Note
Date August 2017
Event ID 1037881
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Note
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1037881
Fields, Buildings and Tenants
The remains comprise some thirty buildings with their associated yards situated in clusters along a dyke which separates them from what must have been the principal fields of the toun. These were laid out under a system of rig-and-furrow cultivation, though the cultivation ridges have long been levelled. Uphill from the buildings is a palimpsest of fields and enclosures which were probably used for livestock or periodic cultivation, and on the western edge of the site there is a prehistoric settlement with cultivation terraces to either side overlain by rig-and-furrow. A second prehistoric settlement lies on the south side of the Boyken Burn and the overall impression is of continuity in the use of the land.
As elsewhere in Eskdale the buildings were constructed upon artificially created platforms usually set end-on to the slope, but occasionally, as with the buildings of the upper cluster at Boyken, set parallel to the contour. It is assumed that this was to facilitate drainage in an area of notoriously high rainfall. Of the buildings themselves all that remain are turf-covered stone wall-footings upon which low walls of turf or turf and stone were formerly constructed. The walls were not load bearing and the thatched roof was probably supported on a framework of crucks or couples, pairs of timbers set into or at the base of opposite walls and joined at the apex. Where timber was plentiful it would have been possible to use single timbers, but here in Upper Eskdale it is more likely that several shorter lengths pinned together with wooden dowels would have been used. In 1627 a Cheshire gentleman journeying into Scotland spent two nights in Langholm, just 7km south of Boyken. He and his companions spent their first night in a dwelling where the fire was ‘in the midst of the house’, and their second ‘in a poor thatched house the wall of it being one course of stones, another of sods of earth’, and which ‘had a door of wicker rods’.
17th-century rent books of Buccleuch Estate, to which Boyken then belonged, and the Hearth Tax returns of 1691 allow us to name the householders who probably occupied these buildings. In 1691 they were ‘Andrew Little,’ ‘Wm Scott yr,’ Jo Scott yr,’ ‘George Little,’ and ‘Andrey Littl,’ who each possessed one hearth, suggesting that there were five dwelling houses in the toun.
Abandonment
Whilst the Agricultural Improvements may be responsible for the largest number of abandoned settlement sites in the hills of southern Scotland, the result of amalgamating several tenancies into one farm, other factors have been involved in earlier abandonments. From the late Middle Ages onwards climatic deterioration was probably the cause of some abandonments, although it is not until the 17th century that this becomes well documented. For example, in late February and early March 1674 thirteen ‘drifty days’ resulted in the deaths of most of the sheep in the neighbouring parish of Eskdalemuir. This was possibly the same exceptional storm that led the Duke of Buccleuch in 1675 to petition the Privy Council that most of his tenants’ cattle were dead and much of his estate was waste and unpossessed. Rural life in earlier centuries could be precarious.
Peter Corser - Field Officer, Heritage Directorate
