The arrangement of this pair of buildings with a cobbled roadway between them is similar to buildings 10 and 11. A linear strip along the wall and in front of the doorway of building 9 was not cobbled, presumably to function as an open drain.
Building 8
It was possible to reconstruct the history of this well-preserved house-byre from the evidence of the walls, floors and objects found within the rooms. Initially, the building was 2m longer, making it 18m long by 5m wide. The west gable in the small chamber is the secondary and foreshortens the room. This wall is built over a fireplace. Similarly, the north wall here can be seen to be rebuilt within the alignment of the north wall of the larger room, whose wall continues for the entire length of the structure. The cross wall is also additional as the occupational surface of the floor underlies it.
The byre end, now a room measuring 10m by 5m, is evident by the drain and its outlet through the lower end of the room. But the drain has been carefully infilled with flat stones, some with indents cut into them. Similar stones and slate can be seen along each wall and the cobbled floor surface has been neatly aligned along straight edges some 0.7m from the north wall face and 0.6m from the southern wall. At least two small areas of floor indicated where burning had taken place. Square section door frames of 0.2m were installed centrally in the walls of the doorway, giving a door width of 1m.
The small room, now measuring 4.5m by 5m, has a wide, open drain leading straight to the door. The higher floor area had a complex of tiny drains cut into the natural compacted gravel with slates laid neatly over to form covers, which are still visible.
From all this and numerous finds in north chambers, we can deduce the following: originally the building was open for its entire length which was 2m longer; the house and its fireplace were naturally at the higher end and occupied about 50% of the available space; slate covered drains were made to keep the floor dry.
At this time the byre had an open drain with cobbles on the floor abutting wooden feed troughs along each wall. These troughs or boxes may have replaced stakes driven into the ground along the walls, which were perhaps used to keep fodder clean and off the ground, although, it is more likely that the stakes replaced troughs, for a short period of time after the troughs’ removal and the installation of the indented stones. These stones held mortised poles in place, thus creating individual stalls for animals to be tethered in the byre. Later, the byre was converted into a house by infilling the drain with some of the indented stones, but only for a short duration as indicated by the undeveloped new fireplace on the cobbles.
The cross wall and reduction of the gable must have taken place around the time of change of use and finally the north wall in the now small chamber was rebuilt against the existing one.
A fine copper allow rowel spur was found in the small room and it is interesting that an iron lock plate had graced the last door of the large room. Just outside the doorway of the small chamber the sherds of a small onion-type bottle were recovered.
Building 9
This building is one of the smaller examples on the site. It now measures 11.8m x 5.2m internally although the west gable has been re-faced on the inside, reducing the original total length by 1m. Once again the house-byre configuration was evident, with the byre indicated by an open drain and occupying the lower two-thirds of the room. A large, well-developed hearth is still visible as heat cracked stone in the north-west corner of the room and against the two walls there are two surviving seats in the form of slabs of slate raised just above floor level. They measure 0.9m and 1.0m long. In the south-west corner of the room, the floor is covered with slate which had been laid over a complex on mini drains cut into the gravel. Some of these funnelled into a neat stone drain which discharged under the south wall while others discharged into the open byre drain. The hearth was also surrounded by this drainage system and the replacement gable wall overlay some drains, indicating the secondary wall as a late occurrence in the building. The doorway was of similar design and size to the one in building 8 opposite. Three cruck slots in the south wall at ground level were located and two contained surviving stumps of timber, which were only half the size of the timbers in building 13. The spacing shows that four pairs of crucks must have been installed but strangely there were no cruck spaces in the other walls, despite the survival of the stone wall faces at ground level. The roof timbers must have been set on to the stones of the walls in these instances. This appears to have been the normal method on most other buildings. Eventually these timbers will be analysed to identify the tree species. Finally, the whole room was inhabited by people who filled in the open drain and created another well-used fireplace above it. The position of this fireplace is now shown by modern stones.
Among the many slates found at Glenochar, none can be identified as roof slates. The structural use of this material was confined to making drain covers and floor surfaces in and around the buildings. However, some inhabitants literally left their marks and signatures on slates. Inscriptions include ‘George Dales is my name’, ‘John Graham’, ‘God’, ‘Adam’, and ‘ant’. Geometric designs were etched and what appears to be tallying (perhaps of sheep) has taken place. Of considerable interest is the representation of the Union flag, and if that is what was intended, then this confirms the early 18th-century use of this building.
Many slates were used as working surfaces, as scratches and scores on them confirm. Perhaps they were the equivalent of the kitchen table for chopping vegetables and meat in food preparation. Some slates were made into circular shapes of various diameters, a few with central perforations in them. These are assumed to be pot/jug lids and much smaller examples may be gaming pieces.
Outside the north-east corner of building 9, lying in the open drain, there were a number of glass sherds from several window panes measuring about 100mm square. This is the best evidence of a glass window on the site. The window probably represents the final period of occupation of the fermtoun and of this building in particular in the mid 18th century.
As previously stated, there were few artefacts found in good stratified contexts, such as within a sealed drain, but some 17th century pipe bowls were located in drains here and these will help to refine the dates of features within the room. Clay tobacco pipes will be one of the key mechanisms throughout the site to establish approximate dates of occupation, change of use and abandonment of buildings. Over 170 were found, making them a relatively large and important assemblage. Many bowls and stems bear the makers’ marks, some of which can be identified, provisionally, as from makers in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Stirling.
The modern trail now leads over a footbridge which has been built just upstream from an original bridge position, shown by the stones on each side of the burn. The route up to the remainder of the site follows another hollow way which branches downhill to the south and would have led towards building 12.
