Brig Bastle

Description

Bastle house now used as byre and store. Late C16/early C17. Upper floor partly rebuilt probably in C18. Openings altered C18. Random rubble 4 ft thick with massive quoins and boulder plinth. Welsh slate roof. 33 ft x 23 ft. 2 storeys. Ground floor has later door, with flat reveals, to right; and original door, 30 inches wide with splayed reveals, in centre. Original upper door also now a window is directly above with 2 later windows left and right. One very small window on ground floor rear and C20 brick outside stair. Gabled roof with kneelers.
Interior has old wood lintels to original ground floor door and to all openings on front of 1st floor. Corbels of former fireplace visible in ground floor and 3 square recesses to sides of former fireplaces on 1st floor. C18 roof timbers with tie and collar beams. (Listed Building Report)

NY 892897 In the farmyard at Brig is a two-storey building, now used as a barn, 23 x 33 feet over walls 3-1/2 feet thick. The ground floor has been much altered with the forming of new openings. A doorway in the upper floor in the middle of the south front is blocked (Ramm et al 1970).
The bastle measures c.12m by 7m externally, with walls of heavy rubble c.1.1m in thickness; a boulder plinth is evident around the east end. Few old features are visible externally. The basement doorway, set towards the east end of the south wall, has been altered, but retains a chamfered and rebated east jamb, cut in large blocks, with a drawbar tunnel. The other openings in the wall, including the upper doorway (now reduced to a window) have tooled-and-margined lintels and seem to relate to a partial rebuilding, or at least re-facing, of the wall in the 19th century. The east end seems to have bastle masonry extending to its full height, but no old features are visible. On the north a doorway close to the west end has a late 18th or early 19th century lintel, as has a first floor doorway at the head of an external flight of brick steps. Internally, the ground floor shows heavy and rough corbelling for a hearth at the west end. The present first floor, of relatively recent date, seems to be placed a metre or so above the original level. At first floor level there are old wall cupboards in both end walls, and a blocked recess in the centre of the east wall that may be a slit vent (if so, it is not readily traceable externally). At this level the internal faces of the side walls have been cut back, especially on the south. Whilst the present farmhouse looks to be of early 19th century date, it has a parallel range to the rear that seems a century or so older, to judge from its fabric. The dividing wall between the two, on the same alignment as (but not continuous with, there is a thin walled section between them) the rear wall of the bastle, is 1.5m thick and must survive from an earlier building. The position of the byre doorway in the long wall of the bastle is rather unusual, but probably relates to the bastle being one of a series built end to end (terraced bastles) as in Wall village; the massive wall inside the present farmhouse seems to confirm this (Ryder 1994-5). (Northumberland HER)