General view of Cleadale houses, Eigg

Description General view of Cleadale houses, Eigg

Date 25/9/1883

Collection Papers of Erskine Beveridge, antiquarian, Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland

Catalogue Number SC 743149

Category On-line Digital Images

Copy of IN 893

Scope and Content Cleadale, Eigg, Highland Cleadale, the main centre of population of Eigg, is a small crofting community of traditionally-built houses which lies in the north-west of the island. The Victorian photographer, Erskine Beveridge, visited Eigg in 1883, providing one of the oldest known photographic records of the island. This township, which sits within a dramatic 300m-high amphitheatre of natural rock, is a collection of early 19th-century squat stone houses, each surrounded by a drystone boundary dyke (wall) which encloses the land allocated to each croft for cultivation. The houses, which seem to emerge from the stony hillside, are the traditional round-cornered 'blackhouses' of the Hebrides, with thick walls and thatched roofs, and were home to the crofter, his family and their animals. Houses of this type were common in the Western Isles, and were double-walled, with an infilling of rubble or sand which provided insulation and channelled excess moisture. The rafters sprang from the inner edge of the wall-head, leaving a wide verge which in time became green with grass and provided grazing for agile sheep. The houses often did not have windows, most of the light coming through a central doorway. The roof was covered with a thatch of some local material such as heather, bent (sea grass), bracken or rushes, and fixed by a network of ropes which criss-crossed over the roof. Source: RCAHMS contribution to SCRAN.

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/collection/743149

File Format (TIF) Tagged Image File Format bitmap