This season’s archaeology at The Hall has been extremely successful, with ancient buildings archaeologist Tom Addyman working with a team from Orkney Research Centre for Archaeology at UHI to undertake excavations inside and outside Hall of Clestrain.
We wanted to find out certain information about the West Pavilion, such as how deep the original floor was and what it was like. What we discovered is that under a skim of cement is the 18th Century floor with the threshold in place, though built over in the 1950s. Beneath the floor are uneven midden deposits filling an undulating surface as shown left.
As we have plans to build our restaurant on the west side of the pavilion, we needed to know what was there. What we found was evidence of a wall heading south. It lines up with another farm wall, which was part of the 18th Century enclosures. The wall actually stops at the corner of the pavilion and the rubble layer rests on the natural clay subsoil, as shown left below
The Coldomo Road took all the produce from the Honyman Estate and others to Coldomo, where it was shipped to Stromness as provisions for the Arctic ships of sail. It was laid over an old field surface, only inches above the natural clay. Below we see the rough beach stone metalling of this vitally important road to Coldomo Bay.
One very exciting and joyous find from the Coldomo Road excavation is a delightful 1950s Rupert Bear badge from The Scottish Daily Express! This brings us so much closer to the children at Clestrain.
Also below is the wonderful pencheck stair delving four steps down to a wooden surface, and then to the magnificent flag floor, shown on the left of the image. These are such exciting and important discoveries, which illustrate the grandeur of the ground floor of The Hall. All the stone was quarried locally at Quarryfield on the Scorradale Road. The roofing slates came from Black Crags past Stromness.
The breast of the fireplace on the north wall of The Hall was masked with cement render. The original fireplace was reduced in size by installing jambs on either side of the hearth. Loose rubble lies between them, then there is stone and plaster blocking. A cracked hearthstone lies just above floor level (shown below beneath the camp chair.)
The amazing thing is the brick rubble that can be seen in section and the complete bricks behind the pigsty wall. Tom Addyman, our ancient buildings archaeologist, immediately realised that these bricks were from the original partition walls of the Hall’s ground floor. This is a superb discovery as it really informs our thoughts on the forthcoming restoration.
The John Rae Society would like to thank Paul Clark, Rick Barton and the ORCA team for their diligent work. Also Tom Addyman of Addyman Archaeology in Edinburgh.
Words and images by Andrew Appleby