Girgenti House

Girgenti House (OS grid reference: NS 36502 43575) was a small, rather eccentric mansion built on part of the old Barony of Bonshaw in the parish of Stewarton, East Ayrshire, Scotland.

Bonnyton, a part of the Barony of Bonshaw, had belonged to the Reids of Stacklawhill and also to several generations of the Watts family, who were joiners and cartwrights. Born there was Doctor Robert Watt, the eminent Scotsman who published the Bibliotheca Britannica in 1824, shortly before he died; it records more than 200,000 books, pamphlets and periodicals printed from 1450 to the early nineteenth century and took him 25 years to compile. His portrait hangs in the entrance hall of the Royal Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, and his direct descendants still live in the Stewarton area.

Captain John Cheape, the builder of Girgenti House, belonged to the Fife family represented by George C. Cheape, Esq., of Strathtyrum, and was the seventh son of James Cheape, Esq., of Sauchie, in Clackmannanshire. He was in the Scots Fusilier Guards and had served in the Napoleonic Wars.

Bonnyton (not Muirhead as sometimes stated) was renamed Girgenti by the well-travelled Captain Cheape, perhaps in honour of a visit to the ancient Greek ruins of Agrigentum (the name of the town has become Girgenti in modern Sicilian). In 1827 he paid Thomas Reid £1350 for the property, totalling 50 Scotch acres, and at a cost of £6000 he demolished the old Bonnyton farm steading and built a rather eccentric mansion house and offices and planted extensive plantations and shrubberies on what had been a wild moss-land. It is not known what brought him to the area or why he chose such a comparatively desolate site. Moorhead is the original name given in the Lainshaw Register of Sasines for Girgenti.

Cheape lived at Girgenti for the last twenty years of his life (1829–1850) after leaving the army. The house had a pillared portico and was basically single-storeyed in appearance, with bays, a capped tower and dormer windows on two different levels; it had a large summer house. The OS maps show associated buildings—presumably the mains or home farm and a coach house, stables, and so forth. The National Archives of Scotland hold a map of the estate made in 1845, surveyed by John Fairlie.

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