This was different to the crisis of the 1680s. Then, poor crops had failed to sustain a reasonable population. Now, the number of people was outstretching the land’s productivity even in a good year. Marginal ground had to be taken into production. The meadows on which the hay was grown to feed the ponies had to be cultivated and so the ponies themselves had to go. The use of the spade, or of the famous cas-chrom, the foot plough or crooked spade, which all visitors in the nineteenth century saw as evidence of a primitive agriculture still at work here, may in fact have been evidence of precisely the opposite: the pressure which the modern growth in population was bringing to bear. With many mouths to feed, a horse and its pasture cannot be afforded. But many mouths also come with many hands and the hand cultivation of enormous areas of ground, back-breaking labour as it is, may have been the only possibility for a Hebridean population under heavy duress from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. Lowland and English visitors, seeing the huge numbers of Hebrideans doing hand work on the fields compared the sight to the labour of Chinese coolies in the paddy fields of Asia.
Almost certainly, that is what happened here. As the century progressed, more and more land was dug. Even today, in some places, the sharp edges of the cultivation ridges show that these were dug by hand. A horse plough would leave a rounded contour, like the ridge and furrow of central England. The entire Shiant population would have been out there every spring, digging, quite literally, for their lives.
High on the windswept side of Eilean an Tighe, above the Norse house, is a field which is quite clearly cut out of rough pasture. It is poorly drained and acid land. Mountains of seaweed would have been brought up here on men’s and women’s backs to lighten the soil and to create some kind of workable tilth. At some time in the middle of the eighteenth century, the barn next to the blackhouse was abandoned. Roofless, it became the rubbish heap of the household. Among the bones – of puffin, guillemot, shag, pig, whale, all kinds of fish, cattle, both young and old, and dog – we identified the jaw bone of a horse. Perhaps the ponies, when they finally went, provided a welcome meal.
That is all very well, but I want to take this further, to get some kind of real sensation of what life was like in this blackhouse. Could I recreate the atmosphere within these bare, ruined walls? Could I feel my way to the experience of being a Shiant Islander in the mid-eighteenth century, as the pressure came on, as the world seemed to change around them?
There would, first of all, have been no sense of this building being somehow antiquated. The blackhouse was a modern invention. Medieval houses had been shorter and rounder. This beautiful long form, which nineteenth-century travellers always took for an immensely primitive sort of dwelling, first appeared only in the seventeenth century. It is an ingenious structure. Its low, ground-hugging, rounded shape presents no obstacle to the wind and is both a model and symbol of homeliness. It embraced those that entered it. Its narrow width is governed by the shortage of timber in the isles and its length by the need to shelter more than a family from the weather. It is an occupied farm building rather than a house in which agricultural equipment and animals are also stored. It was always built on a slight slope so that the liquors from the manure heap would run out at the far end, rather than pollute the hearth. On occasions, this slope was ‘so steep that a cask would have rolled from one end to the other’.
The smoke from the central hearth filled the house’s roof and worked as a fungicide to preserve the timbers, which were precious. Meat and fish hung there and were cured in the smoke. Midges, mosquitoes, wood-beetle and other pests were killed off. The sharing of the space with the animals not only provided extra heat in the house, but protected the dung heap and its precious nutrients from the rain, in which its goodness would have been washed away. This arrangement was also healthier than you might think. Lewis had a far lower incidence of tuberculosis than almost anywhere else in the country, a level shared only by dairymaids. It turned out that blackhouses had a sophisticated internal air flow, meaning that heat rising from the cattle and their dung heap carried a weak solution of ammonia (from the urine) across into the human half of the house, where the people breathed it. A weak solution of ammonia, inhaled regularly, is known to prevent TB. Dairymaids were breathing the same air.
