The towns of the area not only had to withstand the deprivations of the Reivers but also, more dramatically, suffered from being in a war zone - certainly for the period of the Rough Wooing in the 1540’s. Dumfries, for example, was destroyed twice in this time. No houses of this era, therefore, have come down to us. Certainly, if we take the example of Edinburgh, which was itself ravaged by fire by the forces of Lord Hertford, stone was a better material to build in to withstand fire than the normal daub and wattle with wood beams found in the parts of the country which have extant building of the period such as Chester. Thatched roofs are especially susceptible to fire. Slate is not a native stone in the south of Scotland so that roofs tended to be covered with thin sheets of stone (a technique called ‘hipping’). Luckily for it, Dumfries’s main quarrying stone is sandstone, which readily adapts to this technique. The houses in the High Street of Dumfries were placed with their gable ends to the street, with gates at the top and bottom of the closes (alleys) thus formed so as to make it more difficult for raiders to enter the houses. This gives the town its modern-day closes which run off the High Street, perpendicular to its course. Haltwhistle was described as having sturdy stone built houses, of the Bastle variety, which were so placed as to give each other covering fire, rather in the way of German Blockhouses in WWI.
We can get a better idea of the style of houses in the countryside by looking at a survivor - well, almost a survivor. This 18th Century cottage is in the village of Torthorwald (pronounced Turthorall), just outside Dumfries. The stone-built walls would have been made of local stone, but very few cottages would have had this sturdy a construction. It is more likely that any courses of stonework would not have been more than 30 to 60cm (one or two feet) high, the rest of the height of the wall being made up with sods of turf or clay mixed with straw (a technique known as ‘cob’ in the south of England) which may have been all that the wall consisted of in the poorest houses.
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The roof covering is a layer of heather turf, laid on birch rafters, the heather facing downwards. This provides a base for the straw thatch. The roof may well have been roofed solely with heather or with grass turfs. This would have been cheap, easy to construct, with easy availability of materials, if rather leaky. This would have the added bonus of making it more resistant to fire. Stone hipping would be unlikely because of the weight imposed on the structure as well as the fact that the main consideration for the tenants was that if the house was destroyed it should be as easy as possible to rebuild it.
However, it is the construction of this otherwise unremarkable cottage that makes it important, since this is one of the few surviving Cruck Cottages in Scotland. The “crucks” are the wooden beams which give the cottage its shape and strength. The side walls are merely for clading, the weight of the roof being borne by the crucks.
It is much easier to see the construction of the cottage if you go to the larger view of this diagram which you can access by clicking on the image at right.
The cruck frames are made of roughly shaped tree trunks, with just the bark removed to which are attached “Collars”, the beams which go across the width of the house. Everything is joined together with wooden dowels rather than nails. Crucking was an extremely common medieval building technique. The frames would have been joined on the ground and raised into position supported on stone footings, to stop their bases sinking into the ground.
In the interior of the cottage. The floor would be of earth, stamped hard, possibly strewn with rushes of grasses. Furniture would have been very basic - a board on rough trestles as a table. The Black Houses of the north of Scotland, the equivalent of this one, have seats with very short legs, 3 or 4 cm, just high enough to take the sitter off the ground but low enough to be under the ever-present pall of smoke from the fire.
The chimney above the fireplace (a “hanging lum”) is made from clay, horsehair and manure mixed together. It would have removed some of the smoke, aided by the fact that the windows have no glass in them and the door, left open during the day or in warm weather, is covered by an animal hide. The inside, however, would still have been extremely smoky. In the poorest and most hastily-constructed houses there would have been no chimney. The smoke would be expected to find its own way out through the thatch. Lit by tallow or mutton fat candles, possibly with animal shelter at the other end of the house, our modern noses would be assaulted and battered by the variety of smells we would encounter in this house. We would find it dark, damp, cold smoky and smelly.
