SRP Archaeology Notes
Date 5 November 2009
Event ID 579941
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Srp Note
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/579941
The site is as described by RCAHMS in 1999. The following additional points were noted:
The NE range (CLOVA99 224) has a stone terrace along the façade of the SE compartment. Inside this compartment is a later pen. The outshot at the SE end contains a similar pen.
Between the NE range and the SE building runs a narrow passage to the former.
S of the SE building (CLOVA99 225) lies a yard. Its S dyke breaks the line of the linear field dyke.
Between the SE building and the SW range (CLOVA99 226) is a filled-in corn drying kiln, 2.5m in diameter.
A ditch runs along the uphill side of the SW range.
A breached dyke has linked CLOVA99 227 and CLOVA99 228.
From census records it appears that Rochteth no longer functioned as a farm by 1841. The last inhabitant died in May 1861 and Rochteth is missing from the 1871 census. The Ordnance Survey Namebook, compiled for the First Edition Ordnance Survey map in 1862, describes Rochtaughs as ‘a strip of rough ground’ by that date.
It may have been an offshoot of the flourishing adjacent farm of Fettereggie (now called Kilburn. The first written record was in the 1643 list of fencible men (i.e. men fit for military service, National Archives of Scotland GD16/50/17/4). From 1698 until at least the 1851 census it was occupied mainly by a Lindsay family which had close social relations with the Lindsay tenants of Fettereggie until the last Fettereggie Lindsay died in 1787.
In 1818 Fettereggie took over Rochteth’s extensive grazing land, leaving the last two generations of Lindsays in possession of the buildings, some of which may have already been derelict. From then on, a couple of elderly women were engaged in handloom weaving while the Lindsay family’s Ogilvy descendants worked for Fettereggie, the son as shepherd, the daughter and their aunt as agricultural labourers.
Information from SRP Glen Clova, September 2009
