We must preserve our 4 beautiful A listed lighthouse cottages on our site at Hynish. They offer unique heritage affordable homes for local people and are an iconic part of the Shore Station.
Estimated Price
300
1 We need to repoint the external stonework and do work on the chimneys and roof of the 4 lighthouse cottages. No maintenance work has been done for many years and there has been major issues with damp and water damage in these 4 properties. There is a critical housing shortage on Tiree and in particular affordable housing. We have now 2 of the cottages on long term lease to locals and would like to make the other 2 habitable for long term lease. We would also like to use this opportunity to encourage young people on Tiree to consider construction and in particular stonemasonry as a possible career. The team we would use, have experience of running training programmes for school pupils to come and work on the site and learn some of the basic skills of maintainting heritage buildings. This added value to the project would bring a very useful experience to our local children who are disadvantaged at present from these type of careers activities. We would also offer to design a long term training programme for a local person so that we could have local skills to maintain the A listed heritage buildings on our site.
2 We funded work late last year on two of the chimneys by a stonemason specialising in these kind of listed buildings. He has advised that all the external walls, chimneys and roof require work done to preserve these wonderful buildings. The work he did was enough to sort the immediate issues of dampness coming from the chimneys. There is still some damp coming through the walls/windows. Also the other chimneys that we did not repair mean that two of the cottages are not fit for long term lease at the moment. Funding has been recieved by Argyll and Bute Council to allow us to the internal upgrading but we require major funding for all the external works so that we an offer 4 good quality upgraded affordable homes for locals. One of the issues has been lack of maintenance of all the A listed buildings on our site. There has been some repair work done but it has exaccerbated the problems due to lack of knowledge. These buildilng require specialist skills. If we can train up someone locally to do the basic ongoing maintenance through this project this would be of huge long term benefit to the Hynish Trust.
3 When we advertised the last cottage for lease we got 5 applicants. They were all local people wanting to come to live at Hynish. Our vision is to create a clachan type village at the Skerrryvore Shore Station in Hynish for people to live, play, learn and enjoy. The demand is there amongst the community for long term affordable housing and this is a relatively quick win to maintain the two leases we have and create another two. But more importantly to ensure the buildings are presrved for the long term future. So the refurbishment of the externals of these buildings would be transformational for the Hynish Trust. It would ensure that these buildings will be fit for purpose for the future. It also addresses the critical housing situation. Providing an opportunity for local children to experience somehting different as a possible career opportunity would be welcomed by the school and the community. If we can also get a local person trained up to be able to maintain all our buildings externally this would be a long term benefit to the community and create much needed local employment.
4 The project would start in March 26 and run to September 26.
