Although some of the buildings at Abbeymill Farm can be dated to around the 16th century, the area it sits in has a significant part in Scottish history dating back to the middle of the 12th century. 1159 to be exact. This is when the Abbey of which the farm gets its name was first built. Being one of the largest in Scotland at the time, it played an incredibly significant role in Scottish history. Built by Ada de Warren, mother of two Scottish kings, it controlled many of the agricultural, religious, and domestic life in a large surrounding area stretching from the coast at North Berwick and Dunbar and inland to Gifford, Garvald and Longyester and as far away as Crail in Fife.
It survived numerous attacks by marauding English and Government armies, being on the main route from the south as well as being a prominent building in the strategically positioned town of Haddington. It was even used to host a meeting of the Scottish Parliament in 1548 to decide the fate of a young Mary Queen of Scots. The Abbey was dominant for the best part of 5 centuries, surviving even the Scottish Reformation, which was the undoing of many significant religious buildings in Scotland although this made it illegal to recruit new nuns. Once the last nuns died out it was converted into a temporal lordship by 1621 and the religious order ceased to exist.
The only remaining visible evidence of the abbey and its existence is the graveyard which still stands in the copse of trees to the east of the farm. It is also believed that the red stone that is distributed throughout the buildings on the farm as well as the predominant building blocks of the Abbey Bridge, have been recycled and used after the Abbey was abandoned.
There has been recorded agriculture on the site for as long as the Abbey was established but the modern day farm (modern at least in relation to Abbeymill Farm) has been around since the 16th century. There was a significant flour mill (still in existence but derelict), a schoolhouse (still in existence but derelict) as well as a small town called Abbey village.
During the 17th and 18th century a significant portion of the land owned by the Abbey was bought by the Earl of Wemyss. In 1841 Abbey village had a population of 96. By 1911 the population had fallen to 15. The 1911 census records five houses there. Robert Steedman took over the tenancy of the farm in 1913 from Robert Golightly who concentrated on the mill. The mill then ceased trading in the 1920’s and the Steedman’s bought the farm from the Wemyss estate in 1944 and the remaining houses of the village in 1949. A few were still occupied in the late 1940s until they were abandoned due to the lack of electricity and water. The last people to live in the cottage were members of the second generation of the Steedman family who left for Auchterarder in the mid 1940’s. The Steedman’s farmed Abbeymill Farm for 3 generations until it was sold to us, the Macnairs, in 2019. And so, we take our place in the incredibly long history of Abbeymill Farm.