Buiston Crannog

Mid-Buiston Farm stands between the small towns of Stewarton and Kilmaurs in Ayrshire and in the 1880's was the property of the Earl of Eglinton. It is situated within a shallow basin, now, as it was then, of good agricultural land. In earlier times however this basin was the bed of a large lake known as Loch Buston. A small mound in the centre of the basin which the locals knew as 'Swan Knowe', on account of the numbers of swans which frequented it, was thought to be, by the farm's tenant, Robert Hay, built by one of the old Earls "for the purpose of facilitating the shooting of wild-ducks" - a purpose for which it had often served the tenant farmer himself. The local schoolmaster of Kilmaurs, Mr. Duncan McNaught, however was sceptical, and after some inspection of the wood-pile collected by the farmer from the mound and of the mound itself, was convinced that it was much older than the locals thought, and had actually once been a man-made island or crannog.