86 Covington Road

This is an earlier 19th century row of seven single-storey cottages on Covington Road. The cottages are three or four bays wide, with corrugated iron roofs on most, but numbers 82 and 86 retain reed-thatch roofs. The construction is random rubble with sandstone ashlar window margins. Most of the front doors are timber-boarded, and the windows are timber sash and case with four panes of glass. Short stone chimneystacks are topped with clay cans.

This is an unusually long and largely unaltered row of traditional cottages. The corrugated iron roofs give the row a distinctive and picturesque appearance. The absence of later rooflights or dormers on the front and rear elevations is remarkable, and very few rear extensions have been added since the early 20th century. Originally, all the cottages would have been thatched; the thatch on number 86 was replaced in the early 1990s.

These thatched cottages are rare in Scotland. A 2016 survey by the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) identified only around 200 such buildings remaining, primarily in small rural communities. Surviving thatched buildings are important examples of traditional building techniques and offer insight into earlier ways of life.

The building was re-graded from a Category C to a Category B listed building in 1989.

The cottages appear on the first edition Ordnance Survey map, dating to around 1864.