Isle of Lewis – Arnol Blackhouse – 2

A blackhouse was almost always a long narrow building, often with one or more additional buildings laid parallel to it and sharing a common wall. The walls were made from an inner and outer layer of loose stones with the gap between filled with peat and earth. The roof would be based on a wooden frame, resting on the inner stone walls. Over this frame the grass strips would be placed and over these would be a layer of thatch. The thatch would be held down by old fishing lines, strong twine, and ropes made from heather, all attached to large stones, whose weight would hold everything in place, even in the highest winds. More rocks would be laid around the bottom of the roof, where it met the inner wall.

The roof traditionally had no chimney, the smoke from the peat fire in the central hearth simply finding its own way out as it could. The smoked thatch was considered an excellent fertiliser and it was normal to strip it off, to use for this purpose, which meant of course the roof had to be re-thatched each year. The peat used for the fire was placed in a large pile outside the door.

A blackhouse such as the one at Arnol would burn around 15,000 peat bricks per year and it would take two people two weeks to cut this many bricks, a task spread throughout the year. I was told that peat smoke is not carcinogenic, although all the occupants of the Blackhouse would be constantly breathing in particulates, which would give rise to other lung problems. 

Having said that, people in blackhouses did not suffer from TB, which they did catch after moving from a blackhouse to other types of accommodation, such as the white house seen over the road. Fleas would also not have survived in this environment. The combination of smoke and ammonia coming from the byre, where the cows lived, would have caused the fleas to vacate the premises. The room where the beds were located looked cosy and the mattresses filled with straw felt comfortable. There were two mattresses, each one in a large enclosed wooden box, with a curtain on the fourth side for privacy.