Monument record 821 - ST KILDA VILLAGEBLACKHOUSE L

NF19NW 21.09 1005 9938.

The remains of this building lie to the E of the path leading from the street to the burial-ground. On Sharbau's plan a building on this site is overlaid in darker hatching by a longer structure marked 'Village Barn'. This sequence appears to be reflected in the surviving remains. Aligned N-S, the building measures internally 3.99m by 1.93m within walls which vary in thickness from about 1.15m to 3m at the N end where the squared internal angles are not bonded except in the upper few courses. Externally the walls are battered and the corners rounded.
The doorway, which is in the W side-wall, has an entrance-passage spanned by three slab lintels, and preserves traces of a wooden door-frame. In the N wall there is an aumbry, roughly 0.33m in cubic dimensions, but unusually there is no window. At the wall-head there are fragments of wall-plates, and some wire over the doorway may have helped to secure the roof-covering.
A later dyke over-rides the outer edge of the N wall and was probably intended to prevent stock from entering the adjacent enclosure on the NW side. Beyond the N end of the building there are mounded foundations which are apparently earlier than the adjacent enclosure-wall. They probably represent the N extent of the former barn, later foreshortened and re-faced internally.
G P Stell and M Harman 1988.

G P and M Stell and Harman, 1988, Buildings of St Kilda, 41-2, no. 9 (Bibliographic reference). SWE8255.