#isle of lewis
Hebridean blackhouse (taigh-dubh), Baile an Truiseil, Leòdhas, Western Isles.
This blackhouse was built between 1852 and 1895, and was the home of a crofting family and their animals until 1965, when they moved out. It is still fully furnished and preserved almost as the last family left it.
Blackhouses were very different from modern homes, as they housed animals as well as people, had rounded corners, had no chimney or windows. Sharing with animals made the house warmer and meant fewer buildings were needed.
The blackhouse has a central door. Inside is an aig an teine (‘living room’) and a bathaich (‘cattle byre’), with a parallel sabhal (‘barn’). A peat fire burns in the open hearth with the smoke filteeing thrlugh the roof. It is in the centre of the living room and it was the heart of family life, never allowed to go out. Smoke from the peat fire killed insects, and the smoke-laden thatch, which was replaced every so often, made excellent fertiliser for the fields. (Arnol, Eilean Siar, United Kingdom)
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Castle in the Snow by Impact Imagz
Via Flickr:
Lews Castle in Winter
Calm seas in Stornoway
Donald Trump’s father was German, but his mother was a MacLeod from the Isle of Lewis. She was born there to a large family in 1912. They lived in a one-room cottage. Trump’s “ancestors suffered in ‘The Clearances’ – a tragic, decades-long period of upheaval in Scotland, during which greedy landlords forced families from their homes”– and many locals view him as “the antithesis of Lewis’ collective history.” According to researchers:
The distrust of property barons and the fear of losing one’s home runs deep on the island, permeating the residents’ collective conscience. “I think people to this day in the Highlands and islands have a deeply skeptical attitude to landlordism,” says Maclean. “It has a very negative history in this part of the world."Yet today, Trump lives by the very trade that saw his family and hundreds of thousands of other Scots uprooted, thrown from their humble homes often with just the clothes on their backs, forced to start over. Trump could not have turned his back on those roots more if he had tried.
