Building in Remote Scotland
Building in remote places in Scotland has always been hard, and for all benefits of progress and innovation it is still getting harder. But Highlanders and Islanders are a resilient and resourceful bunch, and communities and individuals are finding ways to make new homes even where the odds seem stacked against them. William Tunnell writes about our experiences of working with people building houses for themselves in remote places.
Near the east end of the Hebridean Isle of Coll the settlement of Bousd is a scattering of ten small cottages in a landscape of rocky outcrops. The houses were originally built in the late 1800s by families cleared from the west end of the island. The exiled families pooled their labour to build one house after another, each on a pattern 5m deep, 10m long, with two rooms separated by a box bed and a small entrance hall. Stone for the walls was quarried from a pit in the middle of the village and the roofs were thatched with marram grass from the machair. Necessity was the mother of invention.
By the 1950s only two houses remained in occupation. Over a 70 year period the hardships and undoubted poverty of living on poor unproductive land in an isolated part of an isolated island had taken their toll.
By the 1970’s the population of Coll was at its lowest ebb of 100 people, down from around 1,000 a hundred years before. Over the 1970s and 80s the tide turned and the roofless ruins of Bousd were re-occupied. The ruins were affordable to people of modest means, and in rebuilding them a simple approach was typically taken of repointing the walls and roofing them with a simple roof structure and profiled asbestos or metal roof covering. Sand and gravel were extracted from near the shore, beach timbers were often used for the roofs and fish boxes re-purposed for furniture. Like one hundred years earlier neighbours shared skills, knowledge, and labour with each other. At this time houses were connected to phone lines and power for a modest flat fee, no matter how far the lines had to go.
It was in this context that I built up my own house in the 1990s from one of the remaining ruins. I was an architecture student with, quite frankly, few practical skills. However, I benefitted from the community of knowledge and experience of my neighbours. There was no internet and no library to ask, but variously my neighbours taught me how to mix and lay concrete, point walls, put together timber carcassing, slate roofs, and install power, plumbing and drainage systems. The resulting house was in a true sense vernacular, built largely to a pattern, primarily from materials found or recycled from the island, sitting comfortably against a rocky hillside.
The image of the ruined croft house in a wild highland landscape has a strong presence in the Scottish identity. At once it stirs conflicting emotions of pride in our landscape, our natural heritage, our culture and history, whilst reminding us that the people who once lived and worked in this place left, either by force or choice. Nowadays the economic context has changed to a point where the ruined croft house falls in to the longing gaze of retirees and potential second-home owners, often with deep pockets. At the same time the growing tourism industry in the Scottish Highlands and Islands and the connectivity the internet provides is enabling diversification in jobs, and opening up more opportunities for those of working age to base themselves here. And there’s the crunch that boosts the rocketing prices of houses and plots, and means young people cannot find homes to buy or even rent.
While inaccessibility and the harsh climate made it hard to build in the 1990s, those looking to do so now face a plethora of additional challenges: the cost of land, materials and labour, supply issues, lack of available trained labour and local skills, more extreme weather, limited capacity and reliability of CalMac, tighter planning restrictions, cost of utilities, the absolute need for low carbon construction and low carbon operation of buildings, and centralised often metro-centric policies. The old rule of thumb that building on an island adds 20% can now stretch to an uplift of 50% or more, and there can be huge variations in cost from place to place, island to island. Being resilient and resourceful, communities and individuals are increasingly finding ways to address these challenges.
In 30 years of practice working in the Scottish Highlands and islands we have tested and learned many different approaches to construction there. Often construction methods are determined by who is likely to build it. We have had bespoke timber kits from the central belt delivered by landing-craft to beaches, local builders carrying individual sticks across moorlands, and dry stone dykers cladding walls. However, we have increasing numbers of clients who decide, often out of financial necessity, to build for themselves. In this I mean literally build the houses themselves, as drawing in building teams from elsewhere can be prohibitively expensive. “Sweat equity’ as it is often referred to is quite normal and common in rural Scotland.
