Fig. 16.—BO’H IN THE HEBRIDES.
(From Mitchell: The Past and the Present.)
“My first visit to one of these houses was paid in 1866, in the company of Captain Thomas. They are commonly spoken of as bee-hive houses, but their Gaelic name is bo’h or bothay. They are now only used as temporary residences or shealings by those who herd the cattle at their summer pasturage; but at a time not very remote they are believed to have been the permanent dwellings of the people.
“We had good guides, and were not long in reaching Larach Tigh Dhubhstail. As we had been led to expect, we found one of these bee-hive houses actually tenanted, and the family happened to be at home. It consisted of three young women. It was Sunday, and they had made their toilette with care at the burn, and had put on their printed calico gowns. None of them could speak English; but they were not illiterate, for one of them was reading a Gaelic Bible. They showed no alarm at our coming, but invited us into the bo’h, and hospitably treated us to milk. They were courteously dignified, neither feeling nor affecting to feel embarrassment. There was no evidence of any understanding on their part that we should experience surprise at their surroundings. I confess, however, to having shown, as well as felt, the effects of the wine of astonishment. I do not think I ever came upon a scene which more surprised me, and scarcely know where and how to begin my description of it.
“By the side of a burn which flowed through a little grassy glen, we saw two small round hive-like hillocks, not much higher than a man, joined together, and covered with grass and weeds. Out of the top of one of them a column of smoke slowly rose, and at its base there was a hole about three feet high and two feet wide, which seemed to lead into the interior of the hillock—its hollowness, and the possibility of its having a human creature within it being thus suggested. There was no one, however, actually in the bo’h, the three girls, when we came in sight, being seated on a knoll by the burnside, but it was really in the inside of these two green hillocks that they slept, and cooked their food, and carried on their work, and—dwelt, in short.
“The dwelling consisted of two apartments opening into each other. Though externally the two blocks looked round in their outline, and were in fact nearly so, internally the one apartment might be described as irregularly round, and the other as irregularly square. The rounder of the two was the larger and was the dwelling-room. The squarish and smaller one was the store-room for the milk and food. The floor space of this last was about six feet in its shorter and nine feet in its longer diameter. The greatest height of the living room—in its centre, that is—was scarcely six feet. In no part of the dairy was it possible to stand erect. The door of communication between the two rooms was so small that we could get through it only by creeping. The great thickness of the walls, six to eight feet, gave this door, or passage of communication, the look of a tunnel, and made the creeping through it very real. The creeping was only a little less real in getting through the equally tunnel-like, though somewhat wider and loftier passage which led from the open air into the first, or dwelling-room.
Fig. 17.—PLAN OF BO’H.
a a a. Entrances; b. Sleeping platform; c. Range of cobble stones; d. Hearth; e e e. Lockers; f. Dairy.