page_title: Shieling
section_title: Surviving shielings in Scotland and elsewhere
hierarchical_section_title: Shieling / Surviving shielings in Scotland and elsewhere
caption_attribution_description: English: Colourful Sheiling One of the many sheilings on the Lewis moorland.
context_page_description: A shieling, also spelt sheiling, shealing and sheeling, is a hut, or collection of huts, once common in wild or lonely places in the hills and mountains of Scotland and northern England.
  The word is also used for a mountain pasture for the grazing of cattle in summer, implying transhumance between there and a valley settlement in winter.
context_section_description: Among the many surviving buildings named shieling is Shieling Cottage, Rait, Perth and Kinross, an 18th-century cottage of clay-bonded rubble, originally roofed in thatch, now in slate.
  The 'Lone Shieling', built in 1942 in Canada's Cape Breton Highlands National Park, is modelled on a Scottish 'bothran' or shepherds' hut of the type that was used during the summer when it was possible to move the sheep up on to the hills to graze. It has the same design as the Lone Sheiling on the Scottish isle of Skye, romanticised in the lines "From the lone shieling of the misty island/Mountains divide us and the waste of seas – Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland, And we in dreams behold the Hebrides."
  Derek Cooper, in his 1983 book on Skye, suggests that the isolation of shielings gave opportunity for "sexual experiment[ation]", and in evidence identifies a moor named "Àirigh na suiridh", the bothy of lovemaking. The song Bothan Àirigh am Bràigh Raithneach confirms this with the verse "And we'll rear them in a shieling on the Braes of Rannoch, in the brush-wood enclosed hut of dalliance."
  The buildings on the moors were repaired each summer when the people arrived with their cattle; they made butter and cheese, and "gruthim", salted buttered curds.
caption: A colourful shieling of non-traditional materials on Lewis
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