On the Ross of Mull our clients Hannah Fisher and Sorren MacLean are two years in to the extension and renovation of their cottage. They describe themselves as lucky to have managed to buy the cottage they were renting off market and therefore at an affordable price. They are both professional musicians and had rural upbringings that taught them to be comfortable lending their hands to fixing things, and different practical tasks. Like the 1970s builders on Coll they benefitted from the accrued community knowledge of local friends on Mull who had done similar self-build projects ahead of them. Nevertheless, huge up-skilling was required for them both in terms of not only constructing a sustainable building fabric but understanding the complexities of sustainable modern service integration. On the plus side, these new challenges do also come with an extraordinary new self-help manual not available to previous generations - the internet. Hannah has become an expert in charring cladding and frameless glazing, and Sorren something of ‘the’ local expert on heat pumps and solar panels.
Hannah notes ‘You think you are going to compromise so you can do it on a shoestring, but then the complexities become apparent, and the perfectionist kicks in. You also want it to be sustainable, so it all takes longer and you can’t afford to finish the project. Three years for a building warrant to last is simply inadequate’.
Back on the Isle of Coll we worked with Tony Oliver and Mel Cottrell on their new build house. Tony says for them the decision to use Insulated Concrete Forms (ICF) wasn’t difficult.
‘Apart from its insulating and air-tightness qualities, assembly’s a doddle, especially for a pair of numpties. It’s a huge, grown-ups Lego. We were in our element. The stonework took Mel (yes all of it Mel!) about 3 years to complete and involved barrowing many tonnes of stone from the ruin at the back and woman handling them into place.’
But this is a sophisticated modern house with integrated PV and solar hot water, MVHR, air source heat pump, small wind turbine, and energy control/diversion hardware and software. Mel and Tony have had to learn about and in some cases develop systems that suit the peculiarities of island living including the extremes of regular drought, power outages, and hurricane-strength winds. The house also contains some of the best polished concrete you’ll ever see. This is up-skilling at championship level and their expertise is now being shared with island friends and neighbours. This is an approach to skills as a commons, collectively drawn on by community members when needed – as a public good.
On Eigg and Canna we have been working with communities with their own power companies, and community trusts who are taking control of their assets, and enabling new housing and shared facilities. Following the Eigg community buyout in 1997 the community formed their own construction company to facilitate the building of their new community hub ‘An Laimhrig’. The skills developed fed in to wider construction projects, bolstered self-sufficiency and the local circular economy. This legacy helped support the more recent WT Architecture extension and redevelopment of An Laimhrig which now provides a general shop, cafe and bar, as well as tourist facilities and office spaces. A mainland-based contractor was able to draw on skilled local labour, helping control building costs and keeping wealth in the local circular economy. The population is growing and the community is thriving.
Neighbouring Canna has struggled to maintain a viable community and currently has a population of under 20 people. Part of the challenge has been that property has historically been in the hands of one owner, and individuals have not been able to buy in to and invest in the island themselves. Now a partnership between the National Trust for Scotland which now owns the island and the new Isle of Canna Community Development Trust aims to deliver housing, community and visitor facilities which should lead to a more stable community built upon a critical mass of people who can live and work there, including families with school age children, which would in turn lead to the reopening of the primary school.
These vignettes raise the question of how best to support individuals and communities in the extraordinary work they are doing to establish sustainable rural lives. We have found that local factors and the nature of different communities vary hugely, and it is clear that local people are the best to decide on what they need and the best ways to deliver these projects - whether this is housing, shared community facilities or infrastructure.
The ownership and availability of land is of course a huge issue in Scotland which we will not drill down in to here, but government does have a role to play in supporting communities and individuals in securing the land. More grant and logistical support needs to be made available for self builders, both for securing sites and building their houses. This would deliver good value and feed money in to the local circular economy. However, we are heading in the opposite direction with a substantial reduction in the Scottish Land Fund this year, and while the government says housing is a priority there is scant funding available to support communities in delivering it, particularly in rural areas.
Yet surely one of the most effective ways of supporting rural building projects and driving down the cost of building would be in supporting the up-skilling of individuals, and in turn embedding those skills in communities. We have seen short locally-held courses on leadwork, slating and stone walling all draw in half a dozen people on tiny islands. We need to see courses on the likes of heat-pump maintenance, fitting and maintaining solar panels, and understanding MVHR delivered affordably to remote communities. Government and enterprise agencies can support this training, and the economic and social benefits would be significant.
Highlands and Islanders are a resilient and resourceful bunch. Empowering them with more opportunities to build on their existing skills, as well as access to affordable land would be two big steps in helping these communities to not only become economically and socially sustainable, but to thrive.