The rural Angus home of a man whose agricultural invention helped transform the industry is on the market.
Dating from 1820, the late Georgian former manse at Carmyllie was home to the Rev Patrick Bell, inventor of the reaping machine, a creation that marked the beginning of the end of harvesting by sickle and scythe.
Bell, who lived at the manse from 1843 until his death in 1869, was raised on his father’s farm and saw the back-breaking work required at harvest time.
As a student he was interested in mechanics and secretly made a crude horse-drawn reaping machine, consisting of a frame, cutters and a piece of sloping canvas.
He perfected the machine behind closed-doors and in the field at night, before it was put to use on his father’s farm and then manufactured locally and exhibited throughout Angus.
Many reapers appeared after Bell’s invention, but his was ruled by a team of international judges to be “the best and most effective reaping machine”.
Even in more recent times, reapers were based on his design.
The original sits in the Science Museum in London.
Bell decided against patenting his invention, and so reaped little financial reward from it.
But, 40 years later, the Scottish Highland and Agricultural Society presented him with the not insubstantial sum of £1,000 and a silver salver with the inscription: ‘Presented by a large number of his countrymen in token of their appreciation of his services as the inventor of an efficient reaping machine’.
There is a memorial stained-glass window to him in Carmyllie Church.
An earlier manse in Carmyllie was the birthplace of William Small, a “true son of the Scottish Enlightenment”.
As a professor of natural philosophy at William and Mary College in Virginia in America, Small taught Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the American Declaration of Independence and third president of the United States.
The two remained friends and, in his 1812 biography, Jefferson tells how Small “probably fixed the destinies of my life”.
The current Carmyllie House, marketed by Savills at offers over £480,000, is a category C listed manse set within beautifully laid out grounds and has been refurbished and upgraded, while retaining its original character and features.