Part 3 Questions 11–20 Look at the sentences below about a museum. Read the text on the next page to decide if each sentence is correct or incorrect. If it is correct, mark A on your answer sheet. If it is not correct, mark B on your answer sheet. 11 The village of Arnol is near the sea. 12 A blackhouse had only one room upstairs. 13 The roof of a blackhouse was made of large rocks. 14 Blackhouses were shared by people and animals. 15 The buildings were called blackhouses because they had no windows. 16 The people gradually started living in a different type of house. 17 Blackhouses look like some ancient houses on Orkney. 18 Some blackhouses in Arnol were lived in until the 1970s. 19 The museum is in a real blackhouse. 20 There is a model blackhouse in the museum. An unusual Scottish museum he small village of Arnol lies on the coastal side of the main road as it makes its way down the north-west coast of Lewis in the Western Isles. At the far end of the village is the Blackhouse Museum, an unmissable visit for anyone wanting to understand the way of life once common in this part of Scotland. A blackhouse was a long narrow single-storey building, often sharing a wall with neighbours. The walls were made from stones and earth. The roof was based on a wooden frame, covered with plant material kept in place by an old fishing net or by ropes attached to large rocks whose weight held everything down. The roof traditionally had no chimney, the smoke from the peat fire in the central hearth simply finding its own way out as it could. The floor of the living area of the blackhouse was usually stone. The animals would be at one end of the house, and in that area there was earth flooring. Part of the blackhouse was also used to store corn and other products. Perhaps you think that the name “blackhouse” had something to do with the almost windowless darkness in which people lived, or the smoke. In fact it dates from the introduction of more modern housing at the end of the 1800s. People called these new cottages “white houses”, and the more traditional ones they started to replace were therefore soon called blackhouses. While the design of the blackhouses in Lewis may seem similar to the 5,000-year-old homes on Orkney, another Scottish island, most are not as old as people think. The blackhouse used as the museum was built as recently as 1875. In 1960 there were still nine blackhouses in use in Arnol; the blackhouses further along the coast, at Gearrannan, were last used in 1974. The building housing the museum still looks very similar to the blackhouses when they were lived in, although it does not offer visitors the experience of sharing a roof with the animals. The Blackhouse Museum is run by Historic Scotland. Nearby, there is an equally interesting “white house”, furnished as it was in the 1950s. Next to the white house are the walls of another series of blackhouses and an excellent Visitor Centre in another cottage. This provides background information about the area and has a very helpful model of the blackhouse. The Blackhouse Museum and the Visitor Centre are open all year round but closed on Sundays.