North Ronaldsay, Verracott Cross and Burness, Scotland

Text courtesy of Historic Environment Scotland. © Crown Copyright, reprinted under the Open Government License.

An interesting farm in terms of layout, Verracott, like Gateside (listed separately) and Bridesness, represents a type of farm which seems to have been influenced by agricultural reforms in Eastern Scotland and taken up in North Ronaldsay. The traditional layout of Orkney farms consisted of two lines of parallel buildings, one range comprising the house and byre, the other including the kiln and perhaps a second byre. The examples above seem to have been influenced by the layout of much larger, grander farms like that of Braebuster on the mainland (listed separately, St Andrews and Deerness Parish), and this derivative form seems to be peculiar to North Ronaldsay. Robert Scarth, the factor of North Ronaldsay, abolished the run-rig system here in 1832, reorganising the farms into squared plots. He quite possibly incorporated his ideas on the appropriate layout of buildings and the design of kilns might have derived from the 'high' farms, like Braebuster. Newman notes how the kilns in question on North Ronaldsay, 'appear as scaled down versions of the kind of large farms in the high farming tradition'. He goes on, 'North Ronaldsay has a number of small farms...which are quite different from the traditional double lines of buildings....The rectangular 1 1/2 storey kilns are set near the centre of the complex and at the side, rather that at the end, of the barn'. Verracott is a particularly fine example of a fast-disappearing traditional type of croft, but is all the more interesting for its exceptional methods of construction. The earlier 19th century was a time of uneasy change in the Orcadian economy with the collapse of the kelp industry and the end of a boom. The small square kiln is noted by Newman and Rendall as being easier to build that the traditional bottle kiln; together with the surrounding stead, it is representative of the most distinctive local vernacular. The old house at Verracott was probably the last privately-owned building in Orkney to have been re-thatched with simmens and needled thatch in the 1950s or 60s. The new stable was built by Willie of Verracott (?), who was born in 1860. Records from 1893 show the occupier at that time to be William Swanney, whose allocation of communal sheep numbered 24; by the 1902 apportionment, the number had risen to 30.