Camayo Hyde, a second-year candidate for Lay Readership, enjoyed a holiday with her family on the Isle of Lewis from Saturday 1 July through Saturday 8 July. Cam writes:
This year my family and I spent the first week of our holiday on the Isle of Lewis. We are frequent visitors to Skye but wanted to share with our history loving daughter a different location. My Grandfather is from Lionel, a parish in Barvas near to Ness on Lewis and so this helps the history to come alive.
One of our visits was to the blackhouse in Arnol run by Historic Scotland. It was quiet when we arrived, and we almost had the place to ourselves. We imagined what life would be like with no electricity and no carpets. Having the animals living in the same place. We laughed as we hunched down getting in and out of the small doorways. We took in the breathtaking views and wondered if living there, in those times, the views would have been breathtaking or just part of life.
I love the smell of burning peat. There was a kettle on the boil, as there would have been in the past and the smell and smoke of the burning peat filled the blackhouse. It reminded me of incense. The smell and the smoke rising up as prayers to God. Afterwards the guide told us that testing had shown that burning the peat was not bad for the lungs, and it was considered a clean burn. So similar to incense. It can be so easy to see God in a place so wild and unspoilt as the Hebrides, where everything closes on Sundays and everyone goes to church. Yet for me, I also met God around a peat fire in a blackhouse and let my prayers of thanksgiving for all I have go up and mingle with the smoke from the peat fire.
Photo courtesy of Camayo Hyde
