38145: Keose, a Strangely Featured Hamlet

Article from the Scotsman (Edinburgh) 1878

Keose, a strangely featured hamlet with its houses situated on all levels on a bare ridge of rocky hill-land, overlooking a salt-water loch and opposite the parish manse, is a fair sample of what is seen in travelling through the district.

A novel sight are the ‘lazy beds’ which here abound. Thrown up in mounds of every shape and size, these grave-like patches give the place, on a dull day, an almost sepulchral look. Some of them, two or three yards in breadth, run in straight lines from the road away up the hillside, divided from one another by trenches more than a foot deep and several yards in width; others curve around corners in crescent form; a third lot are semi-circular; a fourth kind straggle about in serpentine fashion; yet another variety have an irregularity worthy of the most neglected country churchyard – all speak of not a little labour on the part of the occupants and suggest the unremunerative character of work which, while it persists in sowing in stony ground, cannot be expected to bring greater reward than was promised of old.

In their houses, the people are no better off than in their lands. Every hut is approached from the road over pathless, marshy ground, that leaves after it is crossed, only a rememberance of dry feet; and often when the doors of the houses are reached, the interior is seen to be even more uninviting. Cows stand in one end of the house, knee deep in a dung heap which no persuasion will induce the ‘farmer’ to remove from his dwelling till spring comes round. When fresh bedding is needed by the animals, one of the family goes to the moor and gathering a creelful of mossy soil, takes it back, thrown it on top of the old manure and there the nuisance keeps on growing.

At some places, it may here be stated, attempts have been made to improve the Lews buildings, not however with uniform success. Two doors were made in the house – one for the cattle and the other for the family – and the fireplaces were placed near the gables, so that chimneys might be introduced. Some tenants have borne with these inconveniences but others have returned to their old ways. The fire has been taken back to the centre of the floor and the family door has been closed because it allowed too much smoke to escape.

At Keose, a feature brought prominently into notice is the method by which the squatting system is worked. There for example, is a broad, low building, well up on the hill, which resembles nothing more strongly than a broad-beamed Dutch lugger in distress. On an uneasy undulating site, there was apparently erected by the original holder a primitive hut, with windowless walls scarcely five feet in height, but fully six feet in thickness, cemented by loose earth, thrown into the interstices of the rude stone. Between the spring of the thatch and the outer edge of these walls was a promenade three feet broad, round which sheep grazed but near which, it may be safely guessed, what Artemus Ward so prettily described as ‘the music of the laughter of happy well-fed children’, was seldom heard.

The children that did exist have, however, grown up all the same and now they are doing their best to produce other colonies of squatters. Alongside the fathers ‘hump-backed hut’ there has been run up by the elder son, a second dwelling, in all respects identical with the old family nest, to which it is joined so as to do away with the need for one of the side walls.

Then again, there has been swung on behind this pair of cottages a third low thick-walled house which grows in a crooked way out of the stonework of its neighbours and there another member of the family has taken up quarters. Besides these offshoots, there may for anything one knows, be a third family of second generation living under the parents’ roof for nothing is more common throughout the island than that when a son or daughter married, the bride should go to live with her mother-in-law, or the bridegroom with his father-in-law.