Historians say that this area of Scotland was slow to develop. In early centuries the humble folk’s dwellings would be poorly-built, mean, comfortless dark little hovels with earthen floors. Sods of turf or a thick-layered network of twigs or heather thacked or thatched the roofs, with a hole left for the fire’s smoke to escape. The room’s only light came from the smouldering glow in the hearth in the centre of the floor and from a few tiny windows that were holes in the wall; and the dingy house-space probably contained little more than a roughly-made table and stools, straw on the floor for sleeping on, cooking pots and feeding bowls of coarse clay.
The inhabitants and their animals lived under the same roof; the human beings used the door that led to the kaleyard, and the animals, kept at the other end of the building, went out the byre door to the moors.
Stones picked up from the moors for long-ago cottages were roughly cut with primitive hand-tools. They say that even into the 20th century, boulders long since weathered into rounded, almost egg-shape and thought to have belonged to much earlier buildings, were sometimes dug up here and there in Carmunnock, or found at the base of dykes or in garden rockeries. These loose, free or alluvial boulders, the largest of them once-upon-a-time used for buildings’ foundations, may have belonged to those of the 17th century or earlier.
As time went on, poorly-built dwellings that had been made of inferior stuff, rotted; their nobbly roughly-mortared outer walls and crudely thatched or turf-covered roofs were allowed to fall down. They would not have lasted as they were, nor would they have given enough protection if families were going to survive. By the late 17th century, however, there were better-built dwellings many of which lasted into the 19th, some throughout the 20th and probably a few will go on well into the 21st century.
Happily, there were a number from that period which were well worth maintaining. In Carmunnock today we have several very substantial comfortable cottages that we know originated in the 1690s. For example there are 1 and 3 Pathhead Road, 22, 24 and Trestermyre at 26 and possibly 32 and 34 Kirk Road, Bishops’ Cottage at 7 Busby Road and perhaps 13 and 15 Manse Road.
Probably the foundations or even parts of several later-developed houses exist from then too. Still more interesting, there is a building in the very centre of the village, at 8 and 8A Kirk Road, where the lowest part of the walls is said to exist from the 14th century.
The 18th century gradually brought a considerable improvement in the state of houses. Stone to be cut to size was carted from quarries outside the district, because locally the one on the High Green and the small one at the top of the Low Green as well as the big quarry on the Cathkin Braes (till recently the city’s Cleansing Department rubbish tip) contained material unsuitable for building, being of Whinstone and some Rottenstone.
In the 19th century good sandstone for many of Carmunnock’s houses came from the small Lower Howgill or Hagwell quarries in the wooded slope sometimes known as Bluebell Wood on the north side of present-day Lainshaw Drive and Castlemilk’s YMCA hall. Some even came from a cut among the trees at High Howgill or Hagwell almost opposite there, south-east of the main road.
When the accessible good stuff was taken from these, all that was left was what is termed weeping sandstone, a damp-retaining material which if used for building often brings structural problems. Then because of the lack of suitable equipment for digging out the remaining small amount of good stone, the Howgills became disused and sandstone of suitable quality had to be brought to the village from further afield.
Various qualities of stone picked up at random from the moors and roughly cut into workable chunks of different sizes were used for the construction of houses at this time. The builder selected these to fit with each other, and by stretching a string to mark the course, placed them more or less in lines or string courses, using smaller or rubble pieces to fill in the gaps. These nobbly walls were thus described as being of random and rubble or simply of rubble-stone. There must have been great activity in Carmunnock during the last decades of the 18th century, patching sections or even rebuilding walls and gables of the best among the existing cottages, as well as repairing the roofs. Good rubblestone of the old would be used to build anew or they would bring fresh material from the quarries. Stone-cutting was improving too, gradually facilitated by better tools.
While the cottages were made mostly of roughly-cut rubblestone, during the later part of the 18th century buildings were going up here and there in the village that were constructed either wholly or partly of rectangular or squared sets of good quarry sandstone - material that had been laboriously ground and chiselled to flat surfaces, then scored or marked or necked with knotches to hold the mortar on the between side and on the outer surface to let rain-water run off. This whole series of processes was known as dressing the stone. We are told by an elderly builder (interested in the work on the church and Kirkennan Cottage) that the stone was “punched and dabbed in levellers, risers and snecks”. Soon too, it was these new squared sets of dressed stone that were used for repairing or facing the walls of some of the earlier cottages.
By now there was a more efficient mortar, and for lining inner walls there was a form of coarse plaster. Good use was made of timber, securing the sections either with crude nails or with the old wooden pins as before, the sap still inside swelling them to fit tightly in holes made by red hot iron rods. Thatching was better too and generally speaking, a lot more skill was being taught and employed.
Besides the new ones, cottages that had originated in the latter part of the 17th century were by now being given the chance of a much longer life. Their construction had been made more secure, giving good protection from weather and safer from that dread old danger fire. (By the 16th century hearth alcoves at the foot of chimney cavities built into a wall’s thickness, became law.) Ceilings were made over kitchen living-space, with a hatch through which the children were “put up” to sleep. As standards of living got better, so did survival, and as the population increased, interiors were divided into rooms.
All this together with the important strengthening work that was done to outside walls in ensuing years, has meant that for some of Carmunnock’s earlier cottages, the work was well worthwhile. This late 18th and 19th century improving has lasted into the present day.