The Outer Courtyard
From the hall just described, access must have been obtained to the outer courtyard of the main building. No trace of the doorways could be found. All the stones of any value for building purposes which lay near the surface had disappeared, and little remained of the court itself save the lower foundations of the walls. On the east, adjoining the outer hall, absolutely nothing but this substratum was left. The method employed had been to dig a trench down to the subsoil, and to lay in it a bed of river cobbles about one foot in depth and four feet in width. Next came a scarcement course of stone—usually the metamorphosed sandstone from the Eildon Hills—of the same width and six inches in height. On this again was built the wall, two feet six inches in thickness. The only portion showing both faces was found on the north side of the courtyard. It measured two feet in length, and consisted of two courses of hammer-dressed masonry bedded in lime, standing fourteen inches above the scarcement.
The court walls enclosed a wide space sixty-three feet by seventy feet, covered with gravel and open to the sky. Around it on the north, south, and east ran an ambulatory, supported on pillars. The fourth, or west, side was bounded simply by its wall, through the centre of which a gateway would in all probability give entrance to the inner court. The ambulatory had a width of ten feet. It appeared to have been slightly higher in level than the courtyard, and to have been flagged with sandstone. Its roof, which was probably a single span set against the outer walls, must have sloped inwards, as was clearly proved by the remains of a stone gutter, found still in its original position, at the north-west corner of the court, Plate IX., Fig. 2. This gutter doubtless surrounded the margin of the courtyard, receiving the water from the roof, which passed into a stone drain, eleven inches wide and ten inches deep, lying just beneath the paving of the ambulatory on the south, and so into the large drain running to the west. The roof was probably covered with red tiles, though the number of pieces found was small when compared with those which lay in the chambers at the back. It had been supported on twenty pillars of stone placed at regular intervals of about eight feet.
In most cases nothing was left of these pillars except the cobble foundations on which they had rested. At the south-east corner, however, the remains gave a more definite clue to the original appearance of the ambu-
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