Day 6: Black Houses

Beautiful boy

Yet another sunny day - hurray.  Matt is likening my luck with Scottish weather to witchcraft now!  Anyhow, today we headed to Garenin and the Black Houses there, on the way we found 3 highland moos - hurray.  Back to the Black Houses - these were last inhabited in 1974 and once empty were looked after as it was realised that they would be the best example of old style living on the island.  They are long houses made of stone with no windows and a thatched roof.  Inside were 3 rooms: a bedroom, a living room and another room which held either a loom or animals depending on your trade / lifestyle.

One had been converted into a shop / cafe.  Another had been kept as it was in 1974 - with lino on the floor, box beds, a big dresser, peat fire and a loom in the outer room.  Another had been converted into a museum where you could learn about typical life in a Hebridean village, and watch films about weaving Harris tweed and cutting peat. 

Garenin Black Houses

The other houses (there were about 10 in total) had been converted into self catering holiday cottages or bunk houses - a very interesting place to stay I'm sure.

Once we had had our fill, we decided to go on a walk around the coast.  First of all we headed to the cafe to have tea and a bun for fortification - very nice it was too.  There was a way marked walk to a beach 4 miles away from the Black house village.  That, however, wasn't the reason we wanted to do the walk, we had seen in the news that a 17,000 ton oil rig platform had washed up on the coastline after breaking free from its tug boat on a journey from Norway to Malta.  It was quite a sight!  Not exactly what you expect to see on a scenic bit of coastline in Northern Scotland.  It had been there a couple of weeks - we could see people on it, but it was completely wedged on the rocks.  Good luck to getting it a float again!

The Transocean Winner

We walked back to the Black Houses the same way we got there.  Have I mentioned that the whole of Lewis is essentially peat bog?  This makes walking here interesting, stay here too long and you would suffer from trench foot!  We splashed and squelched our way along the path, trying to stay to the rocky bits of the path as much as we could.  When we got back to the black house village - we all had very peaty legs and clothes!

On the way back we were discussing why the black houses were called so.  Matt and I thought it might have something to do with the burning of peat turning everything black, but we weren't sure so Tom asked the museum staff.  Turns out that the new houses that were built for the pensioners stoically living in the black houses were called white houses because they had big windows to let in the light.  In response the old houses were then called the black houses as they had no windows.  Another theory is that the Gaelic for thatch is quite close to the Gaelic for black - so it could have got lost in translation.  Anyway the lady was lovely, spent some time chatting to us and to Tom.  It was a lovely welcoming place.  

Salvage work

We decided to check out a tea room we discovered on the way in called The Blue Pig. We got there, had a look around to discover that the owner was no where to be seen, and when it said tea room it meant the drink of tea and nothing else - there certainly was no-where to sit down and no food to be seen.  Oops!  Luckily Matt had noticed a Community shop and cafe in a village down the road, so we headed there.  It was an interesting place run by two men that hadn't been to a customer service school!  We were the only customers and it took us an hour to order and eat 2 sets of sandwiches and sausages chips and beans for Tom.  Not great.  They were gruff and more interested in arguing about who should take the order than actually providing a service.  Oh hum, never mind the food filled us up.

Another beauty

We drove back to the cottage, on the way we found 3 more Highland coos - hurray again.  After showering and scrubbing very hard to removed the peat from our legs we headed back to Stornoway for Friday night dinner.  We decided on Thai today and were very impressed with our food.  We headed back home and packed the car up - we are catching the 7 o'clock ferry tomorrow and need to be at the docks for 6.15 - ouch!