ESCAPE THE GRIEVES FARMHOUSE

An untapped part of Fife is fertile ground for fresh-air adventures - especially now that the doors have opened to this stylish farmhouse

- Words Natasha Radmehr

Well, this is fortuitous. My husband and I are a few weeks away from moving to our new house and almost every conversation has revolved around how we'll decorate it. Just when I start to worry that we've excavated every last scrap of the fun topics (Farrow & Ball vs. Edward Bulmer; what lurks beneath the carpets; where we'll hang the weird ceramic fish I bought in Portugal three years ago) and will have to move on to terra snore-a (insulation, heat pumps), I step inside The Grieves Farmhouse and feel my eyeballs begin to tingle. “Wow. Look at those tiles!” I exclaim. And lo, our chat is rescued by a herringbone-paved terracotta brick floor.

There’s an unexpectedly continental feel about this place given its location on a 750-acre arable farm near Kirkcaldy. It helps that we're visiting Banchory Farm on a sun-drenched May weekend: the fields around us golden with flowering gorse; the Fife coastline winking in the distance.

“This was always such a happy place for us,” says Jane Manifold, who grew up in Australia but spent many summers here on her late grandmother's farm. Shortly before the pandemic, she and her husband moved to Scotland from Singapore with their three kids to take the reins. They grow oats for Quaker and barley for a whisky distillery, and have spent the past few years transforming a crop of disused farm buildings into boutique self-catering holiday lets as they venture into agritourism. “My granny was always entertaining,” says Jane. “So it feels like we're opening up those doors again.”