Monument record MHG53724 - Series of Smallholdings, Clashmore

Recorded as part of a wider survey by Historic Assynt on the Clashmore Township.
The northeast part of the site is divided into large rectangular fields created by the Sutherland Estate as a model farm in the 1870’s. Home’s survey of 1774 and contemporary records indicate that the model farm destroyed the bulk of the earlier township and the population was moved onto new crofts to the southwest. However in the northwest fields of the model farm and across a nameless burn to the southeast the footings of several smallholdings, consisting of a house and one or more outbuildings within an enclosure survive, together with some field boundaries and other structures. Smallholdings K, L, M, N, O, P and structure J lie in the northwest fields of the model farm, whereas smallholdings A, C, D, F, complex B and buildings E and G lie to the south east across a burn from the main areas of settlement. The latter group of structures generally have several courses of walling surviving whereas those to the northwest are little more than ridges and mounds with a few odd stones. The majority of the buildings are not marked on Home’s map but first appear as roofed structures on the 1st edition of the OS 6 inch map. However they are either unroofed or unrecorded on the 2nd edition suggesting that they were mainly built in the first half of the nineteenth century as the earlier settlement expanded and the first crofts were laid out in the 1840’s, and taken out of use after the construction of the model farm. <1>-<3>