File:Ruins of Carman Cottage - geograph.org.uk - 1220786.jpg

English: Ruins of Carman Cottage. For an indication of the date of construction of the building, and of its probable use, see an entry at WoSAS: http://www.wosas.net/wosas_site.php?id=21373

This rectangular ruin is made up of large blocks of red and grey sandstone. By pacing out the walls; I found that the ruin measures about 9.3 m by 5.1 m; see also 1220808, which shows one of the shorter walls of the same ruin. I later found that the building is named as Carman Cottage on old OS maps.

[The WoSAS database entry suggests that it may have been a herdsman's house dating from the eighteenth century. Local tradition agrees: by coincidence, a few weeks after taking this photo, I was watching the video "The Lovely Valley – Memories of the Old Vale – Part 3", which contains local footage filmed from the 1950s to the 1970s; it concludes with a walk uphill, past the nearby stile – https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/1220747 – which was described as being "at the shepherd's cottage".]

On the other side of the fence behind the ruin is Poachy Glen, marked out by the trees and bushes that grow in abundance along the course of the Poachy Burn. There is another ruined structure in this area, but it is much less visible: 1224662.

[The name Poachy Glen has nothing to do with poaching. In the book "Changing Identities, Ancient Roots – The History of West Dunbartonshire from Earliest Times", Simon Taylor cites a fourteenth-century land-grant that mentions "Poachy Burn (Pocheburne, probably containing Scots poch 'poach', a kind of fish)".]