News 2020

Absolutely glorious walk on Ulva yesterday (2022.08.12) in the company of Andy Primrose, archaeologist; Lesley Davis and Abbie MacFadyen, guides and several MH&AS members. Abbie is our Heritage Horizons Heroine. She gained her Scottish Tour Guide Gold award for the work she did with Lesley and me, to develop the walk to Aird Glass (one of its many spellings), also known as Starvation Terrace, along with information about the social history of the site. We stopped for lunch high up on the hill overlooking the bay where the row of buildings stood by the shore, the top edges of the structures were just visible.  Looking across the Sound of Ulva we could see Eas Force (more photos to follow).It was very hot and the walk was tough but most of the party made it down to Starvation Terrace.

There must have been a hatching of butterflies with lots of them fluttering around us while we ate our sandwiches. I think they might have been Gatekeepers (see the photo below, courtesy of Butterfly Conservation). Inez also found a very handsome caterpillar, see above, and if anyone can identify it you can email me at: mull.h.and.a.s@gmail.com  Margaret found two small examples of Grass of Parnassus, I must check the old guidebook to see if it is listed in there. Watch this space!

 

Andy made an interesting observation in that some of the structures didn’t really look like dwellings. He thought they might have been barns or byres and had been ‘tacked’ on to the end of the row. Other structures had been built in the gaps between dwellings so that it ended up looking like a terrace.  Many people, when leaving their homes to emigrate to Canada or Australia, would fill up the windows with stones. At Aird Glass, they had taken down the lintels from above the doors and placed them in the entrance as if to stop anyone going in.  The first image shows Lesley and Andy striding down towards the beach and Starvation Terrace. The following two, are at the village and show a window opening and what may be a storage nook. Who knows…

There’s a lot of conjecture about the reason for the name and the location of the site and we’ll be looking into that in a later post in here.  In the meantime thank you Abbie for the photographs and Butterfly Conservation for the image of the Gatekeeper butterfly.

 

 

 

 

This image of Grass of Parnassus is courtesy of Fine Art America;