers.

• Census for Inverurie 1851
• Censuses for Kemnay and Inverurie 1841 - 1891
• Family papers and Photographs
• Family reminiscences
• Gravestones in Kemnay Churchyard
• Kemnay Estate map of 1792 in the Burnett Archives
• Kemnay Kirk Session Records 1770 - 1870
• Ordnance Survey maps 1866, 1900, 1975
• Old Parish Registers for Kemnay
• Papers and plans in the Burnett Archives