Steading, Cailness Cottage

Cailness Cottage is a small farmstead located in a very remote area on the eastern bank of Loch Lomond, with steep inclines directly behind it. The property includes an early 19th century cottage, two small outbuildings that may date back to the 18th century, and a stone-built harbour or jetty situated a little distance away. Cailness is a well-preserved and largely unaltered example of a modest early 19th century cottage and steading.

The cottage has a rectangular plan and consists of three bays. The front west elevation faces Loch Lomond and features a central 2-leaf timber-boarded door with a rectangular fanlight above, along with two large piend-roofed dormer windows in the roof. The side gables are blank, while the rear elevation has four bays, including a door in the inner right bay.

Inside, the cottage contains several 1930s tiled chimneypieces, a plain timber dog-leg stair with winders, and has been modernised in the early 20th century.

The exterior is made of white-painted random rubble with red-painted droved sandstone quoins and margins. It has 12-pane timber sash and case windows and a pitched, graded slate roof. The gable-end stacks are corniced with circular cans, and the property mostly features cast iron rainwater goods.

The outbuildings are both rectangular in plan and oriented roughly northwest to southeast. The larger outbuilding, closest to the cottage, is built of random rubble with dressed quoins and projecting block skewputts. It has two doorways and a slit opening on the northeast elevation, as well as one doorway on the southwest. The pitched, graded slate roof has raised ventilation openings below the ridge. This barn appears to have been constructed on the foundations and lower courses of an earlier building, possibly rebuilt when the cottage was built. The smaller outbuilding, located just southeast, is a lower, simpler rubble structure with a doorway on the northeast elevation and a corrugated iron pitched roof, suggesting it predates both the cottage and the larger barn.