Just Another Birthday #tenyearson

Final weekend of the summer holidays and we're finishing the same way we started... with a party!

And still 29!!

Sir Alexander MacRobert purchased the Burnside Estate (now known as Douneside House) as a holiday home for his family in 1888. During the 1900s, the MacRobert family added extra rooms and a tower, transforming the property into a spectacular country house and gardens.

Sir Alexander and Lady MacRobert had three sons, all of whom died under tragic circumstances.  The eldest, Alasdair, was killed in a civil flying accident in 1938, aged just twenty-six. On his death, the baronetcy passed to Roderic, a pilot in the Royal Air Force.  Roderic was lost in action just three years later on May 22nd 1941, also at the age of twenty-six, while leading a flight of Hurricanes in a strafing attack on a German-held airfield in Iraq.  The baronetcy now passed to the youngest son, Iain, who was by then a pilot officer in the RAF having joined straight from Cambridge University.  Less than six weeks after the death of his brother, Iain was reported missing when his Blenheim aircraft failed to return from a search and rescue mission.  He was twenty-four years old.

Lady MacRobert's response on hearing of the loss of her sons gives a flavour to her character. She made a donation of £25,000 to purchase a bomber for the RAF and asked that it be named "MacRobert's Reply".  The chosen bomber was a Stirling of XV Squadron, which was handed over in October 1941, and the name was the start of a tradition that the RAF has kept alive.  In 1942, Lady MacRobert donated a further £20,000 to purchase four Hurricane fighters, which were sent to RAF operations in the Middle East.  Three were named after her sons and the fourth after her. 

For a number of years, until a major renovation in 2015, Douneside House was used (almost exclusively) as a holiday retreat for Commissioned Officers, with rates subsidised by The MacRobert Trust.  Which might actually explain why we'd never heard of it until only very recently!

But what a wonderful afternoon of cake eating and swimming pool playing, evening of fine dining and great conversing, night of much needed sleeping in the silent countryside, and morning of brunching, more conversing, and croquet and tennis playing... 

Ten years later and look how they've grown!

Getting a final round of croquet in!

But partying was only half the fun of staying on the outskirts of Tarland.  The Sunday funday was all about the new Tarland Trails - Aberdeenshire's only purpose built Mountain Bike Trail Centre - which opened up last Spring and the boys hadn't yet been to.

So while the girls sat in the car and watched some downloaded movies / TV shows, and I cycled the 27k back home, the boys mountain biked their heart out: