Kirbuster Farm Museum

'showing latest development in one-storey houses

before...people...took to building them in two storeys'.

'Date 1723 is over outer door leading into W end'.

Description and plan can be seen in P.O.A.S. [R1]

'...only house in Orkney in which kitchen has its fire in

middle of the floor'. [R2]

[Open to tourists Summer 1980]

Now a farm museum.

Information from Orkney SMR (RGL 1987)

It is unusual to be able to date an old farm so precisely, and the fact that the date is carved on the marriage lintel above the main door reflects the status of this farm: there was no question here of living under the same roof as the cattle. The walls are unusually high and the house is reasonably well lit by windows, and yet it has undergone remarkably little alteration for a house inhabited until recent times. Its linear range consists of four rooms, of which the kitchen is by far the most interesting, because it was never divided and it retains the free-standing hearth with its stone-built fire-back. The wooden smoke-hole in the roof above has been reconstructed faithfully to the original, and the iron fittings by which cooking pots were suspended above the fire are still fixed to the charred beam above. The peat was kept in a neuk in the wall, the floor well-paved and the fireback was kept whitewashed. In the south wall, close to the warmth of the fire, there is a beautifully constructed neuk-bed, not housed in a projecting outshot but contained within the thickness of the wall; two large flagstones form the front of the bed, with masonry above, and the neuk would have been snugly lined with wood.

The outbuildings include a barn with a well preserved corn-drying kiln, a pigsty and a smith's forge, and there is an attractive and sheltered garden.

Information from ‘Exploring Scotland’s Heritage: Orkney’, (1996).