Houses
‘I once asked a party of tinkers to make me one of the larger tents in which they spend the winter and which they called “ghiellies”. They arrived with a bundle of birch wands and, without taking any measurements, and in what seemed the most casual way, they stuck the wands into the ground, tying their tops together and fastening more wands round them. The result was a most symmetrical oval framework. A space had been left in the framework to serve as a door and the whole thing was covered with tattered tarpaulins held down by ropes weighted with stones. A hole had been left in the covering to let out the smoke and a hearth of flat stones was arranged in the middle of the tent. Beds were made up at each end of straw and blankets. The whole thing was about 12 ft. (4 m.) long and I was told that eight people could live in it. To hang the pot over the fire the tinkers use an iron rod, which is thrust into the ground, and the upper end of which is bent into a U-shaped hook.’1
Visitors after 1750 reported a consistent picture. ‘There my landlady sat with a parcel of children about her, some quite and others almost naked, by a little peat fire, in the middle of the hut; and over the fire-place a small hole in the roof for a chimney. The floor was common earth, very uneven, and no where dry, but near the fire and in the corners where no foot had carried the muddy dirt from without-doors. The skeleton of the hut was formed of small crooked timber; but the beam for the roof was large out of all proportion. This is to render the weight of the whole more fit to resist the violent flurries of wind, that frequently rush into the plains from the openings of the mountains; for the whole fabric was set upon the surface of the ground, like a table, stool, or other moveable. … The walls were about four feet high, lined with sticks wattled like a hurdle, built on the out-side with turf; and thinner slices of the same served for tiling. This last they call divet. When the hut has been built some time, it is covered with weeds and grass; and do assure you I have seen sheep, that had got up from the foot of an adjoining hill, feeding upon the top of the house’.2
‘The houses of the common people in these parts are shocking to humanity; formed with loose stones, and covered with clods which they call devots; or with heath, broom, or branches of fir: they look at a distance like so many black mole-hills’.3 ‘On removing from one house to another it was accounted unlucky to get possession of a clean house. “Dirt’s luck” says the proverb’.4
Mrs Murray was a wealthy widow who travelled round the Highland towards the end of the eighteenth century in a large carriage equipped like a touring caravan and complete with tea service and maid. Like many since, she financed her visits to exotic places by writing books about them. Near Fort William she crossed a moor which was being used as summer grazing. ‘I never drank finer milk than I did there, from cows I found milking at the road’s side… . The huts on this moor are very small and low, are soon erected and must very soon fall down. They consist of four stakes of birch, forked at the top, driven into the ground; on these they lay four other birch poles, and then form a gavel [gable] at each end by putting up more birch stick, and crossing them sufficiently to support the clods with which they plaster this skeleton of a hut all over, except a small hole at the side for a window, a small door to creep in and out at, and a hole in the roof, stuck round with sticks, patched up with turf, for a vent, as they call a chimney. The covering of these huts is turf, cut about five or six inches thick, and put on as soon as taken from the moor; therefore it seldom loses its vegetation, as I hardly saw any difference between the huts and the moor; for what heath there was on either was equally in bloom. In these huts they make a fire upon the ground, and the smoke issues in columns at every hole … At night they rake out the fire, and put their beds of heath and blankets (which they have in abundance) on the ground, where the fire had been, and thus keep themselves warm during the night. The chief of their furniture is an iron pot, a few bowls, and spoons of wood, and pails to put their milk in.’5
‘I found Mr McRae’s shilin a miserable hut, on a moor, bare of everything but stones. I was obliged to stoop when I entered, and in the inside I could scarcely stand upright: its walls are of loose stones, its roof heath, which slopes to the stones within four feet of the ground. The floor is full of holes, and when I was there very wet. It consists of three partitions, – the entrance, a bed-place, a common room, and a closet behind the entrance. Planks, ill put together, form these divisions; and the bed-place having no door to it, Mrs McRae hooked up a blanket to screen me from public view; but from the eyes of the closeted family I could not be screened, as the planks stood at a considerable distance from each other. The window is about a foot square, having the ends of the heath in the roof hanging over it, which almost precludes both light and air’.6
Dorothy Wordsworth and her brother William visited Scotland in the late summer of 1803, using an Irish ‘car’ but walking considerable distances on foot. Dorothy is an excellent observer. It was at Luss on Lochlomondside, ‘a cheerful, populous village’, that she first saw bare-foot women, boys wearing the philabeg or small kilt, and houses with no windows, the smoke coming out of the open window-places and chimneys like stools with four legs, supporting a slate. D. Wordsworth 1804, 68. On an island near Luss she examined several woodmen’s huts. ‘They were built in the form of a cone from the ground, like savages’ huts, the door being just large enough for a man to enter without stooping. Straw beds were raised on logs of wood, tools lying about, and a forked bough of a tree was generally suspended from the roof in the middle to hang a kettle upon’.7 This recalls the turf-covered ‘wigwams’ noted by Pennant in Jura in 1772.
