Little wonder, then, that a government inspector of ancient monuments took it for what it appears to be: a tower house of the 1550s. Little wonder, too, that Jack Vettriano should have made it his home for several years. Nor that former Millwall, Liverpool and Arsenal footballer Jimmy Carter should offer significantly over the asking price to buy the castle within hours of crossing its threshold.
Standing on the road between Burntisland and Aberdour in Fife, Easterheughs is just one castle in a county of many. Considered beside Kellie, Earlshall, Balgonie and Pitcullo, there is little to make you think this fastness is anything other than a towering leftover from Scotland’s strife-riven past.
But it is nothing of the sort. The castle is actually the creation of a couple of Cambridge-trained physicians whose energy, imagination and will can only humble anyone who has ever complained about a bit of household DIY.
In the 1930s, William Thomas became manager of the Burntisland aluminium plant. Initially he leased Rossend, a 16th-century castle overlooking the harbour at Burntisland, which was owned by the local council. Several attempts by Thomas to buy his home were turned down so, exasperated, he decided to build his own castle.
Thomas bought a stretch of land a couple of miles from Rossend with an outlook every bit as good and enlisted the help of his friend, John Rhodes.
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The couple spent weekends fashioning their tower house. With no scaffolding, they built from the inside, passing stones upwards hand over hand. They told people at the time that the walls “rattled up” once they got going.
Every Friday Rhodes would travel from his home in London. Thomas would spend the preceding week scouring Fife for suitable stones. Most came from High Binns, a deserted village. The pantiles came from the distillery at Auchtertool and the carved stonework from Otterstone House.
As the work continued, the pair enjoyed repeated good luck with salvage. Perhaps their biggest break came when the council that owned Rossend decided to demolish it. Knowing it well, Thomas was happy to meet the asking price for a mass of ornamental detail from the building — £6 per skip-load. Fire surrounds, wall panelling and window sills were all prised out and shipped along the coast. And the banister for the turnpike was taken from Rossend in one piece and fitted perfectly.
As chance would have it, just as Rossend was being emptied of architectural treasures, a public inquiry into its future was launched. Eventually the council was ordered to save the buildings and architects were commissioned to return it to something like its original glory. Many of its fittings, however, were already gone — but have continued to give sterling service just a few miles along the coast.
Warming to the salvage game, Thomas and Rhodes created a marble floor from broken pieces of old washstands and crafted a four-poster bed from barley twists taken from a nearby shop. In all they spent £3,000 on materials.
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Once it was finished, the pair took up residence and set up in business repairing harpsichords. They remained there until they died — Thomas surveying the scene from his own battlements until 1989.
When the castle’s second owners decided to sell for £250,000 in 1997, it was snapped up by Fife-born painter Jack Vettriano. He decorated much of the castle in the style of one of his paintings — many of the walls were painted a deep gothic red. In 2002, however, he decided to move on and placed the property on the market for offers over £600,000.
By that time Jimmy Carter had come to the end of a 15-year career as a professional footballer — he dazzled at Millwall, but failed to shine on Merseyside or with the Gunners. He was living in Hertfordshire and, despite not knowing a great deal about Scotland, had decided to move north.
“My brother-in-law had moved to Scotland a few years earlier and when we visited him, we really enjoyed ourselves,” he says.
“We bid for a 52-room house in the southwest of Scotland, but missed out. Then someone sent us an advert for Easterheughs and I thought, I must see it.”
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Carter and his wife flew up to Edinburgh, the first time they had set foot in the capital, and travelled over the bridge. They met Vettriano’s sister at the castle and made an offer there and then. A deal was struck before they flew back later that day.
It might look as though Vettriano had done well, but a recent valuation of the building suggests it would now command a price of about £1.5m.
Since moving in, Carter has set about returning the house to rather more conventional tastes, and upgrading some of the services from the 1950s no easy job when the walls are several feet thick and made of stone. The candle-powered lighting the painter favoured has also given way to electric.
The result is a house that is surprisingly domestic, despite its fortress-like exterior. The rooms are, for the most part, of average size — with the exception of the extraordinary great hall that Thomas and Rhodes used as their music room. Today, it serves as a living room with vast windows facing south over the Forth. (The windows are one of the few areas where the builders departed from medieval design — bigger windows meant fewer stones and more light.) The roof terrace is not exactly 16th century, but it is an incredible vantage point from which to survey a good chunk of the Lothians across the Forth.
The castle is only half an hour by rail from Edinburgh, and Carter’s teenage son was able to commute to school there. He is now 18 and no longer needs to make the journey. The footballer’s younger son, aged five, is too young to travel alone and rather than drive to and from Edinburgh daily, Carter has now bought a house close to one of Perthshire’s most distinguished private schools.
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“I could not sell Easterheughs, though,” he says. “It is such a one-off, I couldn’t let it slip out of my hands. I invest in property anyway, so it adds nicely to my portfolio. That’s why we decided to offer it for holiday lets.”
With sleeping for up to 12, the castle will be let for between £2,000 and £2,500 a week.