Hanging Shaw Bastle 2

Description

Solitary bastle, 9.2m long x 5.7m wide. Byre entrance in gable wall (Ryder 1986).
Hanging Shaw II. This forms the east end of a range of farmbuildings, adjoining an 18th or early 19th century barn. The bastle measures 9.2m by 5.8m externally, with walls of rubble and large roughly shaped quoins to the lower section of each angle, on a boulder plinth. There has been extensive rebuilding when the inner faces of the walls were probably cut back to their present thickness of 0.6m. The only obvious bastle features surviving is the blocked byre doorway in the centre of the east end; this is square headed, with a chamfered surround, and is only 0.7m wide outside the chamfer; it has large roughly shaped dressings, the lintel being partly cut away. In the centre of the south wall is a straight joint, possibly one jamb of an opening, of uncertain date; the two ground floor and two first floor windows in the south wall have tooled stone surrounds of later 18th century character; above the smaller first floor openings is a prominent set-back, carried right round the building; the featureless walls above this level are probably a later 19th or 20th century heightening.
Internally, there are no features of any age; the first floor is of relatively recent date, and above its level the upper part of the west wall has been removed.
The fact that the bastle byre entrance doorway is set considerably below the present floor level suggests that the original building was virtually rebuilt, as a conventional ground floor house, in the later 18th century; the windows in the south wall relate to a floor level at approximately the present level. There has been further remodelling in the late 19th or 20th century, when the building was heightened; the cutting back of the internal wall faces may date to this latest phase (Ryder 1994-5). (Northumberland HER)