The ferryman’s house at Portnellan, Loch Katrine, in 1803 was a longhouse in which the cows occupied one end and the family the other. ‘We entered by the cow-house, the house-door being within, at right angles to the outer door. The woman was distressed that she had a bad fire, but she heaped up some dry peats and heather, and, blowing it up with her breath, in a short time raised a blaze that scorched us into comfortable feelings. A small part of the smoke found its way out of the hole of the chimney, the rest through the open window-places, one of which was within the recess of the fireplace, and made a frame to a little picture of the restless lake and the opposite shore, seen when the outer door was open. … When I went to bed, the mistress, desiring me to “go ben”, attended me with a candle, and assured me that the bed was dry, though not “sic as I had been used to”. It was of chaff; there were two others in the room, a cupboard and two chests, on one of which stood the milk in wooden vessels covered over; I should have thought that milk so kept could not have been sweet, but the cheese and butter were good. The walls of the whole house were of stone unplastered. It consisted of three apartments, – the cow-house at one end, the kitchen or house in the middle, and the spence [pantry] at the other end. The rooms were divided, not up to the rigging but only to the beginning of the roof, so that there was a free passage for light and smoke from one end of the house to the other. I went to bed some time before the family. The door was shut between us, and they had a bright fire, which I could not see ; but the light it sent up among the varnished rafters and beams, which crossed each other in almost as intricate and fantastic a manner as I have seen the underboughs of a large beech-tree withered by the depth of the shade above, produced the most beautiful effect that can be conceived… I lay looking up till the light of the fire had faded away, and the man and his wife and child had crept into their bed at the other end of the room’.8
As the party moved north, things became less civilised. The inn at Cladich, Argyll, ‘was a cottage, like all the rest, without a sign-board… As to fire, there was little sign of it, save the smoke, for a long time, she having no fuel but green wood, and no bellows but her breath. My eyes smarted exceedingly, but the woman seemed so kind and cheerful that I was willing to endure it for the sake of warming my feet in the ashes and talking to her. The fire was in the middle of the room, a crook being suspended from a cross-beam and a hole left at the top for the smoke to find its way out by: it was a rude Highland hut, unadulterated by Lowland fashions, but it had not the elegant shape of the ferry-house at Loch Ketterine, and the fire, being in the middle of the room, could not be a snug place to draw to on a winter’s night’.9
‘The Highlanders say they love the smoke; it keeps them warm’.10 Smoke was positively encouraged to hang around inside the house, for old sooty thatch was valued as a fertiliser. ‘In the heart of Lewis, where many of the farms are far from the sea, they are necessitated not only to use all manner of cow dung, but even to strip the house of its thatch every Spring, to make an addition to their manure for the lands.’11 In St Kilda the only opening to let out smoke was above the byre, at the left-hand end of the house as you went in, ‘which, in fact, they wish to keep in as much as possible for the sake of the soot, which they use to enrich the land for the barley and their potatoes in the spring,'12
Horsepower
Small ponies were a standard feature of Highland life, used as mounts, pack animals, traction for sledges and slipes, and four-abreast for ploughing. Small horses had arrived in Scotland in the Mesolithic, at much the same time as red deer, and persisted in the wild well into the eighteenth century; indeed, in Shetland the ponies are still left to look after themselves on the hills where they compete with the sheep for pasture. Horse-meat was not eaten in Scotland but horses were hunted in Central Europe during the last Ice Age and in Britain in the early Mesolithic for the fat in their long bones.13 Many of the picture stones of the Pictish period show hunters, armed with spears and shields, riding on small active horses. Horse-racing was a popular diversion at particular places and at particular seasons, suggesting a link with seasonal hunts. Vast numbers were rounded up every and sold at Lowland horse fairs, notably at Perth, but of this trade virtually nothing seems to be known.
