Other people's houses
Mar. 18th, 2021 08:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustUnexpectedly at a loose end while durham_rambler wrangles some urgent Parish Council business, after a day in which I have accomplished nothing but shopping (online) but feel quite brain-dead as a result. So here's a handful of pictures from that long-ago holiday in the Western Isles, of what we did when we moved on from Stornoway.
We visited the Blackhouse, Arnol:
It's a traditional croft house - which I knew because I had read Peter May's The Blackhouse - in the care of Historic Scotland. Fortune has allowed them to display side by side the blackhouse, and the newer 'white house' which replaced it, and not far away a ruined blackhouse too -
Like the Orcadian croft houses, the blackhouse is a single long rectangle, entered by a door in the middle. One end belongs to the family, the other to the cattle. It's not very hygienic, but it helps keep you warm. As does the fire in the centre of the living space:
The white house, built in the 1920s, looks more as I expect a house to look (the byre is separate from the living accommodation) but it doesn't look much more inviting - and not just because it was such a damp and gloomy day: it wasn't very weatherproof, apparently, or not proof against the weather of the Hebrides.
Finally, the ruined blackhouse, sinking slowly into the ground (no, not really):
It's just one of many abandoned houses in different degrees of decay, but very similar in shape and size - though not all of the accompanied by blue boat and red waggon. I got very excited about this repetition, and had ideas about a collage of images, but I'm not sure I took enough photos to make that practical. We shall see.
durham_rambler wrangles some urgent Parish Council business, after a day in which I have accomplished nothing but shopping (online) but feel quite brain-dead as a result. So here's a handful of pictures from that long-ago holiday in the Western Isles, of what we did when we moved on from Stornoway.We visited the Blackhouse, Arnol:
It's a traditional croft house - which I knew because I had read Peter May's The Blackhouse - in the care of Historic Scotland. Fortune has allowed them to display side by side the blackhouse, and the newer 'white house' which replaced it, and not far away a ruined blackhouse too -
Like the Orcadian croft houses, the blackhouse is a single long rectangle, entered by a door in the middle. One end belongs to the family, the other to the cattle. It's not very hygienic, but it helps keep you warm. As does the fire in the centre of the living space:
The white house, built in the 1920s, looks more as I expect a house to look (the byre is separate from the living accommodation) but it doesn't look much more inviting - and not just because it was such a damp and gloomy day: it wasn't very weatherproof, apparently, or not proof against the weather of the Hebrides.
Finally, the ruined blackhouse, sinking slowly into the ground (no, not really):
It's just one of many abandoned houses in different degrees of decay, but very similar in shape and size - though not all of the accompanied by blue boat and red waggon. I got very excited about this repetition, and had ideas about a collage of images, but I'm not sure I took enough photos to make that practical. We shall see.
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