Recording Your Heritage Online
Event ID 567034
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Recording Your Heritage Online
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/567034
HIRTA is the largest island and the focus of human occupation. Its defining characteristic is the hundreds of drystone structures - walls, beehive-like cells and enclosures - that spill down from the heights of Conchair and Oiseval to the grassy amphitheatre encircling the bay on the island's south side. These stand in stark juxtaposition to the 20th century infrastructure of the MOD, which is concentrated in the vicinity of the slipway/jetty of 1901.
The main settlement of Village Bay is an excellent survival of a planned crofting development, its ordered layout reflecting the changes introduced in the 1830s by the improving landlord and the Rev. Neil MacKenzie. The old village further up the hill was replaced by a crescent of blackhouses built end on to a paved street, their individual cultivation plots defined by an enclosed fan of field boundaries running down from a head dyke. From 1861, following a hurricane, 16 new dwellings replaced the blackhouses, which were relegated to byres. These standard threeroomed 'white houses' were built by Skye masons of harled, lime-mortared stone with gable end chimneys and roofs of zinc (later replaced with tarred felt). In recent years six have been restored for basic accommodation, with No 3 displayed as a small museum.
Strewn across the slopes in every direction are the unique St. Kildan cleitean or small storehouses that the islanders built to store and dry their seabirds, crops and fishing gear. Well ventilated, with corbelled drystone walls and stone slabbed roofs originally covered in turf, these beehive-like structures number at least 1,260 on Hirta alone. At the lower end of the street, the factor's house, late 1860s, is now the home of the ranger.
Standing consciously apart from the village, and now absorbed with the glebe into the MOD base, are the kirk and manse by Robert Stevenson, 1826, the plain, two-bay church, with the schoolroom added to its north west in 1898, restored as they might have appeared in the 1920s. Further round the bay, the store, late 18th century, is a two-storey gabled structure in which feathers and other produce paid in lieu of rent were stored. Badly damaged by a shell from a German U-boat in the First World War (which also affected the church), it has been much rebuilt. The naval gun and ammunition store of 1918 was built in response to the U-boat attack.
Taken from "Western Seaboard: An Illustrated Architectural Guide", by Mary Miers, 2008. Published by the Rutland Press http://www.rias.org.uk