When Mr T. Jolly, minister of Dunnet, Caithness, contributed an essay to the Prize Essays and Transactions of the Highland Society,14 his hope, as a member of an ‘improving’ Society, was to persuade Highlanders to see ‘the superior advantage of using oxen’. In fact he found so much to say in favour of the thrifty, adaptable and energetic native horse that within a short time horses had almost entirely replaced oxen in Scotland, even on the largest Lowland farms. The use of wooden ploughs pulled by teams of horses succeeded immediately to tillage by the spade, though in places such as the island of Stroma in the Pentland Firth, spade-cultivation continued well into the nineteenth and even into the twentieth century, partly because small and scattered plots of arable are easier to dig than to plough and partly from the belief, which was not unfounded, that digging produced a better crop.
‘The horse, however lean, is easily recruited; and if he get but a handful of corn before he is yoked, will endure moderate labour; whereas the ox, in that state, is good for nothing. He has neither strength nor spirit, but will lie down the moment he feels the draught; nor is it possible to recruit him but by the summer grass. Besides, in severe seasons, the horses not only keep in better flesh than the black cattle, with the same treatment, but often look tolerably well, when the others are dying from want. Where the object, therefore, is to rear a greater number of cattle, than the provender produced upon a farm can fully support through the winter season, there is an absolute necessity for depending almost wholly upon horses for labour.’15
‘For, little provender was laid up for winter; and only given to the cows, and youngest cattle, in the severest weather. The horses were allowed to take their chance among the hills; nor were they ever brought near a house, but when needed for any particular purpose. The person who could procure a few breeding mares, soon came, without much trouble, and with no expense, to have such a stock of horses as was sufficient to answer all the purposes of agriculture, on that confined scale… These pasture at large among the hills, and are only caught at the particular times when their labour is required.’16 Moreover they had been used for untold ages to pull sledges and slipes and so were easily broken to traction, and the harness was available. To be fit for ploughing, oxen had to be stall-fed through the winter and were good for nothing else.
‘These horses in miniature run wild among the mountains; some of them till they are eight or nine years old, which renders them exceedingly restive and stubborn. There be various ways of catching them, according to the nature of the spot of country where they chiefly keep their haunts. Sometimes they are hunted by numbers of Highland-men into a bog, in other places they are driven up a steep hill, where the nearest of the pursuers endeavours to catch them by the hind leg; and I have been told, that sometimes both horse and man have come tumbling down together. In another place they have been hunted from one to another among the heath and rocks, till they have lain themselves down through weariness and want of breath.’17
The slipe or car
‘The author recollects to have seen a farm in the Highlands, as late as the year 1778, on which there were sown above 100 bolls of oats, and 36 bolls of bear, where there was not one cart, or wheel-carriage of any kind, employed.’18 The variety of types of slipes and sledges which are known from recent centuries and their world-wide distribution suggests another Palaeolithic invention. All of them were based on an A-frame made of two poles known in Gaelis as car ‘a joined pair’, found in càraid ‘pair, couple, twins, married couple’. Some A-frames served as the traction unit for rectangular sledges which ran flat on the ground and increased the load-carrying capacity. The A-frame equipped with two wheels became a cart, while the addition of four wheels to the sledge created a wagon. Wheels came much later and were made by specialists but slipes and sledges could be made by anyone. The Jura ‘car’ used only one horse but most A-frames had a cross-piece to allow the harnessing of two (Du. paard ‘horse’ means ‘paired’).
