Scar Steading: View of byre from S. Digital image of D 3364

Description Scar Steading: View of byre from S. Digital image of D 3364

Date 10/8/1996

Collection Scottish Farm Buildings Survey

Catalogue Number SC 738880

Category On-line Digital Images

Copy of D 3364

Scope and Content Byre, Scar Farm, Sanday, Orkney Islands, from south Scar is a coastal farm on the island of Sanday, part of the Orkney group. Sanday is low-lying and almost treeless with only a few low hills to protect it from the wind. It has good arable land and a favourable climate conducive to growing crops and rearing livestock. This shows a single-storeyed stone building roofed in a mixture of grey and green slates. It was used as a stable but was later converted to a byre. Now it is an open cattle shed, also used as a lambing shed. It contains four double stalls and traces of calf stalls and forms part of a U-shaped complex of farm buildings. Orkney's brief summers and long winters meant that cattle might be housed in byres like this for several months of the year. Cattle dung from the byre was used to form a compost for fertilising the soil. In Orkney, because of the lack of timber and scarcity of peat, it was also dried for fuel, known as 'coo's scones'. Source: RCAHMS contribution to SCRAN.

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/collection/738880

File Format (TIF) Tagged Image File Format bitmap