Excavations at Clestrain Hall - The John Rae Society

 Excavations at Clestrain Hall, Orkney

 Graemsey Island taken from the steps of Clestrain Hall at the end of the 2020 excavation season.

In May 2020, despite COVID-19 restrictions, we had the opportunity to help excavate the courtyard around the rear of Clestrain Hall which is a part of the overall £4 million renovation project being undertaken by the John Rae Society.  

Clestrain Hall was the childhood home of the famous explorer John Rae (30/09/1813-22/07/1893).  John Rae was born at the Hall of Clestrain on 30th September 1813, one of nine children born to John Rae and Margaret Glen Campbell. His father, also called John, was the estate factor for the Lord Advocate of Scotland, Lord Armadale (William Honeyman) who resided in Edinburgh. As a young boy John Rea, as was the custom for young boys of his background in the 19th century, spent time hunting and shooting in the hills around the Hall or sailing in the family's boat.  His love of outdoor pursuits would serve John Rea well when he later became an explorer with the Hudson Bay Company following graduation with a degree in medicine and was later licensed by the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh.  

                                                                        

                                                Fig.1 Dr. John Rae FRS FRGS (30/09/1813-22/07/1893) circa 1862.

Rae explored the Gulf of Boothia, northwest of the Hudson Bay, from 1846 to 1847 and the Arctic coast near Victoria Island from 1848 to 1851, back in the Gulf of Boothia, he obtained credible information from the local Inuit about the fate of the Franklin Expedition that had disappeared in the area in 1848.

Whilst Clestrain Hall is better known as John Rae's childhood home, it was thought to have originally been built or renovated by Patrick Honeyman (25th January 1733 - 1798), in the Scottish Palladian style, although there are elements within that are more akin to Georgian style of construction, sometime in the late 18th Century.  Patrick Honeyman was the son of William Honeyman, the Lord Advocate of Scotland and the descendent of the illegitimate son of James IV.  As the eldest son, Patrick Honeyman inherited the estate in 1751 from his father William and a few short years later he either built or renovated an existing building that had been on the site.  

Records suggest that the pirate John Gow (1698-11 June 1725) and his men on the ship 'Revenge', (renamed the 'George'), raided the Hall of Clestrain in 1725.  John Gow and his men were apprehended when they floundered off the coast of the little island of Eday, near the calf o' Eday, on the way to raid Carrick House, owned by Gow's friend James Fea.  Gow and his men were later arrested and were sentenced to hang at Execution Dock in London.  

The Hall of Clestrain may have originally belonged to Robert Honeyman (1670-1747), Sheriff of Orkney.  It formed part of the large estates that he inherited from his father. However, records place the Clestrain Hall raided by John Gow "on the shore of Hamnavoe, directly opposite Stromness", which does not quite fit the actual location of present-day Clestrain Hall, leading to the speculation that perhaps there had been another Clestrain Hall closer to the shore and indeed there are two likely candidates, or the Hall had been loosely located and the current Hall had been subject to extensive renovations and rebuilding.

The Honeyman family had been present in Orkney for over a generation and by the early 1800’s they had acquired properties in Edinburgh, Sutherland, Lanarkshire, and Lothian.  Honeyman appointed John Rae Senior factor to oversee his holdings in Orkney, and he moved with his family into Clestrain and his son John Rae was born there in 1813.

 Last season's (2020) excavations were undertaken to establish whether there had been an earlier building on the site and whether it originally had a moat, in addition to establishing the location and footprint of the eastern pavilion. Next seasons excavations are still to be confirmed, but it is expected that further trenches will be opened in the courtyard and on the northern side of the second pavilion overlooking the Island of Graemsey.

             

            Fig 2. Capped off stairs with slab removed                      Fig.2.1 Stone rubble infill beneath the earth infill

Above (Fig 2& 2.1) beginning of the excavation undertaken to evaluate the depth and condition of the old stairs leading down to another portion of the house, thought to be a cellar or undercroft.  Fig.2.1, shows the stone rubble infill with a couple of pieces of potential masonry in the top right corner of the trench. The stone infill went down another foot where I found a flagstone slab (Fig.2.2) which capped off the stairs thought to have been built as a part of the larger construction works in the mid 19th century by John Rae Jnr. 

                                                     Fig. 2.2 Flagged capped stairs 

The walls of the stairs were constructed of sandstone of the type commonly found around the area and on the shore as can be seen in Fig. 2.2.

           

    Fig. 3 Trench across the earlier 'moat'.                                     Fig.4 long shot of the flag capped drain ditch construction 

Fig. 3 above, is a working photo taken of the test trench excavated to evaluate the potential of excavating a larger area. The test trench was enlarged to a further 50cm to the left (brown infill) to establish the relation of the stairs on the left (Fig.3) to the moat and the drain in order to get a sequence of events established. The infill of the suspected moat is thought to have surrounded the Hall at an earlier period contained a great deal of peat ash, bones of duck, beef, and lamb among others.  As expected, due to the low water table, it became waterlogged within minutes of reaching the last six inches of the bottom of the 'moat' or ditch and it became evident why drainage was required.  The area was largely devoid of any artifacts, however, the anaerobic conditions preserved large quantities of animal bone, wood, and wood shavings thought to have been evidence of the building or renovation process undertaken in 1765. In addition, thick layers of peat ash and bones were found, leading to a suggestion that the moat or ditch may have been used as a midden and it gradually filled up to the point that it could no longer function as intended.  Whether this was the case when John Rae Snr moved into Clestrain or it was during his tenure that the drainage became ineffective which lead to a soakaway being excavated (Fig. 5 &5.1) before the large scale drainage improvement and landscaping around the Hall took place in the mid to late 19^th century. 

  

                                

                                    Fig. 4.1 East-West running dry stone wall drains 

Following the insertion of the new drainage system (Fig 4-4.3) around the Hall in the mid to late 19th Century, the northern courtyard was leveled up and extensively landscaped. The drain itself was a large undertaking thought to have been partially built into the older moat in the traditional Orcadian method of dry stone walling.   Fig. 4 is a working shot of the drainage channels built in the traditional Orcadian way similar to the fabric and methods that are often seen in the construction in the Iron Age earth-houses or souterrains found around Orkney, a method of dry stone walling, unchanged in over a thousand years. 

The drain was constructed with a proper water drainage channel excised into the stone with curbing work to direct the water around the Hall to the area that is currently the front but which may have originally been constructed to flow to the rear of the Hall by setting the drainage channel at an approximate 2-3 degree slope which flowed at around the Hall possibly utilising the remains of the older moat to the front of the house and exiting through a drain to the west and out to the shore.   

                                                      

               Fig.4.2 Flag capped drain taken from                                                Fig.4.3 image of the inside of the drain 

                  the door.                                                                                   

The flow of the drain suggests that the formal entrance part of the Hall may have been swapped around some time in the past, from what is the rear today to its present layout. Further structural changes took place which may have been the removal of the superstructure around the moat and the building or demolition of a structure where the capped off stairs are now located.  

               

Fig. 5.  Photo of the ‘soakaway’ with flagstone infill                Fig. 5.1 Photo of the 'soakaway' running perpendicular to the

from the leveling up process                                                      wall to the left of the Hall                     

 

 

 The end

 

           

Clestrain Hall reproduced with kind permission from the John Rae Society 
          

References

1.John Rae (explorer) - Wikipedia

2.Patrick Honyman of Graemsay (1733 - 1798) - Genealogy (geni.com)

3.John Rae - Ancestry.com

4.Hall of Clestrain – Arctic Return

5.John Rae Society – To promote the life and history of one of the greatest Victorian explorers

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