The Jura car was designed for deer-hunting. Jura is a wet, windy, and very mountainous island, with indifferent soil. It had about 466 inhabitants in 1764, living on an estimated 115,000 acres, giving 246 acres for each inhabitant: as someone saw it, ‘a most melancholy proportion. To find a parallel to it, we must go to the wastes of America.’ The people lived on milk, butter, cheese, fish, mutton and venison, and appeared to live longer than many of their neighbours. Jura was famous for its deer-hunting and was visited on a regular basis by deer-hunters from neighbouring islands. The Jura car was adapted to the terrain.
‘The kind of sledge known as the Jura car … with side struts fastened to the sides of a horse and their rear ends trailing on the ground, with a carrying platform linking the struts behind the horse, might well be considered a primitive survival, an example of the past in the present. And so it is in a way, for slipes or travois of this type go back to the Bronze Age and are known in many parts of the world, from Scotland to the plains of North America. They were illustrated by John Slezer in 1693 at Dunblane, Perthshire, and Arbroath, Angus, and appear to have been in widespread use in hilly areas. And yet the Jura car, though a link – perhaps the last one – in a long chain of succession, was nevertheless made, as it survives, by estate joiners, to carry the deer shot by sporting gentry off the trackless hills. No equipment or tool can really be described as primitive, where it is obviously serving a purpose that more up-to-date equipment cannot serve, or at least cannot serve better.’19
In Gairloch: ‘There being no need of wheels in a roadless country in my young days (c.1810), we had only sledges in place of wheeled carts, all made by our grieve. He took two birch trees of the most suitable bends and of them made the two shafts, with iron-work to suit the harness for collar straps. The ends of the shafts were sliced away with an adze at the proper angle to slide easily and smoothly on the ground. Two planks, one behind the horse and the other about half-way up the shaft ends, were securely nailed to the shafts, and were bored with holes to receive four-foot-long hazel rungs to form the front and back of the cart and to keep in the goods, a similar plank on the top making the front and rear of the cart remarkably stable and upright. The floor was made of planks, and these sledge carts did all that was needed for moving peats, and nearly every kind of crop. Movable boxes planted on the sledge floor between the front and back served to carry up fish from the shore and lime and manure, and it was long ere my father, Sir Hector, paid a penny a year to a cartwright. The sledges could slide where wheeled carts could not venture, and carried corn and hay, etc. famously.’20
‘In the first half of the eighteenth century … the slipes of Moray, Nairn, Easter Ross and Inverness took a step towards improvement, following the fashion of the innovation centres in the South-East of Scotland, by being adapted for wheels, though these were often fixed individually, and not paired at the ends of axles.’21
A lost Pictish stone once at Meigle showed a cart with a basketwork body, two passengers and a driver, and two horses harnessed either side of a central pole. The Romans borrowed all their techniques of wheeled transport from the northern Europeans. Their chariots also had central poles and two horses.
