Grandy's Knowe, Bardon Mill

ringsGrandy’s Knowe (knowe here meaning ‘hill’) is located in the Hadrian’s Wall World Heritage Site, the buildings here being arranged round a rectangular farm yard. The structure of particular interest to this investigation is the Grade-II listed farmhouse of supposedly early eighteenth-century date forming the central part of a linear structure located on the northern side of the yard. The house appears to be attached to the east wall of an earlier ‘bastle’ (a form of defended stone-built farmhouse, peculiar to the English/Scottish border regions, most being with 30 kilometres of it, and most dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), the west end of the farmhouse roof appearing to use the east wall of the bastle for support. A later building, probably no earlier than the late-eighteenth century, and possibly of nineteenth century date, is attached to the east end of the farmhouse. A range of three buildings (including a barn between a north and south byre) is located on the western side of the yard and it is likely that a small structure in the south-east corner was a pig sty. Tree-ring analysis is currently in progress.