Long house, wrong house

It was a beautiful day for a walk along the lower reaches of the mountain above Newport where agricultural land dwindles into tiny pocket handkerchief fields bordered by lichen-crusted stone walls, damson blossom and horse-nibbled rowan trees. The upland dwellings here were once the toeholds of the poorest families who found a perch on these stony slopes by the ancient squatter's right of ty unnos: erect a structure overnight with a roof of sorts and smoke issuing from the hearth by dawn and it was yours.

This one may well have started this way because it lies exactly on the boundary, the mountain wall that separates the fields from the open grazing to which most local farmers would have rights. It's hard to say how old it is because this pattern of dwelling goes back centuries. It's known as a longhouse: one continuous structure divided into two partitions, an upper one (pen uchaf) for the people and a lower one (pen isaf) for the cows. The place is a just a shell now but the huge hearth with a corbelled chimney stack remains set into the top gable end. There would most probably have been just the one room for the family but the crogloft, an open section of boarded floor above the lower half of the room is still in place. It would have been used for storage and sleeping, accessed by a wooden ladder.

Although the original roof has gone (thatch first, then slate probably), the stonework remains sounds and you can see fragments of seashell and cinders in the mortar still. Once the interior would have been plastered with clay (there are pits just above where it was collected) and maybe cow dung too, a very durable substance when dry.

The curious thing about this site is that the old stone ruin is twinned with the much newer one, on the left. Sometime during the 20th century someone built a two storey house of brick, wood and asbestos just yards away. It's also long since abandoned and in much worse shape, the shoddy materials have not withstood the ravages of much shorter span of time. Unlike this one, hunkered down into the hillside, the replacement is very exposed facing north towards the sea to receive the full blast of the weather.
Like Icarus, someone flew too close to the sun!

I blipped the two ruins before here and no doubt will do so again. It can't be long before this another phase of regeneration begins on this site - old long houses make very desirable holiday accommodation.