If you go into the ruin we have excavated now, the one quality that strikes you above all is its bareness, its lack of detail, the simplicity of structure and form. That is as it should be. These places were never filled or crowded with objects. When the clay floors were first laid, a small flock of a dozen or so sheep were usually folded in there for twelve hours or so to consolidate the floor. The clay is blueish-brown and only turns the red colour we found it when hot ashes are spread across it to warm the floor on which the children sit. There was never much furniture. Alexander Macleod, laird of Harris in the 1780s, ‘made a tour around the whole back part of his extensive estate, and even entered the huts of the tenants, and declared openly that the wigwams of the wild Indians of America were equally good and better furnished.’
The Rev. John Buchanan, a missionary contemporary of Macleod’s, who eventually had to leave Harris in disgrace after seducing two of the local girls, found that
The huts of the oppressed tenants are remarkable naked and open, quite destitute of furnishing, except logs of timber collected from the wrecks of the sea, to sit on about the fire, which is placed in the middle of the house, or upon seats of straw, like foot hassocks stuffed with straw or stubble.
Large stones occasionally served the same purpose. Chairs and stools were rare and tables almost unknown. The men sat on a wooden bench or a plank supported on piles of stone or turf against the wall. The foundations of a bench against the north wall, about six feet long, curving out at one end, is exactly what the excavation found, set a little away from the hearth, which in this house was for some reason moved at one point, about a yard to the north. At night, people would simply take a blanket or a plaid and wrap themselves up in it in the corner. The clay of the floor was warm and the atmosphere in these buildings, as the ethnographer Alexander Fenton has described, was a beautiful thick cloud of homeliness, at the centre of which ‘a fire of peat smouldered with a steady red glow from which rose, not so much smoke, as a smoky shimmer of heat …’. There was no need to shut yourself away from it, at least in the eighteenth century, in a bed. In the morning, the blankets would simply have been folded up. The Reverend Buchanan licked his lips at the prospect of immorality in these conditions: ‘Without separate apartments, we need not be surprised to find the virtue of their women too often severely tried,’ he wrote, ‘and no wonder though the poor unprotected females suffer in such circumstances’. At least, that is what he found.
Although internal walls appeared in the blackhouse during the nineteenth century, at this date there would have been none. The hunger for privacy and for subdivision of living spaces, which had arrived in England in the late Middle Ages, had not yet reached here. This life was shared in almost every detail. The line of big stones that we found across the floor would have been all that separated the upper end of the room from the part preserved for the animals. It was a kerb to the dung heap, nothing more. By early spring, the dung heap would have grown so high that it would have been difficult to get in the door at that end. You would have walked steeply uphill over it before coming downhill again to the hearth. Cows standing in there all winter, along with the goats, sheep, ducks, hens and dogs, would have looked down on the company around the fire with a sweet and beneficent presence. In order to reduce the liquidity of the animal end, the householders ‘attended on their cows with large vessels to throw out the wash’ – or to keep it as mordant for dyes – ‘but still it must be wet and unwholesome.’
A sense of disgust was absent from the intimacy of human and animal in the house. It was lovely to have the cows so nearby. ‘And one luxurious old fellow describes the pleasure he found in hearing the sound of the milk as it squirted into the tub.’ The cows liked the fire as much as people did �
�and particularly the young and tenderest are admitted next to it.’ Besides, the warmth was thought to increase the milk yield.
Warm, shared, busy, an animal fug, perhaps a loom in the corner, sheepskin bags or an old chest in which to store the meal, maybe barrels of potatoes, spades, cas-chroms, rakes, blankets, washing tubs, pots, herring nets, the long, many-hooked fishing lines, perhaps the most valuable things here, each worth seven shillings, against four shillings for a bed or chest, and five shillings for the roof of a small house: all these are described in the inventories at the time. This is something of the feeling of a working blackhouse, an organic whole. It was an ingenious adaptation of limited materials to the comforts of home. It would always have been dark. In the evening, rush lights, burning perhaps in seal oil, more probably in fish oil, boiled off from the fish livers, giving a dark viscous liquid ‘like port wine’, would mean that even on the brightest day, no more than ‘a dim religious light’ would have filled the place. One or two small holes in the thatch would have admitted the light and let out the smoke, although we did find fragments of a window pane buried in the levels above the floor.
The house itself partook of the cycle of the seasons, blackening through the year, glittering sooty stalactites dangling from the roof trusses, becoming ever fuller with the growing dung heap at the animal end. In the spring-time, as the year begins, all of that is removed. The east wall is demolished, the sty cleared out, the roof covering taken away and a sudden wash of light, as much as now floods across the floor of the ruin, enters the building. It starts the year again, cleaned, freshened and ready, as renewed as a dug-over garden, the new turfs and thatch sweet-smelling, a sense of annual optimism to hand.
That yearly pattern had its daily counterpart. Every evening the fire was smothered, ‘smoored’ in the Scots word, to reduce its burning in the night but to keep it alive for the following morning. Alexander Carmichael, the scholar and collector of Gaelic culture in the second half of the nineteenth century, witnessed the plain evening ceremony:
The embers were evenly spread on the hearth … and formed into a circle. The circle is then divided into three equal sections, a small boss being left in the middle. A peat is laid between each section, each peat touching the boss, which forms a common centre. The first peat is laid down in name of the God of Life, the second in name of the God of Peace, the third in name of the God of Grace. The circle is then covered over with ashes sufficient to subdue but not to extinguish the fire, in name of the Three of Light. The heap slightly raised in the centre is called ‘Tula nan Tri’, the Hearth of the Three. When the smooring operation is complete the woman closes her eyes, stretches her hand, and softly intones one of the many formulae current for these occasions.
The only peat on the Shiants is on the heights of Garbh Eilean and the marks of peat-cutting are still obvious on the ground there, as well as the remains of a peat-dryer, a rough stone platform that provided a draught under the stack as well as around and over it, where the newly cut blocks would have been left for a year or so before becoming dry enough to burn.
In the house, the women would sit apart from the men on stumps of driftwood grouped around the fire, while the children crouched between them in the warm ashes strewn on the clay floor. There was no oven in Hebridean culture and all cooking was done either on a griddle or in a cauldron suspended over the hearth. At meals the whole family gathered so closely that a single dish could be shared between them resting on their knees, eating from the common dish either with their own horn spoons, or perhaps with a single spoon handed from one to the next. This dish, three to four feet long, eighteen inches wide, called the clàr, was made of deal, with straw or grass on the bottom; the straw with crumbs of food in it was afterwards given to the cow. The meals – breakfast at eleven o’clock, supper at nightfall – were the times at which the family drew together and were the only occasions in which the door would be shut. Together they would eat the oat or barley-cakes, the potatoes and herring, and the supper of brochan, a kind of gruel; or boiled mutton if they were lucky, or perhaps cuddies in the autumn, caught from the shore in a tarbh net, or cod, dogfish, saithe, skate, eels, pollack, or halibut – to all or any of which milk or cream could be added and for all of which the Shiants were well known, but only if they had managed to get out in the boat. If not, then it was surely to be the dreaded limpets.
As well as the hearths themselves, some hints of this cooking life emerged from the excavation. Tiny fragments of a cauldron: one of its legs and a piece of an iron griddle, with a curved, raised lip on two sides, were found. Small chips of flint from a strike-a-light to make the spark with which the fire – or tobacco: there was the bowl and stem of a clay pipe – could be lit. The flint chips had been brushed to the side of the house and lost in the shadows. There was half a quernstone, cut from the very coarse-grained syenite, the igneous rock which is found only at the far east end of Eilean Mhuire.
It was tucked against the northern wall. Evening and morning, with this hand quern – it was low quality and would have made extremely gritty flour – the women would have ground as much grain as they needed, sieving the flour through sheepskin sieves, onto wooden or pottery plates.
It is the pottery we found that summons most intimately the old life in the house. Over one thousand, four hundred pottery sherds were found in the excavation, dividing quite clearly into two categories. By far the larger, with over one thousand, two hundred pieces, was the so-called craggan ware, the unglazed earthenware, made by hand without a potter’s wheel and fired in the low and variable temperatures of this peat hearth. The Gaelic word craggan is related to the English ‘crock’ and probably comes from the Old Norse krukka. The Gaelic for a can of lager is crogan leanna.
