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Recording Your Heritage Online
Event ID 564673
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Recording Your Heritage Online
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/564673
Ord House, c.1750 One of the best-sited gentry houses in Skye, thought to have been built for Charles Macdonald, who was 'outed' after the '45. It stands gable end on to the prevailing winds and the 'wild fringe of the Cuchullins', high above Loch Eishort. The bi-partite windows and porch (formerly iron-crested) were added about 1860. To the rear stood the former 'black kitchen' - 'the most picturesque apartment in the house … walls and rafters were black with peat smoke' - which after nightfall, often did duty as an 'ample ballroom'. In the old walled garden, the Ord Cabbage Tree, a doughty old palm, still thrives.
[Ord House is best known for its central role in Alexander Smith's 'A Summer in Skye', (1865), when the redoutable Mr McIan was proprietor. Near its old oakwoods, scattered along the shore, stood a 'whole colony of turf-huts, with films of blue smoke issuing from each', now replaced by a cluster of holiday chalets.]
Taken from "Western Seaboard: An Illustrated Architectural Guide", by Mary Miers, 2008. Published by the Rutland Press http://www.rias.org.uk
