Bush o’ Bield (possible) (site of)

Bush o’ Bield was an old house “of a baronial character” which was extant in the early 17th century but of which nothing now remains.

Little is known about the house but its baronial description and age may indicate that it was a tower house, so I have listed it as a possible castle for now pending further research.

The house was occupied by the Reverend Samuel Rutherford, a Covenanter, who was minister of Anwoth between 1627 and 1639.

By 1664 Marion Peebles, the widow of the Gordon laird of Cardoness, was living at Bush o’ Bield or Buck o’ Bield with her two sons, William and Alexander Gordon.

In the 17th century the Gordons were involved in a local feud with the McCulloch family which culminated in Sir Godfrey McCulloch of Cardoness Castle shooting William Gordon in the leg 1690. William died from his injury and Sir Godfrey fled to France but was apprehended in 1697 while in Edinburgh and beheaded.

All trace of the house had been removed some time before 1884.

Of Rutherford’s manse of Bush-o-bield, not even a stone remains. But there are those still living who remember its site and its ruins. It was an old house even in his days, built in baronial style, having belonged to an Anwoth family of rank, and containing more space than the simple pastor needed. It stood on a gentle eminence, with a garden behind producing sufficient vegetables for culinary purposes, and abounding in the rose, the honey-suckle, the balm, and other flowers in which our fore-fathers delighted. The Anwoth people of the last generation used to tell of gigantic hollies which lined the front of the house, while a green field gradually sloped down to the level, along which a tiny burn found its way to the Fleet not far off. The church was so near that when the pastor heard the first sound of the bell from its little belfry, he had ample time to don his Geneva gown, and, passing calmly through an intervening copse, to be in his place at the appointed time, to read out the first words of praise.

Samuel Rutherford
Andrew Thomson, London, 1884

Stones from the house were used to build the new church at Anwoth.