Leslie House

Leslie House stands in Glenrothes, Fife, as the largest and earliest Restoration house in the county. Built between 1667 and 1674 for John Leslie, Duke of Rothes, it once rivalled Holyrood Palace in size and grandeur. The writer Daniel Defoe called it ‘the Glory of the Place, and indeed of the whole Province of Fife’. After a fire in 1763, only the west wing survived and was rebuilt. The house passed through notable hands, including the philanthropist Countess of Rothes, who turned part of it into a hospital during the First World War. In 1952 it became a Church of Scotland care home before later suffering fire damage in 2009. The house’s grounds once stretched widely, with fine plantations of ash, elm, beech and oak remarked upon by Blackwood in 1836. A beech avenue planted around two centuries ago still stands, with trees measuring over five metres in girth. The gardens supplied much of the land for Riverside Park when Glenrothes was designated a new town in 1948. The mansion’s interior once housed a picture gallery longer than that at Holyroodhouse, adorned with portraits by Jamieson and Reynolds. Tapestries depicted classical and biblical scenes, while relics included a dagger linked to a 16th-century murder and a sword carried at Charles II’s coronation. Today the restored house forms part of a residential development, its surviving west wing returned to use after decades of change. Visitors can walk the ancient beech avenue and view the rebuilt structure from the park. The surrounding landscape still reflects the careful planting of past centuries, offering a quiet reminder of the house’s long history.