These home-made pots are an archaeologist’s hell. Almost no development can be seen in their style of making, firing or decoration over many millennia. Craggan ware (although the very oldest tends to be finer) has been found on Neolithic sites and it was still being made in Tiree in 1940, although by then only for sale to tourists. The clay for these pots would probably have been dug on Garbh Eilean, as was the clay for the floor, and it was women’s work to make these pots. You can see their thumb marks on the clay, pushing at it, folding out the rim, and the places where the unbaked pot was set to rest on the grass, which left its slight impressions on the body. Here and there, very rarely, a piece is decorated with a few slashed lines or with scattered points, where a straw has been jabbed into the clay. Perhaps these are just the work of a bored child, fiddling with the pots her mother was making, playing with the clay when still soft.
There is a symbolic network woven around the craggan, bringing together women, milk, cattle, clay and the hearth. Only women can make the craggan, just as only men can go out in the boat and just as women make butter and cheese in the churn, or in the sheepskin which does for a churn in poorer families. The opening at the craggan’s neck, it was said, must be large enough for a woman’s hand but too small for the muzzle of a calf. The body of the pot would have been roughly rounded, as high as it was wide, and in various sizes, some big enough to milk into, others little more than a container for butter or curds. Roundedness was important. Although there is one dish, like a sugar dish, probably copied from an import, which is completely flat-bottomed, not a single Shiant craggan pot has a flat base. The pot itself is like a small womb, but made of clay, and so perhaps like a small house.
Unroundedness, even if convenient, would have spoiled it symbolically. Houses too were made with rounded corners. Milk taken straight from the cow into one of these little craggans, which had been warmed by the fire, was called ‘milk without wind’ and was a cure for consumption. A piece of calfskin or lambskin was used to cover the pot and was tied there with a cord beneath the out-turned rim.
Arthur Mitchell saw a woman making craggans on Lewis in 1863. This would have been the scene in the Shiant house, or perhaps outside its south door, on a bench there, on a warm day in summer, the headscarf do
wn around her neck, her eyes half closed against the sun, her children at her feet and the lark above her, looking out to the distant mountains of Skye.
The clay she used underwent no careful or special preparation. She chose the best she could get and picked out of it the larger stones, leaving sand and the finer gravel which it contained. With her hands alone she gave the clay its desired shape. She had no aid from anything of the nature of a potter’s wheel. In making the smaller craggans, with narrow necks, she used a stick with a curve on it to give form to the inside. All that her fingers could reach was done by them. Having shaped the craggan, she let it stand for a day to let it dry, then took it to the fire in the centre of the floor of her hut, filled it with burning peats, and built burning peats all around it. When sufficiently baked she withdrew it from the fire, emptied the ashes out, and then poured into it and over it about a pint of milk, in order to make it less porous.
The other ceramic pieces we found might as well have come from the other end of the world. Alongside these Stone Age, hand-made and, to be honest not very well made things (many of the craggan pieces were never fired to a high-enough temperature and crumble at the touch), are a few shards of elegant eighteenth-century tableware, and the moulded white china lion’s leg of what might have been a sugar bowl.
I asked the ceramic historian David Barker, Keeper of Archaeology at The Potteries Museum in Stoke-on-Trent, to have a look at the sherds. Did they fit the dates of the documents? Four of them did. There were four diagnostic sherds from the 1760s, moulded creamware; what Dr Barker called ‘reasonably upmarket lead-glazed earthenware and white salt-glazed stoneware, including the base sherd of a tea-pot of quite high status.’ The pottery almost certainly came from Staffordshire, perhaps from Liverpool. After them, there was nothing in the collection I had given him until the 1820s and ’30s, when there were a few pieces of Scottish earthernware from potteries on the Clyde. The house may have been re-occupied for a while by visiting shepherds in the nineteenth century, but the fifty-year gap before them confirmed exactly what the papers had suggested: the old Shiant life came to an end in about 1770.
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