Thanks for visiting my personal page. This is a little about how I came to Buittle, what we have been doing here, and some of the things that occupy me when I’m not repairing an old castle.

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The first twenty-one years of my life were divided between California, the UK, and Connecticut. Scotland, where I went to university and where I have longstanding family connections, came to feel particularly like home. After university I spent what I thought would be a couple of months, but turned out to be six years, in California, where among other things I worked as the choir director of an Orthodox parish. Whilst I loved my time there, the fondness for Scotland which developed during my university years exercised a great pull on me. Eventually, my cousin Tobias and I decided that we wanted to put down roots in a place where we could restore an old property, run a business, foster a little community around it and, hopefully, put some beauty back into the world.

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The search for such a place was tiring and occasionally comical: fourteen properties in ten days, most of them in some stage between ‘challenging’ and ‘catastrophic’. After all that I returned to my parish duties in California and, would you believe it, Buittle Castle came onto the market.

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Even in the rather dishevelled state evident from the estate agent’s photographs, it was utterly compelling: ancient stones, a remarkable history stretching from the Lords of Galloway and the Balliols through Jacobites and beyond, and apparently limitless potential for keeping us occupied. In addition to this, it had a long association with the Maxwells, and finding a place which had once belonged to kinsmen had a distinct draw.

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Some people prefer turnkey houses. We rather liked the prospect of rolling up our sleeves in a place our ancestors had once called home.

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We moved in during 2017 and began the slow, and still very much unfinished, process of bringing the place back to life. In 2018 we welcomed our first B&B guests. Since then Buittle has gradually become a working house again, hosting visitors, historical tours, weddings, exhibitions, dinners, markets and community events, while restoration continues around all of them.

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In 2020 I acquired the historic Barony of Buittle, reuniting it with its traditional caput. For me, its importance lies principally in the continuity it represents: Buittle has been a recognisable place and community for many centuries, and I hope that what we are doing now forms another small chapter in that much longer story.

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Church life has also been an important part of my life for many years. I am a priest in the Antiochian Orthodox Church, and much of my ecclesiastical work and research is concerned with the historic Western liturgical tradition which was practised at Buittle for so many centuries.

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History itself remains one of my great interests, particularly the Balliols, medieval Galloway and the early Christian history of south-west Scotland. Since 2023 I have had the privilege of serving as a trustee of the Whithorn Trust, which provides another outlet for this interest and one in which, I hope, I can give something back.

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Buittle today is a place of varied industry. There is always some part of the Castle being repaired, researched or rearranged; gardens being planted or altered; guests arriving; events being planned; bees producing honey; and some new project which seemed perfectly manageable when first proposed becoming rather more complicated than expected.

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Away from all that, I enjoy gardening, cooking, singing, riding, historic textiles and embroidery, old cars, and various other interests which can be found further down this page. The dogs, naturally, regard themselves as responsible for supervising most of these activities.

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If you have made it this far, thank you for indulging these reflections. I hope they give some sense of the spirit in which we care for Buittle: as a living place with a long memory and, I hope, a long future.

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Until we meet again, or meet for the first time, in person,

James