‘It’s totally nuts that the eldest son inherits the estate – so we scrapped the rules on our 60-room country house’

For 200 years, Cambo House, near St Andrews in Fife, had passed neatly from father to son down the Erskine family tree.

But then the next generation decided it was time to end the “nonsense” of the mechanism that means the eldest son inherits. Instead, the five children of Sir Peter Erskine, the 6th Baronet, opted for a more collaborative approach – a family trust, which is now responsible for decision-making at 60-room Cambo, which sits in a 1,200-acre estate.

Sir Peter’s son James, 44, was appointed director of the estate in 2021. Until 2019, he and his wife Jasmine were living in Myanmar, where Jasmine was working for Oxfam and the United Nations. They returned home to the UK in 2020 and now, with their three young sons, live in an apartment in the “preposterously big house” at Cambo. 

Establishing a trust and putting a stop to primogeniture has been a brave move, but an important one, he says. “I don’t think it was particularly healthy for my brother to feel the sense of pressure that he did about Cambo, that he didn’t have any choice [but to be here].”

The system of passing down the estate through the male line is nonsense, he says, and all of his siblings are agreed.

“Imagine if I gave you something incredibly precious to look after, and lots of people were relying on you to look after it, because it’s a really important part of our heritage, and I said, ‘how are you going to look after it?’ and you said, ‘I’ll just give it to my eldest son…’ Well, it’s an interesting approach, but a brittle one, incredibly risky – and maybe it’s not that good for everybody. It’s just not something you’d come up with if you were starting from scratch – it’s totally nuts.” 

The Cambo estate dates back to the 12th century, and came into the Erskines’ possession in 1668, in whose hands it has remained ever since, bar a 24-year period in the 18th century when it was owned by the Charteris family.

When Thomas Erskine, 9th Earl of Kellie bought the estate back in the 1790s, he invested heavily in it, building the elegant Georgian estate and farm buildings, and commissioning the architect Robert Balfour to remodel the house, which began as a simple tower.

Though Thomas Kellie had no children with his wife Anne, he had a daughter out of wedlock. Knowing he was likely to die without a male heir, he adopted his daughter’s children, the first of whom, David Erskine, was created the first baronet of Cambo in 1821, and from whose line the family descends today. 

In 1878, the house was gutted after a fire broke out following a staff party, and the Erskines rebuilt the house, instructing architects that it must be bigger than Balbirnie, the home of the Balfour family 25 miles away.

The new house, a solid piece of Victorian engineering – or, as James puts it, “an absolute monster” – has been divided into apartments since the late 1940s when his grandparents Sir David and Lady (Ann) Erskine began letting parts of the house. They considered moving out entirely, into the stables, but chose to stick with the house and built a family apartment on the ground floor, where James and his family live today. 

This has not always been entirely logical or functional, he says: “There was a kitchen in the hall when I was born, and no front door, so you had to be passed out of the window.”

Throughout the later 20th century, parts of the house were often let to students from St Andrews, becoming a happy source of babysitters for the Erskine children. After the students left in the mid 1990s, by which time Peter Erskine and his wife Catherine were running the house, the estate moved towards the self-catering market.

In 2016, when Struan and his wife Frances took over Cambo, they pushed the events business, making Cambo a top-class, popular wedding venue. “It was a shrewd move,” says James. “They were definitely ahead of the trend in terms of whole-house hire.”

Now, Cambo hosts weddings and events – the house can be booked for self-catering exclusive-use, and sleeps 37. The gardens and parkland are open to visitors, who particularly come to enjoy the national collection of 350 varieties of snowdrops from January, and the glories of the alliums and roses in the walled garden through the spring and summer.

The Erskine archives have receipts for snowdrops dating back to 1801, but it wasn’t until the 1930s that the idea was really encouraged in the gardens by the then-chatelaine Magdalen Erskine, a keen gardener, who took to propagating them, putting her children to work dividing and replanting them in the 70 acres of woodland.

Living in a big house like Cambo, replete with commercial opportunities and bookings, is not without its challenges.

“It’s like living above the shop, just a very big shop that has a very expensive roof to maintain,” says James, whose background is in theatre production. It has taken some getting used to, but they have their own front door, everyone has a bedroom, and there’s a living room and kitchen.

“It’s looking tired now – the units went in when I was four,” he said.

James likes that his children play on their Nintendo in the room that he used to play in: “It’s nice for them to have that anchor.”

As a wider family, around whom the whole area revolved in days gone by, they are an integral, modern part of the local community. In 2021 James’ sister Gill co-founded Wildstrong, a community fitness franchise which she runs out of the old dairy, and James has plans for a gallery from where they will showcase the work of Burmese artists.

“That’s the kind of thing you should be doing on these estates,” he says. “If you’ve got this amazing toy, why wouldn’t you want to get people to come and play with it?”

Looking after the estate is a huge privilege, but it’s also hard work, says James. “There’s a multi-faceted cognitive dance that you have to do in a place like this when you’ve got plates constantly spinning – it’s quite exhilarating.”

He can’t imagine not opening up Cambo to the public – not just financially, but morally.

“We want this place to be the best place in the world. All this incredible landscaping, the house, the furniture… the idea that you wouldn’t want to share it in some capacity I find monstrous – a bit Bond villainy. The obligation of the house is to work. Maybe that’s a very Protestant way to put it, but it would be incredibly dull to have a big house and do nothing with it.”