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Collections & Research --» Folk Collections --» Rural Buildings --»

DUNCRUN COTTIERS HOUSE

Original location: Duncrun townland, Magilligan, County Londonderry

As a social class, cottiers were landless peasants who survived precariously close to the bottom of the social scale. They only became numerically important in the middle of the 18th century due to population growth and increased pressure for land. They rented a house, usually a one-roomed cabin built of sods, with an attached garden plot and earned a livelihood by at any work that was available. The garden provided the land to grow a crop of potatoes which formed a major part of their diet, and possibly somewhere to keep a pig which could be sold to raise the necessary cash to pay the rent.

The building is structurally interesting, the most notable feature being the roof is supported by cruck trusses rather than by the front and rear walls, not necessary in this case but a throw-back to an earlier building tradition. The house was originally thatched with marram grass, or 'bent', the coarse grass which grows on the sand dunes of the Magilligan peninsula.

The house, one of an irregular cluster of such houses (a clachan), was occupied by the Clyde family. Margaret Clyde, the third generation of the family to live in the house, moved out in the early 1950s when old age compelled her to move to sheltered accommodation.

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