Life in the black house, however, had much to commend it. The sound of the ever-present wind on Hirta was greatly reduced by the thickness of the walls. The structure was warm and draught-proof and there was little chance of condensation forming. The black house, in fact, was a healthy home for people who were primarily outdoor folk.
In winter, living conditions were apparently less beneficial. The St Kildans, like their neighbours on the Hebrides, shared their humble dwellings with their cattle, so that the beasts would not perish from cold. Although unhygienic, the custom had its advantages. The presence of the cattle added warmth and the dung that was allowed to amass and dry on the floor was of inestimable value.
The Reverend Neil Mackenzie, who went to St Kilda in 1829, was distressed by the unhygienic conditions. He was influenced by the trend elsewhere in the Highlands and islands to improve the conditions in which people were living in the name of sanitation. A new village was planned. With financial incentive provided by a philanthropic Englishman, Sir Thomas Acland, who paid a short visit to the island, the St Kildans began to construct their new homes. Wood and glass – two alien materials – were incorporated in their design and were duly supplied by the proprietor. Between the years 1836 and 1838, twenty-five houses, barns, and outbuildings were constructed in a crescent one hundred yards above the shore at the head of Village Bay.
The new black houses, a great improvement upon those they replaced, were described in 1853 by Lady Mackenzie of Gairloch when, together with her young son Osgood, she paid a visit to Hirta. She was ‘surprised at the cleanly appearance of the walls and roofs of the houses, and the nice dry walk which went all along the sides of the houses. The walls of the houses are built just as they are in Harris – that is double, being very thick and the middle filled with earth. The roof extends only to the inner wall, and you can walk round the top of the wall quite easily. The form of the roof is oval, like a big bee-hive. They are made of wood covered with turf and then thatched with straw above, and on the outside are straw ropes like a network put across to keep the wind from blowing away the thatch. The houses have generally a sort of window with a tiny bit of glass, and they have a plan of their own for locking their doors with a wooden key made by themselves. It appears to keep matters quite secure. Osgood observed that the beaks of the solan geese were used as pegs to keep down the straw on the buildings.’
The cattle, however, still occupied one end of the house. ‘The byre is on the left hand side as you enter,’ wrote Lady Mackenzie, ‘and above it is the only aperture for letting out smoke, 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 barley and the potatoes in the spring. I was told that they never clean out their byres at all till they take away the manure in April, and previous to that time it is almost impossible to get in and out of the door.’ The fireplace still remained in the middle of the room and once a year the interior floor was dug up and the roof was stripped and the straw, impregnated with soot, spread on the ground. Every October, in preparation for winter, fresh thatch was laid on the roof.
In the 1850s, the Reverend Dr MacLachlan decided the time had come to present the St Kildans with a quantity of crockery. He was particularly concerned with the lack of sanitation on the island. There were no lavatories at all on Hirta and human functions were performed upon the ground. The kindly reverend saw fit to donate a chamber pot to each household. The islanders, however, had no idea what they were for and used them to eat porridge.
In each house was a box bed, a standard feature of rural life in Scotland and, like so many things, the product of common sense. In Hirta it was called a crub. A boot-shaped sleeping cell, the crub was sensible in a place where wood was scarce, as the alcove could be built into the house when originally constructed.
In the early 1860s, new cottages were constructed by the then proprietor, John Macpherson MacLeod. A row of sixteen modern cottages, measuring thirty-three feet by fifteen feet, was built under the supervision of John Ross, master mason of the MacLeod estate. ‘The walls’, wrote McDiarmid, ‘are well built, with hewn stones in the corners and about seven or eight feet high.’ There were chimneys built into each gable and every home could boast two hearths. Every house had two windows, one for each room, facing out into the bay. Each window was fitted with nine panes of glass and the door, fitted with good latches, was placed between the windows. The stone and mortar cottages were built fifteen to twenty yards apart, gable end to gable end, and formed a long street.
The street was the only one to be found in the Western Isles. It was even given a name, ‘Main Street, St Kilda’, and each house was given a number, no 1 being the dwelling nearest to the manse. A stone-slab causeway was laid along the entire length of the street so that when it rained there was no risk of mud being carried inside the house.
The interior of each home was divided into two or three rooms by wooden partitions. Two rooms were fair-sized and the third consisted of a closet opposite the front door in which were built wooden box beds. When first built, all the houses had mud floors: it was not until the end of the century that cement was laid in each living room and a wooden floor put in the main bedroom. The walls were lined with matchboarding to serve as protection against damp, and the roofs were made of zinc sheeting. Heavy gales, however, soon swept the zinc away and the proprietor had to reroof the houses with felt, securely fastened to the masonry with wires and iron staples and then painted with pitch.
The home of each family was the same inside as outside, and furniture was functional if scant. Although there were places cut in the walls for fireplaces, no home had a grate. Each house had a large, rough wooden bed, a few boxes in which to keep valuables, and a barrel or two for sea birds. Each family owned a couple of small chairs which were sent from Edinburgh, and a dresser containing a few bits of crockery. The only article of native manufacture was the occasional chair made from straw. A table of sorts could be found in every home, although in most cases, as the schoolmaster wrote in 1890, ‘painted with mother earth’.
The hours spent sleeping in a St Kildan house were not the most comfortable. Strangely enough in a land of feathers, mattresses were stuffed with straw, and the St Kildans used the few articles of clothing that they discarded at bedtime as a pillow. ‘They lie down year after year’, wrote Ross, ‘on a hard bed of straw, placing part of their clothing under their heads for pillows. The other part they keep on, having for most part nothing between them and the straw and their only covering being a rough blanket. In this they appear to be quite comfortable notwithstanding that in many instances a number of all ages and sexes are huddled together in one place.’ In a community in which families frequently numbered eight persons or more, the two-roomed cottage provided little space. During the winter months, particularly, when the family was confined to indoors for much of the day, the St Kildans must have become adept at cramped living.
The old homes of the St Kildans were not demolished. Instead they became byres and storehouses. In the Gaelic spoken on Hirta, in fact, no word existed for ‘byre’, which was always referred to as ‘the outside house’.
From the middle of the nineteenth century, therefore, the St Kildans were housed in the most advanced dwellings to be found anywhere in the Hebrides. The generosity of the proprietor in building them was surely an example of the economic value he placed upon the most remote part of his estate.
But the new homes had their disadvantages. There was, of course, no lavatory or running water installed, and the relative thinness of the walls made for a constant high-pitched whine whenever the wind blew. The situation of the homes, with the hills behind, meant that frequently the smoke did not manage to escape from the chimneys. By 1875, John Sands remarked that the interior of the houses was blackened with peat smoke. The walls, he claimed, had never been whitewashed since the houses were built. A few islanders rejected their new homes. Rachel McCrimmon, for instance, preferred to spend the rest of her days in her