Friday 21 May 2010

walking on

The renewal of the door also brought to light that the floor & that part of the wall in which the door frame sat also needed replacing.

Although I’ve been years saving wood of all kinds – planks, old TV stage sets, two-by- fours from friends’ projects – the challenge as ever is to find wood that would suit.

Obviously, the best wood – the cherry rescued from over-enthusiastic fellers at a Baptist church, which I sawed with a friend & an old two handed cross-cut saw, then milled and stored with waxed ends (which were not mouse proof) would not do. Nor would the warts and buboes sawed from the fallen elm by the pond, again with the two-person cross-cut, Morven struggling a little at the other end. Perfect for the structural replacements were the six-by-two timbers given me when a friend of a friend left the country. I filled a vanload with his generosity, including the timber frame for a glasshouse and a good new felling axe.

So when the wall casing was rebuilt, it was a simple job of re-cladding with lapboard.

That left the floor. Most of it was good, with only an eighteen inch gap immediately inside the new door. Nothing to walk on for a while; but a good trap for anyone who shouldn’t be there.

There’s never any end to rebuilding and replacing on an old wooden hut. This hut was built some time in the 1930s by Cowiesons . The oval blue enamelled plaque that’s all but hidden under the front gutter reads: Cowiesons Ltd. Designers & Erectors Charles St. St Rollox, Glasgow.

In the mid-1930s Frank Fraser Darling, the great naturalist and one of the founders of modern ecology, was making a study of the birds and other wildlife on Eilean a’ Chleirich, one of the Summer Isles. In his book of those days – Island Years – he writes:

“We designed a sectional hut . . . and it was made for us by Messrs Cowiesons of Glasgow.”

His description of that hut fits ours perfectly, right down to the way in which the windows open. I wonder now whether Cowiesons, who were better known for sectional churches and village halls, took (borrowed?) that design to themselves and used it for our hut here at Carbeth.

Frank Fraser Darling writes how his Cowieson hut arrived at the island:

“James Macleod of Tanera brought it one evening, laid across the decks of his big teak launch. . . . It was a ticklish job getting the sections ashore, especially those of the roof and window; one dunt through the felt would mean the rain coming in and a great deal of trouble repairing the damage.”

Our roof here has been mended many times and always in the old way, with a pot of melted bubbling tar to spread under the felt.

And how, after having camped for a year on stony, windswept Eilean a’ Cleirich, Frank Darling looked forward to the hut going up:

“That little wooden hut with its rigid walls and roof would be the acme of luxury . . . James Macleod and Donnie Fraser came in that first week of October, but not alone. There must have been eight or ten of the lads and lasses from Coigeach all ready to help and all primed for a good day’s fun. The hut shot up into position, the lining was fitted and wires slung over the top and suspended with boulders.”

I’ve seen – and helped with – huts going up that way at Carbeth. Notably, the dismantling and re-erecting elsewhere of one of the old “wardens” huts. These were men employed by the Estate during the heat of the Rent Strike and were as little liked as any tacksman.

Frank Fraser Darling left his hut on the island that first winter and returned in the spring of the following year, glazing the window with numb fingers:

“here was Dougal at the hut in the teeth of the wind getting colder and colder and almost blue. So I took over the glazing for the last pane or two and Dougal carried stores from the rock to get himself warm”.

The rock was the only place that stores could be put ashore on the tiny island.

To stay in the comfort of a small Carbeth hut is also to be keenly aware of what goes on immediately outside. There’s always the birds – the wren singing louder than her size would seem to admit, buzzards mewling, the kerplunk of ravens and the crankiness of nesting geese. Darling again, describing how these things stop the work (or maybe are the work):

“I had worn my binoculars and had seen purple sandpipers on the rocks, some young and old tysties in the west landing . . . Now I must have a quick run round the island before nightfall.”

Hutting, like old style farming, is always about make do and mend. The floor and door-wall of our Carbeth hut chosen from old stores, and Darling:

“Dougal used the timber which I had brought from the great east cave to make a fine lean-to about four feet high along the back and one side of the hut, where we were able to store peat, driftwood . . .”

Our own woodshed is made from some old surplus-to-requirement wooden theatre props. Full of timber waiting for the saw and stove.

But it’s Darling’s outlook which marks him as a hutter most; that way of thinking which is coupled directly to his studies in ecology – the place where everything fits with its surrounding parts. He was not only a great naturalist, but happy with what is familiar to any hut owner, what my granny called thrift – what’s abuzz now in the west:

“It is remarkable how much more work is made as soon as you have a house of stone and lime with doorsteps and fireplaces and several windows, and when you have begun to collect furniture. We have reached the conclusion that the cure for the chronic state of monetary poverty in which we find ourselves while we insist on doing research which it pleases us to do . . . is to simplify needs. Face up to the fact that much of the furniture and fittings, and therefore of indoor space, is quite unnecessary for comfort. Pare down continuously and avoid junk like the plague: be careful to see that such labour-saving devices as you instal are not in fact labour-makers. We have never been more happy than in these wooden-hut days . . . If you become suddenly poor, cut your losses and climb down, and if you are chronically poor but doing what you most wish to do, then I repeat, simplify your needs with a bold, clear mind . . . These remarks are not offered as sage, sociological counsel for a whole nation; they merely apply to a fair number of people of my type and position. I should not like to see rich people simplifying their lives as we have done . . .“

Darling was a scientist who insisted on engrossing and well loved though poorly paid research, but has everything in common with those poets, writers and artists who, over centuries have led not dissimilar similar lives, whether by volition, or sometimes, as in the case for example of Su Shi, as the result of poverty-inducing exile. We have never been more happy than in these wooden-hut days.

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