Källsner and Girhammar have developed plastic design methods for light-frame timber shear walls that can be used fordetermining the load-carrying capacity when the shear walls are partially anchored. For such walls, the leading stud isnot fully anchored against uplift and tying down forces are developed in the sheathing-to-framing joints. Since theforces in the anchor bolts and the sheathing-to-framing joints do not act in the same vertical plane, the bottom rail willbe subjected to cross-wise bending, leading to possible splitting along the bottom side of the rail. Another possiblebrittle failure mode is splitting along the edge of the bottom rail in line with the sheathing-to-framing fasteners. Anexperimental program has been conducted using different anchor bolt locations, washer sizes and pith orientations. Afracture mechanics approach for the two failure modes is used to evaluate the experimental results. The comparisonshows a good agreement between the experimental and analytical results. The failure mode is largely dependent on thedistance between the edge of the washer and the edge of the bottom rail. The size of the washer seems also to havesome influence on the failure load. The fracture mechanics models seem to capture the essential behaviour of thesplitting modes and to include the decisive parameters. These parameters can easily be adjusted to experimental resultsand be used in design equations for bottom rails in partially anchored shear walls.