Ships
Of prehistoric or even early historic boats in Scotland information is sketchy. Only dug-out canoes have survived in considerably numbers. The vessels which raided Roman Britain in the fourth century are described by Vegetius in AD 380 as scaphae or skiffs and were undecked boats with masts and sails and twenty oars a side, not materially different from those used by the later Vikings. The hulls, sails, ropes and even the clothing of the crews were of neutral tints, allowing them to effect surprise attacks in hazy weather.22
‘The natives of those islands and promontories which form the Rosses of Donegal are described (in the years 1753 and 1754) as using seal-skin boats; but their shape does not seem to have been identical to that of the kayak. “Their boats” (says a visitor to the Rosses at that date) “called curraghs, were oval baskets, covered with seal-skins; and in such weak and tottering vessels they ventured so far out as was necessary to get fish enough for their families.” … In his Gaelic dictionary, Armstrong states that “the curach, or boat of wicker and leather” was “much in use in the Western Isles (Hebrides), even long after the art of building boats of wood was introduced.” He defines curachan as ‘a little skiff; a canoe.’23
Every picture of Highland scenery before the coming of the railways c.1850 shows a multitude of sailing and rowing boats on every loch. The birlinns or galleys were not built for speed but for the safe transport of passengers, grain, livestock (notably beef animals for Lowland markets). They were clinker-built of pine on oak, on an eighteen-foot keel, wide in the beam and masted and rigged with square sails. The sails were used only when the wind was fair; otherwise the crew rowed and sang an iorram or boat-song to synchronise the dip of the oars.24 When Dorothy Wordsworth made the crossing of Loch Lomond, she noted that the ferryman’s helper, ‘a youth fresh from the Isle of Skye … sang a plaintive Gaelic air in a low voice while he plied his oar’. But she also noted that he was an indifferent rower.25
St Kilda had its own traditions.26The Stacks are a good five miles away from the main island, and though the day was fine there was a pretty heavy roll. The whole of the way the ten St Kilda men kept singing a sort of song at the pitch of their voices, the refrain of which consisted of the following words of encouragement in their rather funny St Kilda Gaelic:
Iomru illean, iomru illean
Robh mhath na gillean, robh mhath na gillean,
Shid i, shid i, shid i, shid i.
Row, lads, row, lads.
Well done, the lads! Well done, the lads!
There she goes, there she goes.’
Pottery
‘In some parts of the island [of Coll] there are pits of a reddish clay, which the inhabitants manufacture into different kinds of earthern vessels which they call Crokans. This sort of ware, the most rude and simple that can be anywhere made, they frame in the following manner. The clay without any mixture they form by the hands into the shape of the vessel required, and then place them in the sun till they are thoroughly dry. After this, they are filled with milk and set upon a strong fire, where they are kept until the milk be entirely boiled away, which finishes the operation. This sort of ware, though rough and unshapely, is a close firm substance, and very durable in the fire. The milk seems to communicate to the clay that principle which it always loses by calcination, and by the loss of which the closeness and tenacity of its substance is impaired.’27
Grant confirms that this coarse pottery was made by women, as the use of milk in the process suggests. Elsewhere the women used 'an abundance of wooden vessels’ but ‘In the Long Island, Tiree and in Skye home-made jars, known as Cnaggans (pronounced craggans) used to be made. The workmanship is extremely rough. The jars are without ornamentation and were moulded by hand and not thrown on a wheel. The last place where this primitive craft lingered till within living memory was Barvas, in Lewis… It was a woman’s craft. After the pots had been shaped by hand they were set to dry for a few days, then they were baked on the household hearth, burning peats being heaped around them and some placed inside; then, while still hot, they were plunged into milk in order to make them less porous… The cnaggans were used for holding oil, milk and other liquids and as cooking vessels and churns… In Tiree cnaggans had once been made for ordinary use and, after this had been given up, cows were still sometimes milked directly into little ones and the milk was drunk as a cure for consumption. The one given to me was of a fine red clay.’28 The making of pots apparently persisted in places where wood of suitable size and quality was rare or unobtainable. Logan shows three pictures of what he calls ‘Harris pottery’.
