I will never forget the Thursday evening in September 1976 when our father came home and told us that the purchase had finally gone through and handed me the keys. So much better than what we had been doing for the past two years; climbing over the gate to get onto the site to look around. The three male generations, despite the hour, took a trip the six miles to the nursery to have a "prugh" around; hard to believe that was nearly 40 years ago.
Millholm is a pretty site sitting in what was once a flood plain of the Carmel Water. It was created in the 1830's as a part of the Loudon Estates though we are now only at the begining of researching this. It is bounded on two sides by the "Mill Lade" which once powered the water wheel at Kilmaurs Mill, an imposing four storey building dating from the mid 19th Century which only fell out of use in 1970. The Mill Lade ran from the damn on the Carmel Water opposite Bellsland Farm to the mill and back into the Carmel crossing our property for about a third of its length. The third side is bounded by a field which falls away to the Carmel itself and the fourth a B-road which at times seemed more like an A-road.
With a nursery on the site dating back to the 1830's, and with the family's own traditional approach to market gardening, there was a strong heritage to continue. We grew a range of field crops: brassicas, root crops, potatoes; flowers: chrysanthemums, dahlias, bedding plants; and glasshouse crops: principally tomatoes and chrysanthemums. We will aim to document these and and other crops grown in years gone past through these pages.