The Township of Glen - 2

A few days after locating the possible site of Glen township - see earlier post here - we walked along the single-track road that connects Golspie to Rogart and reached a point where the road gave us a wide view up the Glenrobin glen. The site of the township is just beyond the stone wall so, although we had walked almost as far as we wanted to that day....

....we travelled a little further so we could look straight down on Glen. The visible walls are almost certainly a sheep fank, probably built soon after the township was cleared using stone from the pre-existing buildings.

The main site is to the immediate north of the fank where, in the satellite view, the footings of buildings and small enclosed fields, perhaps used for growing kale, can clearly be seen. Some of the buildings are elongate and divided, and are probably longhouses of the sort we have seen at farmstead NC800004.

Although a fair number of the larger rocks used to build the township are still in place, the structures couldn't be distinguished from the road so, at some point in the future, I'm hoping to return to visit the site, although we were warned by local residents that the field is home to cows with calves; we could also see a black bull with them.

While the people we spoke to knew nothing of the township they told us that the site was called The Monastery, although they did not believe that a monastery had ever existed there. It's interesting that a resident of Golspie Tower had previously said the same of some of the buildings there, suggesting that, at some point in the past, a monastery may have existed somewhere in the area.