Transactions. 45 
stones of the building have not been cleared away, or the 
enclosures of the garden have been left standing, the sites may 
be recognised ; otherwise the place is a blank. 
The most remarkable of these dilapidated enclosures still left 
standing, though greatly broken down and all but levelled with 
the ground, is a group of broken-down dykes or garden enclosures 
seen not far from Southwick old church. It is easily noticeable 
from the parish road which passes the churchyard on the opposite 
side of the valley, and anyone noticing it at once says, there 
doubtless at one time stood a village under the protecting shadow 
of the church. The village existed at a period anterior to the 
time at which my paper begins, but not so long anterior as a 
person looking at the relics may think. Mr Craik, tenant of 
Nether Clifton, and whose father tenanted it before him—Mr 
Craik who lived to 90 years of age, and died only a few years 
ago—told me that he remembered one of the houses still standing 
and occupied. 
The cottages of that period were of a rude and simple con- 
struction—built of drystone wall, without lime; they were 
thatched with turf and straw if it could be got; if not, with 
brackens, heather, or reeds from the numerous lochs. The turf 
consisted of thin flakes, or scraws as they were called, cut or 
flayed from the moorland surface by a flauchter spade, the spade 
used in stripping off the top of the moss in peat casting. Sir 
Walter Scott, who has rescued from oblivion so many of our 
Scotch words, mentions the flauchter spade in “The Antiquary.” 
Many of the cottages were of a peculiar and highly primitive 
construction. <A pair of young fir or ash trees of suitable lengths 
and thickness were placed, their butt ends resting on the ground, 
and their tops inclined the one to the other, but not so as to meet 
and form a triangle, inclined so as to be say four or six feet apart. 
At this distance they were bound together by a thick band or 
strap of wood. This erected formed the gable of the building, 
and was kept in its upright position by either stone or turf 
building around it, or by a combination of stone and turf. A 
second pair of young or sapling trees, treated in the same way, 
were placed at a distance six feet from the first, and built round 
in the same manner. A third and a fourth pair were similarly 
treated, the fourth pair forming the opposite gable. The spaces 
between these upright pairs were covered with thin branches of 
trees, popularly called rice, which formed the roof. These thin 
