Wester Kiltyrie

NN63NW 91 62602 36139.

This farmstead stands on the edge of deciduous woodland at the NW corner of a pasture field, and about 600m SW of Kiltyrie farmhouse. It comprises three rectangular buildings and two enclosures, and there are the fragmentary remains of a fourth building and a small kiln about 20m to the NE.

The two largest buildings stand at right angles to each other, forming the NNW and ENE sides of a yard. The larger of the two (BL00 706) measures 20m from ENE to WSW by 4m transversely within rubble walls 0.9m in thickness and up to 0.9m in height. It has been divided into two compartments, each with an entrance opening onto a terrace running the length of the SSE side. Below this terrace, and within the yard, there is a hollow, probably the site of a midden. The second building (BL00 705) measures 13m from NNW to SSE by 4.2m transversely within walls largely reduced to boulder footings. The yard, which measures about 27m by 17m, is bounded on the SSE by a stony bank, and on the WSW by an unnamed burn. The second enclosure is attached to the NNW side of the first building; roughly triangular on plan, it measures about 24m by 21m. The remains of the third building (BL00 2051) lie immediately E of the S end of the second, and at right angles to it. Most of the SSE side and the ENE end have been robbed out, and the other walls have been reduced to footings no more than 0.4m high, but enough remains to show that it measured internally 8.2m by 4.2m. The fourth building, 20m NE of the third, is even more fragmentary (BL00 2053). Only the N end can be traced, reduced to a stony bank overgrown with scrub and crossed by a roughly-built drystone dyke. Finally, the kiln stands about 15m W of the fourth building, at the rear of a level terrace (BL00 2052; NN 62623 36164). The kiln bowl measures 1.5m in diameter and 0.4m in depth within a stone-faced bank, much tumbled and grass-grown, and its flue was on the SSE..

John Farquharson's 1769 Survey of the North Side of Loch Tay (National Archives of Scotland, RHP 973/1, Plan 6) depicts four buildings at this site; three of them in the positions occupied by three of those described above (BL00 705-6, 2053). The fourth of Farquharson's buildings, of which nothing remains to be seen, stood to the N of the largest building (BL00 706). The buildings mapped by Farquharson represent the W end of a straggle of ten buildings and three enclosures that he shows stretching as far as the farmstead of Wester Kiltyrie, about 200m to the E (NN63NW 75, and see also NN63NW 77). However, few of these buildings are depicted on the 1st edition of the OS 6-inch map (Perthshire 1867, sheet LXIX), which shows none of the structures described here.

(BL00 705-6, 2051-3, 2598)

Visited by RCAHMS (ATW and MFTR) 5 July 2000 and (SDB) 11 March 2004