Publication Account

Date 2002

Event ID 1019615

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Publication Account

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1019615

RCAHMS Excursion Guide

The remains of this township stand to the north of Howlin farmhouse. The name presumably originates from the medieval assessment of Howlin, the earliest record of which is found in a charter of 1498, by which James IV granted '5 den. Terrarum de Houland' to Ranald Maccallan, Captain of Clanranald.

The visible remains comprise the footings of about two dozen buildings, a corn-dying kiln and several small yards and enclosures at the edge of an extensive system of irregular fields. The buildings are all roughly rectangular, most of them having rounded external corners, and are constructed of turf faced inside and out with large stones and boulders, many of them set on edge. This building style, which was described by the Catholic Bishop Nicolson in 1700, is found throughout the surviving remains of pre-crofting townships on the island, and contrasts with the rubble-cored walls of the later period buildings. In one instance, close to the centre of the township, two buildings are joined along one side, an arrangement commonly found amongst blackhouses in the Western Isles, where byres and other ancillary buildings would often be added to one side of the main house, rather than at its end.

Around the township there are well-preserved fields of irregular plan, enclosed by substantial turf and stone dykes, within which fragments of rig cultivation can be traced. Their wide variation in size and their irregular form strongly suggest a gradual, piecemeal process of expansion and enclosure of arable land. Field-systems such as this are common on the west coast of Scotland - examples have been recorded by RCAHMS at Archiltibuie and on Waternish, Skye. The Five Pennies field-system has probably survived because it lay outwith the Cleadale crofting settlement established immediately to the south in 1809, where only fragments of a comparable system can be seen today. Robert Dodgshon has argued that such field-systems are a relict of pre-feudal regime of landholding, superceded, perhaps during the late medieval period, by a runrig system of open fields held by joint tenants who regularly re-allocated land amongst themselves. However, it could also be argued that a runrig system is not incompatible with the enclosure of areas of land, which might have been necessary to control stock movements, particuarly under what Dodgshon has called a 'grass-arable' cropping regime. By this he means that part of the arable was cropped for two to four years before being abandoned to grass. Under such a regime, manuring by stock during the fallow years would probably have required a system of dykes to control the folding and manuring process.

Information from ‘RCAHMS Excursion Guide: Commissioners' Field Excursion, The Small Isles, 23-26 September 2002’.