15 Martin Wright, “The Antecedents of the Double Pen House Type,” AAAG 48 (1958).
16 Leyburn has collected impressive evidence of continuities in the vernacular architecture of the Scottish lowlands, quoting Froissart in the 15th century that “after an English raid, the country-folk made light of it, declaring they had driven their cattle into the hills, and that with six or eight stakes they would soon have new houses.”
Of the 16th century, MacKenzie wrote that throughout Galloway, cottages and cabins were “constructed of rude piles of [drift]wood, with branches interwoven between them, and covered on both sides with a tenacious mixture of clay and straw.”
A report in 1670 noted that “the houses of the commonalty are very mean, mud-wall and thatch, the best; but the poorer sort live in such miserable huts as never eye beheld. … In some parts, where turf is plentiful, they build up little cabins thereof, with arched roofs of turf, without a stick of timber in it; when the house is dry enough to burn, it serves them for fuel, and they remove to another.”
Of the 18th century it was written that the houses were “little removed from hovels with clay floors, open hearths … only the better class of farmers had two rooms, the house getting scant light by two tiny windows.”
Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish: A Social History, 18; P. Hume Brown, Early Travelers in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1891), 12-16; William Mackenzie, History of Galloway from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (2 vols., Kirkcudbright, 1841), I, 232; Harleian Miscellany, VI, 139; H. G. Graham, The Social Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1899), 182-83.