Durie, an estate, with a mansion of 1762, in Scoonie parish, Fife, 1½ mile NNW of Leven. The estate, extending to the coast and including the feus of Leven, belonged to a family of its own name from the 13th till the first half of the 16th century, when it passed by marriage to James V.'s favourite, Sir Alexander Kemp. From his posterity it was purchased in 1614 by the great lawyer, Sir Alexander Gibson, whose notes on important decisions were published posthumously as Durie's Practicks, and who in 1621, on being appointed a lord of session, assumed the title of Lord Durie. He died at Durie House in 1644, having in 1628 received a Nova Scotia baronetcy, whose present holder is Gibson Carmichael of Castle Craig. The strangest tale is told of this Sir Alexander, how, prior to his elevation to the bench, he was walking one day on the beach not far from Leven, when he was seized and gagged by a party of Borderers, headed by Christy's Will, and was carried over the Firth to Leith, from Leith to Edinburgh, and thence through Melrose over the English Border to Harbottle Castle, there to be kept eight days a prisoner, till a lawsuit was ended to which his prescene might have proved inimical. This seems a correcter version of the story than Sir Walter Scott's, according to which three months was the term of imprisonment, the Earl of Traquair its instigator, and its scene the lonely peel-tower of Graham. ' Not for years after, when travelling in Annandale, did Lord Durie recognise in the names of Maudge the cat and Batty the shepherd's dog, belonging to Will's establishment, the only words which, loudly called from time to time, had reached his ears during his days of captivity' (Chambers's Domestie Annals, 1. 355). Durie was sold in last century to the ancestor of its present proprietor, Robert Christie, Esq. (b. 1818; suc. 1872), who holds 2134 acres in Fife, valued at £5884 per annum, including £193 for minerals -a colliery, namely, long so famous for output and quality that even in Holland any prime coal was known as ' Durie coal.'-Ord. Sur., sh. 40, 1867.

(F.H. Groome, Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland (1882-4); © 2004 Gazetteer for Scotland)