No 227 THE CROFTER'S BARN ITSELF

 No 227. THE CROFTRE'S BARN ITSELF

What of the Crofter’s Barn itself, the actual building  So much of the crofter’s land was hard won by himself or his forebears from non productive heathery peat covered land, full of stones and boulders. And water. The peat would eventually have been cut, dried and burnt in the kitchen fire. The clay soil underneath when the peat had been cleared would be spade or caschrom dug, slowly brought into productive fertility. A favourite pioneer crop was potatoes, making good use of the poor turf and providing sustainance sooner than any crops of grain.  Many crofts were made following the Clearances.  Melvich is but one example, Badbea is another. There are many many more, all too many!!  

Of Melvich there is a letter witten in February 1831 to Dunrobin Castle, the Landlords.

The letter, written either by Innes of Sandside or by the Rev David Mackenzie, Minister of Farr, stated that the crofter’s at Melvich, newly cleared from Strath Halladale, some from Golval, some from the Bighouse which lies half way up the west side of the river, did not even have the security of leases though allocated small unimproved plots of newly laid out sea side heath.

 The letter went on to state that the crofters, trying to make crofts out of hard land, were prevented from using sea ware as fertiliser by the Landlords, in this case the Sutherland Estate, or their factor. Sea weed, and little enough there was of it, was being burnt at that time as kelp for the Landlord’s profit!! .

From this small patch of land stones, or sometimes rough boulders, were laboriously dug out and moved to clear the land for the plough. Nothing or no effort was wasted, so the stones were made use of to make field dykes, still to be seen at Melvich, or to build a small enough house, byre and barn on the crofts.

The barns of the big Caithness farms were built at the same time with quarried stone and by skilled masons. The barn at Greenland Mains, then called the Ha’ of Greenland, was built by James Traill of Castelhill, the Landlord. The date 1832 is still on the gable end.

William Pyper, a mason and one of my forebears, spent about ten years down at Dunbeath building the steadings there for Sinclair of Dunbeath before finally moving to Castletown. He spent the rest of his life building new steadings for James Traill, a never ending task. That time span illustrated just how long a time was needed to build these larger steadings which still stand today. The barn at Stanstill, still standing and in good use, was built in 1802 for Colonel Williamson of Banniskirk, the then owner. I have a copy of the old account somewhere!!!  

A comparison of the crofter’s barn and the bigger farms shows that while the large farm quarried stone and built to a very regular rythym of stonework, the crofter used whatever stone was handy at the time, and built it to his own particular or peculiar design, or lack of design!!.  Some stones were heavy boulders and could only have been raised and built in place by more than one man.

The barn at Strathan, Skerray, is a good example. Though now roofed with modern but green painted galvanised sheeting, the gable end is as it was. The walls have an inward slope called batter which helped the building to stand the more secure There was no horizontal layering pattern to be seen as with barns built with Caithness quarried flagstone. At Greenland Mains a large quarry was opened up the hill to provide stone for the new steading and the extensive field dykes.

 At Strathan any large stone lay in the wall where it was placed, to be built around with smaller stones. A big stone like that was sometimes called a riser, which applied to dry stone dyking too. A few of these well placed stones allowed building to proceed much faster, though more than one man would be needed to lift such a heavy stone into place . The shape of these boulders was not designed for building, some boulders being almost round. Still, they were dug out of the often peaty ground and made good use of. Probably of glacial origin, the result was a multi-coloured wall with stones obviously carried from another place to be left after the glacier melted, to lie just where they fell. Years ago, when draining a field at Isauld, we found rounded fist sized granitic pebbles and a few small boulders over 4 feet down and much below ploughing depth. They had obviously been carried there by the ice sheet from the granitic or dioritic rock lying to the west of Reay. They did not belong to the Caithness sedimentary flagstone bedrock lying underneath.

 I still marvel at the sight of roofless crofts in Caithness, Brubster being but one of many such areas.  On passing them by I find an empty sadness within me that will not go away !!