# Kettletonhead



## Crisp Monster (Jul 8, 2006)

Not the most exciting exploration ever, but quite atmospheric in it's way. The sort of house you might expect to see in Chiswick, but 1300 feet up in the Southern Uplands of Scotland.

The Scottish hills are full of abandoned buildings of one sort or another, but this one seems a bit bizarre. Going by the architecture it can't have been built much earlier than the 1950s; I once lived in an almost identical house which was built in 1964. It was apparently a shepherd's house, but bear in mind that Land Rovers had been around for at least 10 years when this was built. It was becoming derelict in the early 1980s, so must have been abandoned for a while beforehand.

It is reached by a track that climbs 2 miles out of the valley, accessible by 
4x4 and not much else. You come up through a fairly typical, attractive lowland Scottish glen, to find this incongruous derelict bunglalow.





Dunroamin





Skylight

There is a climber's bothy next door, so all the timber floors, joists, ceilings etc have gone for firewood leaving very little holding the roof up. The entire house has been totally gutted, and is in a terrible state. You can just about work out what each room was for, including a creepy little mortuary type thing which is accessed from outside the house and has no internal doors. It was probably for cutting up dead sheep or something.





Where they cut the bodies up





Open Plan





A room with a view





Kitchen (with basketball hoop?)

The whole house is full of rubbish from the bothy, and the master bedroom is full of jobbies. I was up there tonight taking these pictures, and the place has a genuinely creepy atmosphere about it, especially as it is getting dark.





Scary rabbit

Sorry about some of the blurry pictures, I had water running down my back the whole time. If you can see down the valley then it's going to rain, and if you can't then it already is.


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## Derek (Jul 8, 2006)

Crisp Monster said:


> Not the most exciting exploration ever,



and not in the least "urban"!

Nice though.

Derek


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## Rob (Jul 9, 2006)

Was the "kettle on your head" ?
Oh sorry i misread    .


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## Crisp Monster (Jul 9, 2006)

Mmmm, huh huh huh huh, uh huh huh huh huh, buttmunch


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## Bishop (Jul 9, 2006)

Good one Crisp Monster. So 2 miles up a track, middle of nowhere?
Bit of a swine if you live there and fancy nipping out for a paper
and a pint of milk.

B


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## Rob (Jul 10, 2006)

Erm! you think I'm going out there when things like this are roaming around.





Is that a sabre toothed rabbit?
Thats so scary and this ones dead what about the many live ones up there! No thanks.


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## Crisp Monster (Jul 10, 2006)

You see - nothing can escape! The lord Humungus _rules_ the wasteland!


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## Romperwoman (Jul 13, 2006)

i like that place, but it does look creepy! i like places that were 'lived in'. theres loads of derelict farms in wales too that are similar to that. would have been a very isolated place to live tho!


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## Major_Tom (Jul 13, 2006)

Crisp Monster said:


> Where they cut the bodies up



Are you sure about that? I don't know much about Scottish shepherds, or any shepherds for that matter, but isn't it more likely a sheering pen or something?


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## Crisp Monster (Jul 13, 2006)

It's possible, although I can't imagine why you would shear sheep inside your house. It's not the clearest picture in the world, so it's not really obvious that there is a low sandstone worksurface running around the room, which suggests carcass preparation to me. As mentioned before, there is no door linking this room to the rest of the house, so it would be relatively sterile and easy to separate blood & guts from your living quarters. Given that this house is quite isolated and it would be a bit of a mission to go for provisions (nearest shops 10 miles away), for fresh meat I would imagine that the shepherd would shoot rabbits, hares etc, possibly also killing the odd sheep or having other dead livestock delivered whole, and prepare them himself. Shepherds of old had to be a lot hardier and more multi skilled than the present day quad bike riding pansy, and would need to be able to fend for themselves if it came to bad snow etc. If you have ever tried to skin & gut a rabbit in a modern kitchen, you will appreciate why you might need a separate room to do it in (after you have had to clean blood, shit, and parasites off your nice hygena splashback). 

Also, there are barns adjacent to this house, one of which is the bothy, so I would think any shearing would happen in there...There are also no sheepfolds in the area, so there would be no way of corralling the sheep before shearing...

But, the final nail in the coffin is this; bear in mind that this is 1300 feet up a mountain, with a near impassible track leading up to it. You would never get a lorry up there to collect the fleeces, so the sheep will have been brought down to the valley. If the mountain won't come to Mohammed...


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## Major_Tom (Jul 13, 2006)

Ah, fair enough then!


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## Crisp Monster (Jul 13, 2006)

Crisp Monster said:


> You see - nothing can escape! The lord Humungus _rules_ the wasteland!




Totally off topic for a minute, but has anybody noticed that one of the biker punks in the picture above seems to be serving afternoon tea to the people strung up on the front of that vehicle?


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## Major_Tom (Jul 13, 2006)

Ha ha, that's true, or he's having a friendly conversation _over_ a cup of tea. Or perhaps just letting them have an enticing sniff through their sacks.. a sort of English middle-class torture.


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## Crisp Monster (Jul 13, 2006)

"Sniffing though sacks"?

Now we're really lowering the tone.


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## Major_Tom (Jul 13, 2006)

I was wondering if that particular colloquial meaning of the word "sack" would take priority in that context


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## Crisp Monster (Jul 13, 2006)

An interesting juxtaposition of the suggestion of stimulation to the olfactory nerve and the concept of a hairy receptacle containing objects of a rotund persuasion. I simply couldn't restrain myself.

Or something. huh huh, huhuhuh. That sucks


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