IT was once home to a Polynesian princess who followed her husband from the sultry south seas to Scotland and lived out her years in Fife.
Now the Anstruther home of Princess Titaua Marama has gone on the market, with an asking price of £295,000.
Estate agents say that the Georgian mansion, which has an Historic Environment Scotland blue plaque marking its history, will be highly sought after and is likely to fetch far more than the asking price.
Johnston Lodge was home to Princess Titaua for six years, after she left her native island of Tahiti to venture north. When she was aged just 14 she married Elgin merchant, John Brander, who was 24 years her senior.
A number of Scots flocked to Tahiti in the mid-nineteenth century, including Robert Louis Stevenson and painter Constance Gordon Cumming, and the princess left a strong impression when she met them.
Queen Victoria’s second son, Prince Alfred was so enamoured that he presented Titaua with a turquoise and diamond pendant and ring.
After John Brander died, Titaua married George Darsie, who worked for her late husband and who was from a wealthy Anstruther family.
Darsie brought her back to Scotland and the couple moved into Johnston Lodge, which had been built in 1828. They moved into the property in 1892 and lived there until her death in 1898.
A pink granite gravestone in St Adrian’s Church in Anstruther marks her resting place with the engraving: “Below this stone lie the remains of
Anstruther’s Polynesian Princess. Born in the lush tropics of the South Seas, she married a Fifer and came 10,000 miles across the world and ended her days in Anstruther, on the shores of the cold and stormy North Sea.”
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