Document record MAB52607 - PIPERWELL

Site of a small farmstead, depicted on the 1st and 2nd edition OS maps.

Site of a small farmstead, depicted on the 1st and 2nd edition OS maps. Limited upstanding remains survived until 2012, when the site was cleared to allow for the construction of a new house. The OS 1st edition map shows a rectangular house forming the east side of a court, an L-shaped range providing its north and west sides. To the east of the house is an attached garden enclosure. The layout is unchanged on the 2nd edition map. A standing building survey was carried out by Cameron Archaeology in August 2012. At the time of the survey, the remains of the house stood to 1.4m high and the building was 5.8m wide and 12.8m long. The walls were circa 0.7m wide and the foundations circa 1m wide. The walls were constructed of large grey granite quarried blocks and the quoins of pink granite blocks. In the centre of the south wall was a fireplace with stone hearth and the room latterly had a concrete floor. All the walls of Building 1 (the rectangular building) were poorly preserved with no surviving mortar, which had been replaced by soil from plant growth and the use of the ruin as a stone dump. The east and west walls survived as 1m wide large stone foundations only. The south wall of Building 1 survived as one course of large grey granite blocks only and the large stone foundation was clearly visible. The building had been divided into at least two rooms with a smaller kitchen at the south end and a larger room at the north which may have been divided into two. Building 2 (the L-plan building) had been the byre. The wall foundations survived as soil filled trenches circa 1m wide with some stone surviving in the base of the trenches indicating that this building had been systematically demolished and the stone removed from the site prior to the 1940s. The floor of the byre survived as a series of stone-lined runnels along the interior face of the south wall and along the interior of the west wall. These were 0.85m wide lined with larger flat granite field stones and the base lined with small pebbles. A layer of demolition material on top of this floor included grey slates and sherds of pottery of 19th or early 20th-century date. A watching brief was also carried out over the site by Cameron Archaeology in August 2012 due to the proximity to NJ50NW0019, an area of cropmarks. The only remains which were encountered related to the 19th Century farmstead.

CAMERON ARCHAEOLOGY, 2012, LAND TO NORTH EAST OF WHITEKNOWES, CRAGIEVAR, STANDING BUILDING SURVEY AND WATCHING BRIEF (Bibliographic reference). SAB5335.

ARCHAEOLOGY SCOTLAND, 2013, DISCOVERY AND EXCAVATION IN SCOTLAND, NEW SERIES, VOLUME 13, 2012, p.16 (Bibliographic reference). SAB5487.

Record last edited

Dec 17 2020 11:24AM