Rocky ruins in the high hills

Many people who spend a lot of time in the hills wonder what it was like for the folk who lived and worked in them in centuries gone by. We often come across sheilings in the high hills in the Highlands, where folk brought their cattle in the summer to graze extensively on the new growth on the hill whilst their in-bye land was being cropped. The sheilings in what now seem to be very remote locations, but in those days the glens were heavily populated hence the sheilings were not as remote to folk at the time. Butter and cheese making were often the main tasks of the women and children who typically inhabited these structures, the location of much industrious activity in the past but now lying empty and forgotten. An old photo of a sheiling can be seen by following this link – they were typically round structures with a low dry-stone wall spanned by timbers and then covered with a turf roof.