Hornybach

ND24SE 36 26268 44839

Small area of improved or cleared ground noted on map of 1871.

OS 6-inch map, Caithness, 1st ed. (1877), sheet xxix.

A small green eminence on which a house named Hornybach once stood.

Name Book 1872.

What are probably the remains of a farmstead, comprising a rectangular building attached to the SW side of a rectangular enclosure, are situated on the E flank of a grassy knoll about 70m E of the Lybster to Watten public road. The building, which has been constructed with its long axis running up and down the slope, measures about 14m from NW to SE by 4.7m transversely over walls reduced to intermittent piles of rubble 1.5m in thickness and 0.25m in height, and the position of its NW end is largely inferred from the line of the enclosure wall. Now reduced to a rubble bank, this encloses an area measuring about 25m from NW to SE by 14m transversely; there is an entrance, 4m in width, in the middle of its NE side.

The farmstead is not depicted on 1st edition of the OS 6-inch map (Caithness 1877, sheet xxix), but the Ordnance Survey Name Book (Caithness No. 13, p. 233) notes that Hornybach is the name given to 'a small green eminence on the east side of the Public Road A short distance north of the Big Loch. A house of some kind once stood on it which was called Hornybach hence the name. The Property of E Strang Esq. Of Camster'. The 1st edition map, however, associates the place-name with a roughly oval area of improved ground situated in open moorland. There is also a small area of rig-and-furrow (ND24SE 72) about 165m to the NE.

(YARROWS04 903)

Visited by RCAHMS (ATW) 9 September 2004.