Munro’s House (Building H)
Munro’s House
Munro’s House is a tenant farmer’s longhouse or byre dwelling consisting of a byre for the cattle, kitchen, dairy and parlour. The Munro family, who claimed residence at Auchindrain since the 1690s, last inhabited the house.
There is a step in wall-head height in the front, southern, wall between the kitchen and the byre. It has been suggested that the byre, located at the western end of the building, is a later addition. However, despite the heavy whitewash on both faces, the wall appears continuous. The byre is certainly earlier in date than the internal stone partition wall separating it from the kitchen, which partly overlies one of the cruck stumps. It appears that this replaced an earlier timber partition, most probably positioned level with the eastern edge of the present stone wall. It also appears that both external doorways were later insertions. It is not possible to verify the phasing of the eastern door, which may well have been inserted when the external threshold into the kitchen was blocked. However, it was suggested that the byre door was inserted in the position of a cruck stump, which is incorrect; the cruck would have been positioned slightly to the east, within an area of wall, which has certainly been remodeled.
The layout of the byre is orientated towards the present door positions, and it is unlikely that the floor was remodelled to insert a new manuring passage to the new doorway. However, the manuring passage is somewhat unusual, in that the southern end by the doorway is blocked with concrete. The western end-wall of the byre contains the only surviving wall-end cruck stump at Auchindrain. It is most probable that this is a remnant of the original style of hipped roof construction once used throughout the Township. The cruck is now redundant, although the corrugated iron roof, added around 1907, is also hipped at the western end. Unlike the byre in MacCallum’s House (Building A) each of the stalls in the byre in this house had its own tether chain, which illustrates the differences in stalling practices used within the Township.
The kitchen of Munro’s House illustrates how a Township kitchen would have looked at the turn of the 20th Century, in regards to its furniture and equipment. The box-beds within the kitchen are probably the oldest at Auchindrain, although the slats forming them have been replaced, probably when the attic was renovated as they are made of the same timber. Box-beds are a traditional feature of a longhouse kitchen as is the provision for toiletry of the enamel jug and basin. The baking board on the kitchen table was a necessary piece of equipment in the longhouse kitchens and was used to stop the flour and meal from spreading around the room.
The Attic
The attic floor was inserted around 1907, with steep stairs constructed within the dairy and halving its size. The renovation of the attic involved the insertion of two timber partition walls, creating two upstairs rooms either side of a central landing.
The Parlour
It would appear that the timber paneling within the northern part of the parlour, some of which forms the eastern part of the staircases, dates from the renovation of the attic, which took place around 1907. A repair within the concrete floor of the parlour also suggests that the position of the wall was moved slightly to the west, or that the new wall was much thinner than the original.
The exacting conditions of the way of life at Auchindrain meant that the houses within the Township were furnished so that they were functional rather than decorative. The houses would have originally been furnished with little more than the box-beds in the kitchen, a few wooden stools, a table and wooden chests for storage. By the 1880s it became more commonplace for money to be spent on the purchase of decorative china, gramophone record players and sewing machines. These items would all have been kept and used in the ‘best’ room of the house – the parlour.
