Orkney Image Library

Hammerfield, Wasbister, Rousay

This is Hammerfield in Wasbister, Rousay. The house has long been demolished so I thought that it might be worth preserving this as a record of its time. I took it in about 1955 (I would have been eight of nine) using a Kodak 127 format camera, hence the poor quality.
It was the home of the Flaws family for generations; the last to live there were Bill and Mabel Flaws nee Sinclair but they had no children. This was a mini-tragety because they loved children and put up with us invading them every summer. The kitchen was at the far end and there was a parlour in the middle and the bedroom nearest the camera. There were box-beds off the kitchen and the parlour. No mod-cons at all.
You can easily see the typical construction of these buildings with dry flagstone walls and flags on the roof. The attachment is the dairy. This, I think, was the original construction and it was replaced a few years later with a breeze-block building with an asbestos cement roof.
The car at the front was Uncle Bill's old Fordie. Uncle Bill died in 1981 and Auntie Mabel moved to Kirkwall in 1983.