Monument record MHG49373 - Muck, Druim Mor

NMRS Report: (07/02/2006)
NM47NW 48 centred 41193 79956

The remains of a township comprising no less than nine subrectangular buildings, at least four enclosures and a pen lie at the NW end of Druim Mor immediately above the enclosed fields of Gallanach farm. The stone walls of these fields cut across four of the buildings and one enclosure, and only faint swellings on the surface of the ground reveal their presence within the improved fields. Elsewhere, the buildings are mostly reduced to grass-grown footings with occasional facing stones, but two have been so heavily robbed that their walls are indicated only by robber trenches. These two are set on an area of flat ground overlooking the greater part of the township, and have traces of what are either enclosures adjoining their SE ends, or the remains of earlier buildings protruding from beneath them. To the NE, at a lower level, there is another building with an enclosure or an earlier building at its SSE end. This building is set end-on into the slope on the SSE and is the only one in which stretches of wall-face still survive. It measures 6.3m from NNW to SSE by 3m transversely within a faced rubble wall 0.9m in thickness and up to 0.7m in height, and the entrance is midway along its ENE side. A pear-shaped enclosure, the largest in the township, lies to the SSE, but it is bisected by a later linear boundary. The pen, which comprises an L-shaped arrangement of boulders, is situated at the foot of a crag immediately to the SW. The remaining enclosures all lie adjacent to buildings.

The township is depicted on an estate map of 1809 as a cluster of three buildings and four enclosures. The largest of these enclosures is annotated as a yard and is attached to the S end of a building: it probably coincides with the pear-shaped enclosure described above. A short distance to the N, another building is shown on the line of a curvilinear boundary. The location of this building now falls within an area of woodland where several buildings and stretches of walls were recorded during the survey (see NM48SW *, Muck02 402-3). The township was probably abandoned by the mid-19th century, and nothing is shown here on the 1st edition of the OS 6-inch map (Argyllshire, Island of Muck, 1880, sheet lxxii).
(Muck02, 209-20, 404)
Visited by RCAHMS (ARG) 15 May 2002