Monument record 825 - ST KILDA VILLAGE, CLEITEAN 144-5

NF19NW 21.21 1004 9953.

These two drystone buildings, which lie outside the head dyke close to Tobar Childa, stand end to end on a sloping NW-SE axis, both having entrances near the centres of their SW side-walls. While both buildings appear superficially to be ordinary cleitean, they incorporate fragments of an earlier cellular structure.
Cleit 144, the upper of the two adjacent buildings, forms part of an enclosure at its N end, and, probably to prevent animals scrambling over the cleit into the enclosure, walls were added on the W and SE sides.
At its maximum extent the slab-lintelled interior of the building itself is 5.01m long, 1.52m wide (in the SE half), and 1.45m high. At the S end there is a small blocked opening 0.33m square; its lintel is 0.46m and 0.91m respectively above the corresponding floor-levels in 144 and 145, the wall at this point being 0.7m thick.
Cleit 145 has a battered wall-face and is buttressed at the SE corner. On the S side of the doorway there is a roughly circular setting of stones, possibly the remains of a cell about 1.07m in diameter. The main structure is 4.57m long internally, 1.42m wide, and the lintelled roof is 1.52m above floor-level. The corbelling is more pronounced on the E side, but at the NE corner the wall is almost vertical to a height of 1.22m. It abuts the N end-wall which is noticeably square, whereas the W side-wall is mutually bonded from the lowest courses. In the N end-wall there is an aperture 0.38m high and 0.18m above the floor but below the existing floor-level of its neighbour, Cleit 144.
G P Stell and M Harman 1988.

G P and M Stell and Harman, 1988, Buildings of St Kilda, 47-8, no. 21 (Bibliographic reference). SWE8255.