Lower Steenberg's Yard, northern building range

The rectangular brick building backing into the valley side north-east of the chimney stack and north of 'the cottage' structure have recently been demolished. The front wall, articulated by big projecting buttresses, was of three bays. The first had a slit vent at midheight, the second an arch of odd asymmetric form, and the third a taller arch of which only the springing remained. The buttresses at the ends of the wall formed piers for transverse arches spanning the width of the building. The lower part of the rear wall of the building was of stone; in the second bay this was pierced by a low opening into a partly-infilled chamber under a segmental brick vault; there was a similar but shallower chamber in the more ruinous third (north-eastern) bay which in this case has a stone rear wall, in which there appeared to be an opening infilled in old brick; only a fragment remained of the upper part of the wall, which is thinner and of brick. At a higher level there were remains of a sloping floor or platform of reinforced concrete supported on transverse girders. The former ruinous north wall of the building was on the line of a taller wall running south-west to join the main retaining wall; this had clearly formed the south-east end of a larger structure extending to the north-west (outside the area covered by this survey); the retaining wall had formed its rear wall, and its upper floor had been carried on heavy transverse girders, the sawn-off stubs remained. The end wall, stone below and brick above, had various openings and had been infilled in relatively recent brick.
The stone-built part of this building appears to be associated with the line of buildings, also including the ‘cottage’, which appears on maps from as early as the later 18th century, but the brick-fronted part was clearly much later and may have been associated with the ‘oil depot’ which occupied this part of the site for all or much of the first half of the 20th century.