Baile Gean
Baile Gean's buildings constitute a township or settlement of a type that was common enough in the eighteenth-century Highlands - but which has long ceased to exist. I've read plenty accounts of those townships. I've written some such accounts myself. 

But actually to see a settlement of this vanished type; to walk into several of its homes; to get some impression, at first hand, of how eighteenth-century Highlanders organised their lives: this I found deeply moving.

Settlements of the Baile Gean variety owe nothing to the way we organise our countryside, whether in the Highlands or elsewhere, in recent times. Today the typical farm is worked by a single family who live in their holding's single house and who manage, either as owners or tenants, a single, and exclusively-operated, set of neatly-fenced and regularly laid-out fields. 

Communities of the Baile Gean sort, in contrast, were just that - communities. Hence the extent to which Baile Gean's closely-packed dwellings and outbuildings approximate less to a present-day farm than to our notion of a village. Hence the application to such a settlement of the Gaelic term baile: a term usually translated into English as 'township' and one preserved in numerous Highland placenames like Ballachulish or Balmacara. But while I understood all this - as it were - intellectually, it came as a tremendous revelation, actually to be in a Highland township of the kind that would have been familiar to the men who, in April 1746, were ordered into battle, by Prince Charles Edward Stuart, on Culloden Moor.

The average clan's territory - which generally ran to a sizeable tract of hill country - included a whole series of townships of the Baile Gean type. In times of trouble and when ordered to do so by their chiefs, the adult males among a township's residents doubled as the fighting men whose role it was to make the devastating charges that were the basis of Highland warfare. Most of those men's lives, however, together with the lives of their wives, their daughters and their sons, were taken up with the more mundane, but endlessly pressing, task of growing the crops and rearing the animals on which their community, like thousands of similar communities, depended.

Runrig, as this system of land-use was known, had its strengths. For instance, it helped ensure that each one of a township's families got a reasonably fair share of the available arable land - by making it possible for good, not so good and poorer land to be equitably distributed among all the township's occupiers.

To be sure, external observers of the eighteenth-century Highlands did not see things like that. With much of the rest of Scotland - and much of England also - beginning to adopt the farming practices that were eventually to lead to the emergence of our modern British countryside, runrig townships of the Baile Gean variety were inevitably thought, by eighteenth-century outsiders, to be decidedly out-of-date, even primitive. Much the same jaundiced view was taken of thatched and turf-walled homes of the standard Highland pattern. They, too, were dismissed, by virtually every southern visitor to the eighteenth-century Highlands, as hopelessly backward. . That's why it comes as a bit of a surprise when, on stepping into one of Baile Gean's homes, you find it roomy, comparatively well-furnished and by no means uncomfortable.

Homes of this sort were much more spacious than I, for one, would have imagined. At 52 feet (16 metres) long by 16 feet (5 metres) wide, the Baile Gean creel-house compares favourably, in dimensions at any rate, with the dwellings that many people - whether in the Highlands or in Britain's cities - have occupied in periods much more recent than the eighteenth century.
Nor is the Baile Gean creel-house a smoke-filled slum of the type Edmund Burt described. Neither this Baile Gean home nor any of its neighbouring buildings, to be sure, possess chimneys. But between the creel-house's peat fire (burning brightly on a hearth located in the middle of the creel-house's earthen floor) and the house's outside wall, an underground vent has been installed. This creates a through-draft which makes the house much less smoky than it might otherwise be - and which helps propel such smoke as is produced in the direction of a vent in the building's thatched roof.

The furniture and the domestic utensils which I saw in the Baile Gean creel-house are modern - in the sense that they've been made in the last few years. But they're modelled, in practically every instance, on originals which the Highland Folk Museum holds in the indoor collections at the museum's Kingussie site.

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