(no subject)

[endlessrarities]

Okay, I admit it.  A change is as good as a rest.

The bad news is that I forgot my camera for the View From The Office feature.  The good news is that the job's run on, so hopefully I'll remember it tomorrow.

I spent the whole day trying to record and get my head round my little tower (which some of you may remember from the UK terrestrial TV programme 'Restoration Man').  The party line is that the tower in question is just one surviving part of a much larger structure.  Everyone knows this to be the case - it's just a matter of proving it.

The case of Cinderella's slipper and the Ugly Sisters springs to mind.  The shoe has to fit, no matter what.  Unfortunately, the archaeological part of the works has revealed no traces of a curtain wall (and you'd think that a BIG, kick-ass curtain wall, like those seen on Harlech, Caernavon, etc.) would leave at least some trace behind.

As for the building survey...  I've visited this site before as a guerilla archaeologist, and it didn't make sense then.  After spending a whole day trying to communicate with this structure, I've discovered that it talks gobbledigook.  All the vocabulary's there - it's got a slop drain, it's got handsome rolled mouldings round the windows, it's got a number of gunloops.  It's even got Mason's Marks!  And yet, when you fit all this evidence together, you get gibberish.  The salt boxes and aumbrys are located in the opposite walls from the fire place, the slop drain doesn't seem to be associated with a kitchen, and there are two arched recesses which look suspiciously like the kind of cupboard you'd get in a Victorian House.

Add to this a few niggling hunches, and the confusion merely intensifies.  If this structure forms part of an earlier castle with curtain walls, then why does it have GUNLOOPS???  Shouldn't it have arrow-slits???  And the masonry is pretty shoddy for a 13th century structure.

As a medieval structure, it just doesn't feel right.  There's so many places where nothing makes sense.  Take the basement/cellar.  There's a blocked up feature in one wall which looks for all the world like a machicholation (that's the projecting hole where you drop boiling oil and stuff onto people's heads).  So what's it doing in an internal wall in a basement?  Chances are it's actually a fireplace, but there's no chimney, and this is the point in the wall where the slop drain feeds out of, too. 

Confused?  You bet I am.  The possibility that this building's actually a 17th century folly built using original bits of worked stone and masonry from an earlier castle seems increasingly likely, and this is probably not what the Awfully Nice People from the local council and Historic Scotland will want to hear.

I was keen to work on this site because the castle features in my historical novel.  And you know what?  As an accurate record of day-to-day life in late medieval Renfrewshire, I think my novel hits closer to the mark than this poor building does!