Excavation

Date 16 July 2010 - 8 August 2010

Event ID 879934

Category Recording

Type Excavation

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/879934

NC 90470 03307 (centred on) The SCAPE Trust and the Clyne Heritage Society undertook a fourth season of excavation from 16 July–8 August 2010. The excavation was funded by Historic Scotland and their support is gratefully acknowledged. The site was excavated by volunteers, who once again made the most significant contribution to the success of the project.

Documentary evidence records that Lady Jane Gordon, Countess of Sutherland, established a salt pan here in 1598. In 1618, there is a reference to the iron of the pans being sold, probably to help pay off estate debts following the death of her son John, the 12th Earl, in 1616. The main

focus of this year’s excavation was the site of the ‘Old Salt Works’, which is marked on John Farey’s 1823 mineral map. Work was focused on this building as this area of sand dune had suffered particularly badly from coastal erosion over the winter of 2009. The principal outcomes of this season’s work were:

• the total excavation and recording of the critically at risk parts of the 16th/17th-century building;

• recovery of evidence showing the quality, status and uniqueness of the building for the historical period in this area;

• recovery of evidence showing that the excavated building was contemporary with large quantities of industrial midden material and the remains of a substantial wall (now mostly gone), located on the beach c20m to the S–SW, previously recorded by the Clyne Heritage Society

(2005);

• the excavation and recording of a lime kiln built into the ruinous remains of the salt works building.

A 12m x 8m trench (Trench 9) was machine excavated over the site of the visibly eroding building. An additional c30m long narrow strip of the dune face, extending W from the main trench, was excavated by hand. The extension aimed:

• to ascertain the full length of the eroding building in Trench 9;

• to investigate industrial midden deposits occasionally exposed in the dune face;

• to investigate the relationship between these deposits, the building in Trench 9 and the remains of the substantial wall formerly visible on the beach.

The excavations at the salt works revealed the eastern half and the entire surviving face of the S wall of an E–W oriented building, with overall external dimensions of 16.4 x 5.8m. An internal wall, flanked on either side by a doorway, divided the building into two rooms, an E room measuring 10.4 x 4.4m internally and a smaller W room of 3.7 x 4.4m internally. Only the easternmost 8m of the building was fully exposed and excavated. The external face of the westward 8m of surviving S wall, including the doorways and dividing wall, were revealed and recorded in section, making their internal dimensions conjectural. The c2m high remains of the N and E (gable end) wall of the building were exposed in Trench 9. The SW corner of the building and the S wall had been destroyed by coastal

erosion. The building was constructed of roughly hewn beach boulders, almost certainly collected from the adjacent beach. The exception was the openings for the doorways, which were constructed with chamfered stone door jambs carved from the softer pale yellow Sputie sandstone, probably quarried about a kilometre S of the site. A mason’s mark was carved into the outside face of the W door jamb of each doorway at ground level. Wall construction was random uncoursed with a rough face finish and stressed

quoins. The walls were bonded with lime mortar. There is good evidence that the internal and external faces of the wall were harled with the same hard white lime mortar. The floor of the exposed part of the building was laid with angular flagstones, bedded onto clean beach sand. The only

features recorded in the E room exposed in Trench 9 were two substantial postholes and an area of rounded beach boulders within the flagstone floor, which sealed a pit containing slag and fish bone. A fragment of post-medieval oxidised ware and one of post-medieval reduced ware, recovered from beneath the flagstone floor, were the only ceramic finds in

the building. Two tiny sherds of plate glass were recovered from demolition deposits. The posthole and pit fills contained greater quantities of finds comprising fish bone, slag-like and clinker-like material and iron objects. The surviving remains of the E room of the building revealed in Trench 9, Back Beach Brora. Coastal erosion has destroyed the S wall in the main excavation trench. A fragment of the later lime kiln can be seen in the far corner. The hard ground surface in front of (S) of the building was made up of highly compacted layers of burnt fuel and ash. This deposit was traced W in the section for >20m, becoming interleaved with increasingly thick industrial midden deposits. The midden deposits were at their thickest and appear to terminate at the substantial wall on the beach. The stratigraphy of the midden deposits indicates deliberate spreads of material to form a clinker road/surface. This would have linked the building on the beach with the building recorded in Trench 9, a few metres to the NE and higher up in the dunes. The massive quantities of clinker and the thickness of the layers of midden material in proximity to the wall on the beach, relative to the thin spreads in the vicinity of the building in Trench 9, suggests that the material originates from activity carried out in the building on the beach. This evidence, together with the lack of evidence associated with the process of salt panning in the building in Trench 9,

indicates the building on the beach is most likely to have been the pan house, with the building in Trench 9, or at least the E room, functioning as a possible storehouse. Some time after the building in Trench 9 was abandoned and a c1m thick deposit of windblown sand had accumulated

in the E room, the NE corner of the ruinous walls were modified to accommodate a lime kiln. The inside faces of the walls were lined with clay bonded, medium sized angular blocks of limestone and sandstone. A massive wall was constructed of boulders and apparently bonded with turf, to form the W side of the kiln bowl. A flue hole was inserted into the existing N wall. The whole of the S side of the kiln has been destroyed by erosion. However, it is probable that the draw hole would have been located in the S wall. The kiln bowl had a diameter of 1.8m at the base and

2.3m at the top and survived to 1.3m high. Unusually, a large quantity of lime remained inside the kiln bowl. The kiln structure is of a simple bowl-shaped combustion chamber. There was no evidence of a grate or supporting bars to separate the fire from the charge, so it is likely that the fire was lit at the base and the charge layered directly upon it. The kiln therefore must have been fired periodically, i.e. loaded, fired, cooled and emptied, then reloaded. Quantities of small limestone chippings were recovered adjacent to the outside of the W kiln wall, and identical chippings were recovered from within the burning chamber, where the charge had not fully combusted. The evidence of percussion bulbs on larger limestone cobble fragments clearly indicated where they had been deliberately broken. The origin of the limestone is almost certainly the adjacent beach. No dating evidence was recovered from deposits associated with the lime kiln. However, it does not appear on estate maps from the mid-18th century onwards, so must pre-date these maps.

Archive: RCAHMS (intended). Report: Highland Council and

RCAHMS

Funder: Historic Scotland