Black and white photograph, 1982
RCAHMS
For almost three millennia most people in Scotland would have lived in a roundhouse, often in the same locations we live in today, as can be seen by the housing estate in the background. The Lower Greenyards house was excavated, prior to development, by archaeologists in 1982.
These houses were substantial circular buildings, with a low wall of stone, wood, wattle-and-daub, clay or turf, within which stood a ring of upright timbers, supporting a conical thatched roof which would have stood about 15 metres high. Each house would have been occupied by an extended family, providing sleeping accommodation, an open hearth for heating and cooking, a sheltered working area within the doorway, and also small pens for the livestock.
Where the walls were built of stone, these can sometimes survive as upstanding monuments in upland areas. Elsewhere, the houses only survive as buried postholes because the timber and organic components of the house have decayed. These can be revealed as a cropmark by aerial photography, or as at Lower Greenyards, by excavation.