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C O N T E X T 1 7 9 : M A R C H 2 0 2 4 27 HADRIAN’S WALL PETER RYDER Discovering bastles In these fortified farmhouses of the unruly 16th-and 17th-century borders, the ground floor housed the animals while the family lived on the first floor, protected against raiders. A Northumberland farmer told me how he had been on the receiving end of the wrath of a transatlantic tourist. The tourist had driven miles on narrow winding roads following English Heritage signs, in this case in the remote valley of the Tarset Burn, directing him to ‘Black Middens Bastle House’. He had apparently had expectations of an edifice along the lines of Alnwick or Bamburgh Castle and was seri- ously underwhelmed when he eventually found something looking like a roofless barn. He did not know about bastle houses and the insight they give us into the troubled lives of ordinary border farmers. In the aftermath of the long Anglo-Scottish wars, these farmers were left far from those with either the desire or the capabil- ity of instilling any degree of law and order. Bastles, or bastle houses, really only became public knowledge after the publication of the 1970 Royal Commission on Historical Monuments report Shielings and Bastles . This report lumped them together with the remains of the temporary summer dwellings of folk who followed their flocks to remote upland pastures. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the volume was the product of a brief, working far-from-home holiday by a small group of academics. They identified about 70 bastles, and described and illustrated them well. Then in the mid-1980s came the National Resurvey of all buildings of historic or archi- tectural interest. This is where I got involved as a fieldworker. We rapidly realised that the Royal Commission had missed rather a lot. In Allendale, one of the first parishes surveyed, they found half a dozen bastles and we identi- fied 40; and so it went on. Today’s bastle count must be towards 300. Although the great major- ity remain in Northumberland, they spread into Cumbria and also into Scotland (where they are termed pele houses). Essentially a bastle is a small, very solidly- built house, built – and this is important – by tenant farmers, not the land-owning classes. It had metre-thick walls and the living rooms were on the first floor, above a byre in which animals could be secured behind stout oak doors. These were protected by drawbars and usually turned Housesteads: the ruin of a bastle built into the south gate of the Roman fort. Several forts had bastles built within them, the remains of the Roman walls perhaps providing an outer line of defence. (All photos: Peter Ryder)