Special Survey: St Kilda

Date September 2014

Event ID 1038288

Category Project

Type Project

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1038288

2014 RCAHMS Special Survey

A team from the RCAHMS Landscape Survey section undertook a fieldtrip to St Kilda in September 2014 with two objectives: firstly to re-assess the archaeological evidence for the pre-Improvement township (cf Fleming 2005); and secondly to complete the corpus of detailed plans of the 19th century blackhouses. This work was designed to build upon the archaeological mapping of St Kilda undertaken by RCAHMS between 2007 and 2009, and to supplement the detailed surveys of blackhouses undertaken by RCAHMS between 1983 and 1986 (Stell and Harman 1988). The fieldwork was undertaken by George F Geddes and Alison McCaig, assisted by trainee Joe McAllister, and was further aided by contributions from Kevin Grant (National Trust for Scotland) and Cathy MacIver (independent archaeologist).

Seven plane table drawings were created, capturing fourteen blackhouses on plan at a scale of 1:100 (blackhouses A, B, D, J, F, H, Q, R, P, S, T, U, V and X). For each, an Adobe Illustration was produced at a scale of 1:200; both are available on Canmore. Site descriptions of each building were written by G F Geddes and edited by J R Sherriff. The reassessment of the pre-Improvement township and an accompanying illustration were published in 2015 (Gannon and Geddes 2015).

Information from HES Survey and Recording (GFG), August 2018