Context 158 - March 2019

C O N T E X T 1 5 8 : M A R C H 2 0 1 9 29 Highlands and Islands MATTHEW WITHEY Re-thatching a Hebridean blackhouse The Hebridean blackhouse at the Highland Folk Museum has been re-thatched with traditional marram grass, displaying and supporting a critically endangered specialist craft skill. The Highland Folk Museum in Badenoch in the central Highlands of Scotland is one of the country’s most evocative and well-loved cultural institutions. The museum, nicknamed Am Fasgadh (Gaelic for ‘The Shelter’), opened originally on the island of Iona in 1935, where its founder Isabel Grant (1887–1983) appropri- ated a former United Free Church building ‘to shelter homely ancient Highland things from destruction’. Grant’s collections at that time consisted mostly of handmade household items and vernacular crafts, but she was able to broaden her ambitions from 1944 onwards after moving the museum to Pitmain Lodge, a large Georgian former inn building near the railway station at Kingussie, the capital of Badenoch, in the heart of the Scottish Highlands. The site included three acres of land, enabling Grant to develop a pioneering and highly influ- ential suite of three replica buildings, designed to illustrate three distinct geographical types of traditional domestic construction: an Inverness- shire cottage, a Hebridean blackhouse and a Highland ‘but and ben’. The buildings and the use of live demonstrations by costumed interpreters to explain these settings for visitors helped to establish the Highland Folk Museum’s popular reputation as the first open-air museum on mainland Britain. The museum today is located in the village of Newtonmore, a few miles south of its former home at Kingussie, in the heart of the Cairngorms National Park. The 80-acre site was first acquired in the 1980s by Highland Council – the museum’s current owners – and operations moved there permanently in 2014 at the behest of High Life Highland, the arm’s- length charitable organisation that runs the museum on behalf of the local authority. The Highland Folk Museum attracts about 70,000 visitors a year, with audiences enjoying a taste of how life was lived in the Scottish Highlands between 1700 and the middle of the 20th century. The site provides a home for Isabel Grant’s unique collection of Highland material culture, formally recognised by Museums Galleries Scotland and the Scottish Government as being of national significance. The collection boasts a wide array of house- hold and crofting artefacts, furniture, farming implements and machinery, horse rigging, car- riages and other vehicles, cooking and dining utensils, vessels and general kitchen equipment, pottery, glass, musical instruments, sporting items, weapons and fishing tackle, clothing and textiles, spinning and weaving apparatus, books, photographs and archive papers with accounts of superstitions, stories and songs, and hand-crafted items of every shape and description, including basketry, Barvas ware (a type of pottery) and treen (small domestic wooden objects). The collection also includes more than 30 historical buildings – commercial and domestic, authentic and replica. The Hebridean blackhouse is one of the museum’s most popular exhibits. It was first built under the supervision of ‘an oldish man from Back in Lewis’, brought to Kingussie to oversee the construction of a replica blackhouse in a style typical of that island in the 1890s. Marram grass has been the traditional thatching material for vernacular buildings in the Hebrides for generations, but Isabel Grant was content to employ local heather for her blackhouse in Kingussie. She was painstaking in other details, however, and produced a replica that was as Far left: Neil Nicholson thatching the Highland Folk Museum’s Hebridean blackhouse in marram grass The completed thatch on the Hebridean blackhouse at the Highland Folk Museum