Fenton refers to buttermaking in Skye in 1768 where the churn was an earthenware craggan covered with a piece of sheep-skin or goat-skin which was thrown to and fro between two women, sitting on something like straw or bedding to cushion the shock.29
Nappies, luggies, coggies, bickers and bowies
In place of pottery the Gaels used an immense variety of wooden vessels. Some were made out of a single piece of wood, hollowed out by hand or turned on a simple lathe, while others were staved and bound with withies or iron bands or feathered to prevent splitting and leaks. Some were made at home while others, requiring more specialist work, were made by travelling craftsmen. They included quaichs or drinking cups, equipped with two small flat handles or lugs, larger bowls for mixing meal, ladles, drinking vessels with bottoms of sheep-skin, and turned wood platters, porringers, drinking beakers, staved vessels such as kegs for salting meat and herring, milk cogs (shaped like half a barrel with a single vertical handle), washing-tubes, butter tubs, ‘cheesers’, churns, and all the other equipment needed in the dairy.30
A scallop shell was also used as a cup. Being flat, it could be carried in the pouch or sporran, which is no doubt why a scallop shell is associated with pilgrimage.
Travelling folk or cairdean
Before their skills were devalued by the availability of mass-produced items, the items made and sold by travellers or tinkers were important element in the rural Gaelic way of life. The cairds made wooden equipment and had the skill of feathering the staves. I.F. Grant 1961, 180. They made and sold horn porridge spoons and egg spoons, horn tumblers for whisky and ladles for broth, and small items such as clothes pegs and pot brushes. Some mended china, using hand-drills and staples to join the pieces. They made spoons from cow horn by a secret process. The horn was softening in the fire or by boiling and pressed between the two pieces of a wooden mould. The horns were provided by the family requiring the spoon.31
The cairds were also tinsmiths and made soldered pails, buckets, basins, ladles, milk sieves, pot lids, toasters for oatcakes, and tin lanterns punched to admit air and fitted with a small pane of glass. I.F. Grant 1961, 186. In earlier times these itinerant craftsmen also worked with cast metals: tin, pewter, lead, silver and gold and, less often, iron. They made fine and not so fine jewellery, melting down scrap. They made the handles for wrought-iron dirks and betrothal brooches which might be decorated with polished pebbles, cairngorms, coral, or pearls from fresh-water mussels. The whereabouts of the pearl beds are still a well-guarded secret. Grant notes that ‘very fine silverwork was made in Inverness and other burghs on the borders of the Highlands from the seventeenth century onwards.’32 Goldsmiths of Highland extraction were established in Perth and Edinburgh by the eighteenth century and those who made the fine pistols at Doune were also Highland cairds. There is a direct link with the itinerant metalworkers at the elite sites of Dark Age Scotland.
Baskets and ropes
‘Creels of straw, rushes, docken stalks, heather or willow were made for back transport, generally by the people themselves as they sat around the fire in the evening. Such basket-making and the allied craft of rope-twisting, were among the range of non-specialised craft skills required to keep a community functioning smoothly, using for the most part the raw materials that the neighbourhood could supply. Similar creels, sometimes even a little smaller, were used in pairs on the backs of pack-ponies. A pad of sheepskin, of plaited grass, straw or rushes backed with cloth, or even a thin, grassy sod, was put on the pony’s back and over this was laid a wooden pack-saddle… The creels were hooked on to the crooks or horns of these saddles either directly, or by being placed in nets of hand-twisted bent-grass and straw.’33 In the north-east, ‘ropes were made either of hair, willows, bog-fir split up into canes, broom roots, or heather.'34
In Coll, cattle in spring ate the young shoots of a coarse hard grass, Arundo Arenaria or bent, which grew in great quantities on the sand dunes. ‘The same grass also is extremely serviceable to them for several other purposes. Being very tall and of a tough substance, with no small toil and a great deal of art they weave it into sacks which answer for holding both their grain and meal. They frame it into cordage for tethers to their cattle, and traces to their ploughs, and even twine it into ropes and cables sufficient for their boats. So powerful is necessity, in the many cases to produce both industry and ingenuity.’35
