Wester Yardhouses Souterrain Souterrain View all content for Wester Yardhouses Souterrain

Friday 6/8/04 Driving way up a tiny country road (and I use the word ‘road’ in its loosest possible meaning- put it this way there’s grass growing up trhough the remains of the red tar in the middle of it!) I meet a friendly old man out for his walk in his wellies. I stop to ask him about the souterrain of Wester Yardhouses and if it is okay for me to visit and take some pictures, ‘aye, nae bother’! Turns out this guy is a font of local knowledge regarding antiquarian sites. He tells me about Scottish Water doing some work up on the hill next to one of the cairns and unearthing a massive stone but not really realising what they were doing! He also tells me of an old friend of his who stayed nearby, now long gone, who, every year, used to clean 13 old boundary stones that crossed the Pentlands. We make our separate ways and I head across to the corner of a lonely field of Lanarkshire. Under a dry stane syke, a hole. A muddy entrance 86 cm wide by 1 m high. However, this wouldn’t have been the original entrance as an unroofed section runs about 2.75 m EW before this. I put my hard hat and boiler suit on and crawl inside. The mud floor of the souterrain rises up for about 2.5 m and then falls away, but it has been deliberately blocked only about 4.5 metres from the present entrance. At the very end are a couple of piles of rabbit bones and skulls. There are still some massive lintels to be seen in the short passageway, one being about 1 m wide by 1.5 m long. I take some pictures, write these notes and head back to the car under a grey sky with nothing but the cry of buzzards overhead.

Posted by Martin 17th August 2004ce

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