Upland Houses: The Influence of Mountain Terrain on British Folk Building

Extract

The difficulty of building in mountainous country has resulted in similar solutions over a very wide area, and certain houses and farm buildings in western Britain have many features in common with those in Scandinavia, the Vosges, the Black Forest, Switzerland, Spain, Macedonia and even in the Himalayas. The most obvious method of building in hilly terrain is to create a level platform either entirely by excavation or by excavating the upper portion and using the earth removed to build up the lower part of the platform. A single-storeyed building on such a levelled site may then be identical with any lowland type.

Primitive ‘platform’ sites dating from the Dark Ages have been recorded from several parts of Wales, notably those excavated by Aileen Fox on Gelligaer Common, Glamorgan. These homesteads, each consisting of from one to three buildings erected on platforms levelled into the hillside, were sited on a little shelf at the junction of the moorland plateau and the valley scarp at an elevation of about 1,300 feet. Each house was divided into two parts by an almost central cross-passage and the ridge-pole was supported by two or more upright posts. Dark Age and medieval houses of the platform type are known from twenty-six sites in Glamorgan, three in Radnorshire and two near Llanbadarn Fynydd, whilst many smaller homesteads of a similar character have been discovered in Caernarvonshire by Hemp and Gresham.