Hebrides & Highlands Hebrides & Highlands

The Blackhouse, Harris

A restored blackhouse at Gearrannan on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis, late afternoon in September. The walls are dry-stone, three feet thick at the base. The thatch is held against the prevailing westerly by a weighted rope system that has not changed in its essentials for several hundred years. The Atlantic is forty metres behind the camera.

The blackhouses were built to accommodate people and livestock under the same roof — the animals on the lower ground floor, the people above. The last blackhouse was occupied in the 1970s. This one is a museum. The weather has not received that information.