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C O N T E X T 1 7 9 : M A R C H 2 0 2 4 29 HADRIAN’S WALL dated 1602, a rather superior example (it has a basement vault and, unusually, an internal stair). The big, mullioned windows on the first floor are of 1904 and the stone flag roof of the early 1990s. Victorian drawings show it with heather thatch. Many other examples are now houses, and of necessity have been heavily altered, sometimes only the thick walls giving them away. Others serve as farm buildings, and are more recognis- able, with others simply ruins. They were usually built on a course of boulders, rather than any proper sunk foundations, and can be removed without leaving any real archaeo- logical evidence. I remember visiting one near Bellingham, recorded as a fairly minimal ruin, in Shielings and Bastles . The last stones were in the process of being removed from the site by the farmer, a quite natural and pragmatic re-use of material. Sad but not sad, part of the continuing evolution of the northern landscape. I will end with a tale featuring the redoubt- able Frank Stoke of Chesterwood, as recounted by the guidebook writer William Weaver Tomlinson. It took place one night in the early 18th century and demonstrates something of the world in which bastle dwellers lived. ‘One winter night he was awakened by a noise, and found that someone was trying to draw back the bolt of his door with a knife. He instructed his daughter to stand quietly behind the door as the knife was withdrawn, to push the bolt quickly back again, but without alarming the party. He then took his musket, and loading it with slugs, descended through the trap-door into the cow-house below, and cautiously unbarred the door. At the top of the heavy flight of stone stairs leading to the dwelling apartment he saw four or five men with a dark lantern. After carefully surveying them for a few minutes to satisfy himself as to who they were, he broke silence in a thundering voice “You d-d treacherous rascals, I’ll make the starlight shine through some of you!” and discharged his weapon at the same moment. The holder of the lantern staggered across the stairhead, and fell headlong down the steps, shot through the heart. His terrified companions jumped over the wall and fled in all directions. Stokoe hastily entered the house, closed the door, and retired to his bed as if nothing particular had happened.’ Nine Dargue: a cutaway drawing of an Allendale bastle, showing the byre doorway as usual in a gable end, the upper door before an external stair was added, slit vents to the basement and small grilled windows to the first floor, and floor of stone slabs on transverse beams. Peter Ryder, a buildings archaeologist, spent most of his life in the north east of England. In retirement in Fife, he is writing about medieval buildings and more recent nonconformist architecture. Housty: a tentative reconstruction of a bastle village in Allendale as it might have appeared in around 1650, with bastles (and a long house) linked by walls to form a defensible enclosure.