Machrimore Smithy, Kintyre

This estate-built smithy, neatly executed in rubble masonry with dressed offset margins to openings and quoins, and roofed in slate with overhanging eaves, stands about 41m NNE of the neighbouring mill. Adequately lit by a series of mullioned windows fitted with dwarf shutters within, it is planned with two forges, or hearths, backing respectively onto the W gable-wall and an intermediate cross-wall, beyond which is a shoeing-shop . It continued in use until the late 1960s and still preserves the usual original features and its earth floor.

Each forge is equipped with a cylindrical bellows set in a side recess; the middle forge incorporates a stone cooling trough; the gable forge formerly possessed a set of the earlier pear-bellows in the NW corner. Other standard tools and equipment include the anvil, mounted on an elm block,a swage block, two work-benches with steel leg-vices, and a roller-type tyre-bending machine, In addition, fixed to the bench beneath the sw window, there is a beam-drill worked manually by turning a brace and bit while under pressure from a weighted beam operated by a lever. Outside the smithy, just W of the entrance, is an iron wheel-tyring platform, or plate, and a grindstone.

The shoeing-shop, which is floored with timber planks bedded directly on earth, is also entered externally from a wide segmental-arched doorway in the S wall, and is equipped with high-level wall-racks, once stocked amply with a varied range of ready-made horseshoes; a much rarer feature, set against the E wall, is a well-preserved horseframe, or trave, for handling difficult horses while they were being shod.

Information from ‘Monuments of Industry: An Illustrated Historical Record’, (1986).