Note
Date 1928
Event ID 1103321
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Note
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1103321
Mr Sands refers to an ancient building “on the face of the hill called Sgal overlooking the bay…It had been covered with stones, but was found again last summer (1875). I went and threw out the rubbish. It is built with comparatively small stones…It contains two croopan” (i.e. wall beds). He also notes what Martin, in his Late Voyage to St Kilda (1698), called Tigh na Bana-ghaisgeach, ‘House of the Female Warrior’. “It is circular in form, about 9 feet in diameter, and built of flat stones, which converge as they ascend, until the space becomes so narrow that a single stone covers it. This house is covered outside with earth and turf…There were three croopan or beds in the wall”. One of these had already been destroyed, and subsequently a large quantity of stones were taken away. This place was a beehive shieling of the type described on [RCAHMS 1928] p. xli, as its local name, Airidh mhor ("big shieling"), indicated. A piece of wall on the island, called The Dun, is described by Mr Sands on pp. 189-90. Cf. also Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., X., pp. 702-11. Dr Ross, architect, Inverness, from personal inspection, spoke of it in 1884 in these terms: “A rude wall across the promontory, near the extreme end, is pointed out as the remains of a fortification” (Trans. Inverness Scient. Socy. and Field Club, Vol. III., p. 80). There is an illustration of a bit of the wall in St Kilda, by Norman Heathcote (1900), p. 20. Mr Sands could discover no stone circle on the island of Boreray, as claimed by the Rev. K. Macaulay in his account (1764), “and the St Kildans seem never to have heard of it” (Ibid., XII., p. 189). On Tigh an Stallair on Boreray, of which nothing now remains, see Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., VII., pp.173-4, and XII., p. 189.
