The Touchwood Project

Today we caravanned along the road to check out the first straw bale house being built on Orkney. Our interest is both personal, as a home for ourselves, and for Touchwood, as potential accommodation eco-cottages.

I have to say, it’s a strong contender in the quest to find the best eco-friendly, locally available and enduring building material.

Straw bale house built by Amazonails

Nick Morrison and Amazonails

Nick Morrison is the principal figure in the project — part designer, builder and engineer — alongside Amazonails, a woman-owned straw bale construction company in West Yorkshire. Amazonails teach courses in straw bale building and are a not-for-profit social enterprise whose mission is to involve people who don’t usually do construction: women, younger, older, people with disabilities. Excellent.

Nick generously spent a few hours showing four of us around his home, patiently answering questions like “Are mice a problem?” (No, there’s no room for them to tunnel in between such tightly packed bales) to “Was getting planning consent difficult?” (amazingly, it wasn’t).

Nick’s house is a fairly standard looking design, 2-storey or thereabouts, and rectangular with the gable end facing the sea for the views. (I apologise for a lack of photos, but I didn’t want to be rude on this first visit.)

He sourced the timber frame from Inverness, and explained that he and a fellow engineer had spent a lot of time testing the load-bearing capabilities of strawbale. Thanks to Force 11 winds up here, the corners of the house must be able to take the equivalent of 8 tons on them without a murmur.

Earthships meet strawbale

Nick’s next strawbale project will be his barn, where he’s thinking of using earth-filled tyres as a foundation, just as you do for earthships. So it would be a strawbale/earthship hybrid, which has all kinds of possibilities…

I’m encouraged by what we saw today, because it shows sustainable building techniques like strawbale aren’t unknown here. Indeed, by all accounts there’s been a lot of support and interest from the building trades through to the Council to local folks. All good signs.

A test site for Touchwood

Our business advisor, Euan Smith (thank you, Highlands and Islands Enterprise), thinks the idea of having a test site where we build a small community building combining sustainable construction with references to Orkney’s Stone Age architecture is a good way to go. Now we find the funding and start making it happen.

Tags: eco lodge, Environment, Orkney

Trackback URI | Comments RSS