Inveraray, Newtown, Old Barn

Fisherland Barn. This building, gutted by fire in the 1950s and heavily restored as the Barnbrae Garage, runs along the slope at the N side of Barn Brae, parallel to and 18m W of the S end of Newton Row. This site was fixed by the 5th Duke of Argyll in 1771, building beginning a year later, and William Mylne probably prepared the design, which shares similarities with that of the much smaller hay-barn at the Maltland (No. 197). However, this is probably the 'large shed erecting at Inveraray' for which Robert Mylne supplied a drawing, 'altered in the roof and upper parts of it', in 1774, and it was still incomplete a year later. This barn and the Maltland one introduced the system of slatted upper floors for drying hay and moveable racks for sheaves of corn, which was continued in the barns at Maam (No. 224) and Elrigbeag (No. 221) (en.5).

The barn measures 32m from N to S by 1O.8m over 0.8mwalls, and was built of harled rubble, with well-squared stones in openings and in the voussoirs of the four tall arched openings, one at the centre of each wall. The W archway was set in a 0.3m projection having ashlar imposts and a pediment with ashlar frame whose lowest skews survived in 1962, and an ashlar eaves-course terminated at the end-walls, indicating that these were originally gabled. During the rebuilding of about 1962, however, all of the archways were blocked or altered except for the head of that in the N end wall, which is preserved as a window, and many of the openings in the N half were also blocked, while the walls were heavily rendered and whitewashed. The side-walls were originally identical, except for the W centrepiece, being twostoreyed and of eleven bays with central archways 4.1m wide; although blocked externally, the interiors of the arch-heads are visible. Each five-bay side-division had a central doorway at each level, most of which have been blocked or contracted, but the first-floor doorway in the N half of the E wall is reached by a stone forestair, apparently added, and the arched embrasure of the SE ground-floor opening is still identifiable. The arched openings in the end-walls, although of equal height to those in the side-walls, were only 3m wide.

The 5th Duke's works at the Fisherland in the early 1770s included a stable as well as the barn, and an elaborate roofed midden was built close to it in 1799-1800 on the site of a demolished cottage.6 A substantial two-storeyed gabled building, whose S side-wall is aligned with the N wall of the great barn a few metres to the W [sic]and whose E wall adjoins the rear of one of the 19th-century cottages of Newton Row, is probably to be identified with this stable (en.7*). It measures14.4m by 8.4m over 0.8m walls, and the ground-floor S doorway and flanking windows have offset and round-arrised schist margins of 18th-century character. The upper floor, which was evidently a hayloft, is ventilated by slits with splayed embrasures, six in each side-wall and three in each gable, except for the central opening in the W gable which is an original loading-door. The ground floor, which has two blocked openings in the N wall and a wide inserted opening in the wend-wall, is cobbled but retains no evidence of early divisions.

RCAHMS 1992, visited May 1989