MATERIAL: Heather

Photo: C Dear

Rope made from heather was a very common sight around the croft and is a skill which was just part of life, it is known as sìoman in Gaelic. On Skye the tradition died out long before other places, possibly due to our tourism industry which has been in existence since the beginning of the 1800’s if not before. 

I did hear about a ball of heather rope, made in North Uist, which travelled each year to Skye on the ferry destined for Jonathan Macdonald’s Museum of Island Life in Kilmuir. Rope made from heather had a multitude of uses, the most well known being to hold the thatch down on the roof of houses. For one small house I have calculated that you would need approximately 600 metres, nearly 2000 feet, of rope. Installing the rope on the roof was a communal enterprise with many people working together passing the rope back and forth over the ridge and fixing it with stones at the eaves. In North Uist I have seen heather rope used on the inside of a roof, stretching from gable to gable at about 10cm or four inches apart. This not only shows the shortage of any form of timber which would normally do this structural function but the physical amount of labour involved in doing this. A couple of years ago whilst in Stornoway recording people’s memories of ropes I heard how, about fifty years ago, the fishing boats coming from the outer lying areas could be spotted in the harbour as they were moored with ropes made from heather which floats in contrast to the Stornoway boats which had bought ropes, possibly from hemp, which sank.

   

Photo: C Dear

Heather was traditionally gathered in September when the sap has risen and it is more flexible. It is pulled not cut and places with a gentle slope seem to make it grow longer. Once gathered it was used all winter hand twisted by men into long coils of rope. These ropes were stored outside the house where the men also peed on it, the ammonia probably acting as a preservative in a similar way to tweed being seeped in urine. There are accounts of people at traditional ceilidh’s in the islands telling long epic stories while each person is busy spinning, mending or making rope. One from South Uist recounts how Angus MacLellan was making heather rope as he told stories, interspersed with song, throughout the evening until by eleven o’clock ‘you couldn’t see him at last for the heather rope all round him - coiled round his chair.’ (Darwin p106).  This is not as fanciful as it might seem as when making rope in order to stop the rope twisting on itself and breaking you need to wind it around your body in a certain way so that the twist is counteracted. Inside the house heather ropes were used to dry fish, being strung from corner to corner. Smaller more delicate heather was carefully selected to make thinner ropes using as bindings, cleaning brushes or for small baskets. 

Heather was also used to make pot scrubbers and cross-leaved heath, Erica tetralix, is known in Gaelic as Fraoch an ruinnse, this heather is long and thin and would bind easily to make a pot scrubber. I have recently been shown a heather pot scrubber in Orkney which was bound with what they call ‘burry heather’, possibly crowberry.

Photo: C Dear

Ref. 

Darwin, T. (1996) The Scots herbal The plant lore of Scotland Mercat Press Edinburgh p.106