Craignavar - Deserted Township in Perthshire
As drystone wallers we are always keen to visit historic sites that feature drystone or stone, especially local ones.
Craignavar is a post-medieval, deserted township in Glen Almond, Perthshire. It’s not in any brochures, there are no signs to follow, so you must work a little harder to find it.
On approach, just a few, unobtrusive piles of stones make themselves known, but the entire site comprises around 22 rectangular, drystone buildings, an intact corn drying kiln, and various drystone enclosures/field boundaries.
The stone for this township would have been lifted from the land around it, and the people who built it spent time making sure they were building to a high standard. After all, these were their homes. The corners are really fantastic examples of how drystone should be built, and how, at its core, it is a craft about doing what you can with what you have. Although I have taken many photographs here over the years, I wanted to spend some time documenting its details, as it is falling quickly into further ruin. Despite being heavily ruined, Craignavar still has some beautiful examples of drystone building. Many corners, and a few gable ends are still standing but who knows for how long.
The township is sprawling, and as you walk through the ruins, more make themselves known. Several have been divided into two or three compartments and although the floors are no longer visible, they are still cobbled under the earth and grass. Some of the structures have been built around huge boulders that were already in place and too heavy to move. It’s hard to see the scale of the stones in these images, but the very biggest of them are fridge sized.
There are still some lovely little features on display, like tiny windows and interior shelves. The corn drying kiln (hard to photograph among the summer ferns and long grasses) appears as a large mound of earth with a stone-lined hole in the middle. In winter you can see its interior structure more clearly, including the flue near the bottom.
There are also beautiful sections of building, which is hard to do with such rough stone, including this tiny little sneck near a still-standing corner.
We don’t know if this village was emptied during the Highland Clearances or if life just got too hard out here. These days, it’s one of those very special places where the past hasn’t yet settled into the ground. Instead, it stands around you in the proud piles of fallen stone.
