Small-Scale Evaluation of a Post-Medieval Blackhouse at Bereiro, Lewis, Western Isles of Scotland

This paper presents the results of the excavation of two dry-stone structures in the abandoned blackhouse village of Bereiro, near to the township of Crowlista, Isle of Lewis. The research was undertaken as part of a wider landscape project investigating human occupation on the Uig peninsula from prehistory to the post-medieval period (the Uig Landscape Project). The excavation aimed to collect dating evidence from the site to determine the date of construction and abandonment of one of the earliest structures in the village, in an attempt to establish the longevity of the blackhouse form in the vernacular architecture of medieval Atlantic Scotland. The results of the dating program are considered alongside historical documents, which record the social history of the village within the context of the long-standing research questions regarding blackhouse villages. These questions include the development of the agricultural field systems and continuity or change in the Hebridean landscape from later-prehistory to medieval times. Department of Archaeology, Durham University, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, UK. Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, National Museums Scotland, Chambers Street, Edinburgh EH1 1JF, UK. County Hall, Morpeth, Northumberland NE61 2EF, UK. *Corresponding author [email protected]. Introduction Bereiro is a post-medieval abandoned blackhouse village that sits above the east shore of Tràigh nan Srùban, north of the Camas Uig (NGR: NB 0455 3454; Fig. 1). The site was included as part of the Uig Landscape Survey undertaken in 1995 (Burgess and Church 1996). Bereiro was one of four sites chosen for excavation including a Middle Iron Age islet site at An Dunan, a Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age promontory enclosure at Gob Eirer, and a multi-period relict landscape of Late Bronze Age to post-medieval date at Guinnerso (see Nesbitt et al. 2011). The buaile (small village) of Bereiro is located on a low spur that runs north–south and is easily visible in the landscape, as it is surrounded by the remains of an agricultural field system in the form of runrig (Fig. 2). Local historic documentation places abandonment of the village at around 1830 (Comann Eachdraidh Uig 2011). A number of recurrent research objectives have underpinned the study of blackhouse villages including discovering: whether it is possible to see the blackhouse village as a continuation of prehistoric settlement patterns or as a break from the past (Campbell 2009, Dodgshon 1993); how the use of certain building materials in particular ways suggests an environmental determinism in vernacular architecture (Geddes 2010); the form and extent of the remains of the villages (Fenton 1995, Kissling 1943, Walker and MacGregor 1996); how the settlements develop in terms of the in-field/out-field system of agricultural land use (Dodgshon 1973, 1977; Whittington 1975); and the threats to the extant remains of these particular types of settlement (Parker Pearson et al. 2011). The research aim of the Uig Landscape Project survey and excavation at Bereiro was simply to collect dating evidence for the earliest use of the site and to examine the structural remains to understand the architectural form of the blackhouse building. Therefore, the excavations in 1996 targeted two adjacent drystone structures that were the least well-preserved in the village and appeared to show multi-phase activity compared with the other more straightforward and apparently single-phase final blackhouse structures in the village (see Fig. 4). This evidence led the excavators to believe that the more ephemeral structures represented the earliest blackhouse in the village. The Archaeology of Blackhouses Blackhouse is a term given to a distinctive form of architecture used for dwelling houses in postmedieval Atlantic Scotland. The architectural form of the blackhouse follows a broad pattern, namely a long and narrow house with annexes to the front and rear. Often the main body of the house was separated into a byre area at one end, which housed animals, and a dwelling space at the other end for the human occupants. The annex to the rear was routinely used as a barn while, the front annex, the fosglans, served as an entrance to the structure. Blackhouses are also characterized by their thatched roofs, built on A-frame trusses that rest on the inner skins of the walls, and the absence of a chimney. The walls are thick and stone lined, usually with an earthen core (Holden et al. 2001:17). Within a given region, the forms of the blackhouse tend not to vary significantly from one another; however, the characteristics do vary from region to region. For example, the blackhouses of Barra and South Uist are smaller than those in Lewis, and it seems likely that they may No. 22:1–19 Journal of the North Atlantic 2013 Journal of the North Atlantic No. 22 2 C. Nesbitt, M.J. Church, S.M.D. Gilmour, and C.P.G. Burgess 2013 3 not have housed animals within the dwelling in the way that Lewisian blackhouse dwellings clearly did (Branigan and Merrony 2000:1). The architectural form of the blackhouse was one which suited the climate and availability of materials in the North Atlantic in the latter half of the second millennium AD. Geddes has argued that the roof was designed to be easily accessible for the necessarily frequent repair of weather damage and to minimize the amount of timber required in an area where that commodity was at a premium (Geddes 2010: 20). While there is some evidence that woodland may have been managed in the Iron Age of Atlantic Scotland (Church 2002a), oral testimony from Arnol suggests that at the time of construction of the houses there, all the timber used for blackhouse building was salvaged from shipwrecks or collected as driftwood (Geddes 2010:22). Geddes (2010:15) stated succinctly: “blackhouses are distinctly vernacular buildings in which design materials limitations and pretensions are all allied to a particular cultural and natural context”. It is clear that examples of dwellings closely matching blackhouse architecture exist across the North Atlantic region from earlier archaeological periods. For example, the Underhoull longhouse on Shetland dating from the Early Norse period (ca. 800–1000 cal AD; Small 1964:264) shares several similarities with Hebridean blackhouses, including the plan of the structure, the construction materials, the paved floor, and the central hearth. Similar structures also exist from the Norse period across the wider North Atlantic, in the Faroes (Arge 1991, Church et al. 2005), Iceland (Smith 1995, Vésteinsson 2004), and Greenland (Høegsberg 2010). Examples of similar Norse-period structures in the Western Isles can be seen at Bornais, South Uist, where mound 2 was excavated to reveal a rectangular Norse building, which post-dated an 11-century bow-walled hall (Sharples 2012). At Bostadh in Great Bernera, a Late Iron Age and Norse multiphase settlement was excavated and revealed a stone-walled rectilinear building and associated midden deposits of 9–11 century date (Neighbour and Burgess 1996:113–114). However, very few rectilinear domestic structures have been excavated in the Western Isles that date from the 13 to 17 centuries AD, after the Norse period but before the post-Medieval appearance of classic blackhouse form. Holden et al. (2001:17) suggest that it is likely that turf was used in the construction of these earlier Figure 1 (opposite page). Location map of Bereiro. Figure 2. Extent of rigging associated with Bereiro. Reproduced from the 1967 Ordnance Survey Aerial Photograph OS_67_174_837 with the permission of Ordnance Survey on behalf of The Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office,