From Issue Nine of Hidden Scotland Magazine

The Modern Croft

What crofting means today.

Printed in Issue Nine of Hidden Scotland Magazine, Autumn and Winter 2024–25.

The Collins dictionary defines a ‘croft’ as ‘a small, enclosed plot of land, adjoining a house, worked by the occupier and his family,’ an unsentimental summing up that does little to evoke the harsh realities of crofting life over the centuries. Today, however, the word is more likely to conjure up a cute cottage in a bucolic rural setting. For just as the ‘bothy’ has been reinvented by architects and designers in recent years, old croft houses across the Highlands and islands are being restored and converted into hip hideaways and field-to-fork restaurants for design-savvy tourists.

The life of a Scottish crofter was a hard one. Despite its modern-day romantic connotations, a croft was a simple smallholding, too small to be called a farm, the family living in a low-slung, thatched blackhouse, dark and smoky, peat-fire-warmed, sharing the space with their animals. On stony, unforgiving land they’d grow root vegetables, hens scratching the bare earth, a few sheep grazing the rough ground. To eke out a living the crofter would often be forced to work for the local estate owner.

Today, the ‘modern’ croft house is thankfully less austere. Down a single-track lane in the hamlet of Camustianavaig on the Isle of Skye, The Crofter’s House, a single-storey whitewashed dwelling dating back to the 19th century, epitomises the new ‘croft chic’.