‘Instead of ropes for halters and harness, they generally make use of sticks of birch twisted and knotted together; these are called woodies; but some few have ropes made of the mains and tales of their horses, which are shorn in the spring for that purpose.’36
‘Ropes for retaining the thatch on the cottages were called seamanan fraoich and made of heather. Ropes to hold small boats were generally made of twisted birch twigs, while the very best ropes for all other purposes were made of the pounded fibres of bog-fir roots, and a really well-made ball maith guighais (a good fir rope) could hardly be beaten by the best modern ropes.’37
Riddles and strainers
‘I never saw a wire riddle for riddling corn or meal in the old days; they were all made of stretched sheep-skins with holes perforated in them by a big red-hot needle. Trout lines were made of white or other horsehair, and when one stabled a pony at an inn, it always ran the risk of having its tail stolen. Also, the only spoons in the country were those the tinkers made from sheep and cow horns melted down. How one used to smell the burning horn at the tinker encampments after dark.’38
Tar for boats and other purposes came from tapping pine trees.39
Seals were caught for their oil, which was used for cruisie lamps: ‘Beneath the skin is a deep spongy fat, something like that of the skinny part of a leg of mutton; from this they chiefly draw the oil.’40
Beds
‘In their houses, also, they lie upon the ground; strewing fern, or heath, upon the floor, with the roots downward and the leaves turned up. In this manner they form a bed so pleasant, that it may vie in softness with the finest down, while in salubrity it far exceeds it; for heath, naturally possessing the power of absorption, drinks up the superfluous moisture, and restores strength to the fatigued nerves, so that those who lie down languid and weary in the evening, arise in the morning vigorous and sprightly.’41
Fire
Of making fire, ‘the most primitive method seems to be that which was used in the islands of Skye, Mull and Tiree. A well-seasoned plank of oak was procured, in the midst of which a hole was bored. A wimble of the same timber was then applied, the ends of which they fitted to the hole. But in some parts of the mainland the machinery was different. They used a frame of greenwood of a square form, in the centre of which was an axle-tree… As soon as any sparks were emitted by means of violent friction, they applied a species of agaric which grows on birch trees, and is very combustible’.42 ‘In these days of universal improvement, the Highlanders doubtless avail themselves of the use of chemical matches in the most remote districts, but when this valuable article is not at hand, a light is procured, as in former times, from a neighbouring cottage, or a live peat may be carried from some distance. It is otherwise obtained by the sparks elicited from flint and steel, the back of a dirk, a sword, or the flash of the powder from the lock of a pistol or gun. Those who possessed a lens have used it during the warm days of summer to raise a fire by the well known concentration of the sun’s rays’.43
‘The boat fire is always made on the same spot, that it may not be mistaken. It is generally kindled on a projecting point of land, and when the smoke is seen ascending, the people on the opposite side announce it to the ferryman, Smuid suas! ‘The smoke is up’, on which the boat puts off to convey the awaiting passengers their watery way. The smoke, which it is desirable to render dense, is seen from a great distance when the day is fine, but in wet and foggy weather the mist which overhangs the water is embarrassing. At night the brightness of the fire will render it the obvious means of giving signal for a boat’.44 ‘Having been told that a ferry-boat was kept at one of the islands [on Loch Awe] we resolved to call for it, and row to the island, so we went to the top of an eminence, and the man who was with us set some children to work to gather sticks and withered leaves to make a smoky fire – a signal for the boatman’.45
Light in winter was provided either by pieces of bog-fir laid on the fire, or by fir-candles, which were long slivers cut from the roots of bog-fir, from one to two and a half or three feet (one metre) long, fixed in a sort of candlestick known as a peer-man with the flame towards the door, or by means of oil lamps or cruisies, filled with fish-liver oil or seal oil and using the pith of the rush as a wick.46
