Craigencalt Farm Historic Summary

Craigencalt Farm is now a 23 acre, 10 hectare, smallholding very close to the southerly shore of Fife just outside the village of Kinghorn and along the north shore of Kinghorn Loch. Like many country properties it has had a long and varied history but as far as we know at present it began life as a lint mill, for processing flax, in the later decades of the eighteenth century; possibly even earlier.

We do not know exactly when the mill stopped working but it was probably around the middle of the nineteenth century when it starts being mentioned as a farm and it would have become rather small to be economic. From the late nineteenth century through to the 1960's it was a fairly large, by the standard of the times, and prosperous dairy farm.

Times change though and the farm was later incorporated into a larger farm with its own farm buildings little used and the house rented out to lodgers untill 1988. That is when the current strand of ownership began with the purchase of the farm buildings and least usable land for the farmer, who was principally an arable farmer.

The derivation of the "Craigencalt" name is uncertain. Maps of the past show it as Craigencalt, Craigencat or Craigencault but the first is used in all more modern sources. Someone told us it meant 'crag of the hazels' but then someone else swore that was wrong to offer some other explanation. There is no hazel on the crag but then it is pretty certain from historical documentation that the crag is largely man made by the quarrying of rock to build the buildings and farm walls with. However it is terrible stone to work with being extremely hard 'whinstone', a form of granite, that breaks at all sorts of odd angles to make laying a wall with it skilled and hard work. I speak from hard personal experience!