Visit to Lewis and Harris

After a long break from posting there are many activities to report on. In November I visited Lewis and Harris to look at the landscapes the Scottish crofters, who settled near Killarney, came from.

This landscapes in Gearannan on the west coast of Lewis shows the division of the land into narrow crofts that run across the valley. Some of them are scarcely the width of a house.It is not hard to imagine the difference between cultivating a croft such as these and a square Canadian prairie homestead, many times its size.

These two houses are nestled in the stone outcrops on the east coast of Harris. The heather in the thatched roofs and locally sourced stone makes them blend very well into the landscape.

Peat is still used as a fuel, cut from the bogs of Lewis. Large peat cutting sites are visible in the landscape. The cutting, drying, moving and stacking of peat will have been a substantial task in the farming calendar in Lewis, one which will have been replaced by the sourcing of firewood in Canada.

 

At the abandoned township of Bererio in west Lewis you can see clear marks of rig run agricultural system. The rig run predates the crofts proper (see photo above) and are the remnants of an earlier (first half of the 19^th century and earlier) times when the land was split between families in a rig run system where each family would have a strips of land in different places in the township to secure that everybody got a bit of good land and a share of the less productive land.

These reconstructed black houses are in the village of Gearannan, where I stayed. The houses look authentic from the outside and their proximity to each other is a reminder of how closely families lived together, even if they were farming separate crofts. The distance from neighbours would have been something the crofters and women in particular, who spent most of their time on the farm, would have had to get used to in Canada.