IN SCOTLAND.
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at a convenient distance from the farm offices; and there isa small garden attached to each of them. Sometimes, also,landlords build cottages of a superior description for theirown labourers.
n As to the village cottages, they are generally built by thevillagers themselves, on a long lease or feu of the site of thehouse, with the addition of a small garden, which is usuallysituated at the back of the cottage.
' The miserable cottages, built of turf or sod, which are insome districts rapidly, and in others slowly disappearing, donot require any particular description. They are seldom wellsituated *, and their construction is despicable. Indeed no-thing but ignorance of any thing better, or necessity, whichmust submit to every inconvenience, could have induced anyhuman being to be satisfied with such wretched accommoda-tion. Besides the low and uncomfortable walls of turf, therounded form of the roof with the fire place in the middle,characterises a considerable number of the habitations of thelower classes in the Highlands and Islands. This is occasion-ed by the great scarcity, and consequent high price of woodin some of these districts. A rounded roof requires not onlythe least quantity of wood, but, excepting a few principalsupporters, even that may be of weak rafters of brushwood, orof other timber of inferior quality.
The dry-stone cottage, where earth is put in place of clayor lime, among the interstices between the stones, and whichhas generally one foot of turf-wall built above five feet of stones,was, till within the last fifty years, in many parts of Scotland ,the habitations of married servants, who were attached tofarms. Both in this, and in the turf-walled cottages, thecouples or supporters of the roof were built in the wall, thefeet of the couple resting on flat stones placed in it for thatparticular purpose. This sort of cottage, however imperfect,