'I took this photograph a number of years ago but I cannot trace the date. It was very early in the century.

Father Maclvor tells me that within living memory there were many of such houses there, some better than others. The better ones would be plastered within and without with yellow clay, properly thatched and provided with a chimney; the poorer ones, like this photograph, unplastered and roughly thatched, or covered with furze.

The better ones, so long as the walls were protected from damp, probably made quite a good house, though a storm might shake them a bit. They were certainly cheap to build and possibly just as good as more recent constructions in cement blocks.

Certainly the old mud-walled .thatched cottages could not be beaten for evenness of temperature, summer and winter'.