200 Moffat and Upper Annandale. 



is a well-known tradition in the town that the wages of the 

 masons working on it were 8d per day, and that they left it 

 to begin at Moffat House at gd per day. 



It will be noted that the charters stipulate that the houses 

 are to be built with stone or brick and lime. There is no clay 

 about Moffat suitable, either in quantity or quality, for 

 making bricks. Yet in the rough boulder till which is spread 

 over the whole district some finer portions have been washed 

 into pockets here and there about the town, notably about the 

 Whins and Frenchland Burn ; and the builders here made 

 bricks from this poor sandy and gravelly clay, which were 

 built principally into the internal partitions of the King's 

 Arms, Spur Inn, and other contemporary buildings, but the 

 industry of brick-making here had ceased long before the 

 memory of the oldest inhabitant. These bricks were very 

 crude and rough : some of the stones in them are as large as 

 hens' eggs, as can be seen from the specimen on view,* which 

 is from the King's Arms. Where bricks were not used for 

 the partitions, they were made with clay and 'straw. The 

 method of erecting these partitions was to fix up wood stan- 

 dards about 2 feet or 2^ feet apart from floor to ceiling, fix 

 temporary boards on one side of the standards, and fill in the 

 mixed-up clay and straw between the standards from the open 

 side and left flush therewith, allowed to dry for a few days, 

 and temporary boards removed. After the clay par- 

 titions were done away with, a system came into vogue of 

 doing them with whinstone shivers in much the same way as 

 the clay. The wood standards were fixed up as formerly and 

 lathed on the one side with laths spaced two inches apart, and 

 the stone shivers built with lime from the open side pressed 

 hard against the laths to support them. This form of par- 

 tition lasted, especially in estate work in Upper Annandale, 

 till about forty-five years ago ; but in ordinary buildings brick 

 partitions became pretty general with the making and opening 

 of the Caledonian Railway. The plaster laths used were made 

 from home-grown wood, sawn into the laths required in the 



* This specimen with the exhibits of clay and wall partition, 

 gypsum floor, and stone window weight, are in the Society's Museum 

 by the favour of Mr J. T. Johnstone. 



