Sheiling, Barvas Hills

The edges of the moorland are used for small-scale domestic peat-cutting for fuel, and its interior is scattered with sheilings, small stone huts where people (mainly women and children) lived in the summer months while grazing their cattle in the islands interior. This transhumance has now died out, although sheep are still grazed on the moorland and many people (ourselves included) still use their family sheilings for leisure. There also hundreds of archaeological sites on the moorland. My parents generation spent their childhood summers on the sheiling, and remember this time with great fondness and nostalgia.  Each feature of the moorland, however small, is known and named by the indigenous people, and many features have stories associated with them.

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