Lealt (Leth-allt) Lealt

Placename Lealt (Leth-allt)
Translation half burn.
Description One side of the burn is higher than the other. When driving north from Portree you can see, from Tote, the remains of the previous agricultural systems clearly etched into the landscape of Lealt. These strips of land that take on a corrugated pattern are left over from the lazy-bed system. This misleading term is given to a laborious method of constructing mounds and ridges on worthless land to grow oats and potatoes. Known in Gaelic as 'feannagan'. The work to prepare these snake-like ridges, with only a cas-chrom was considerable. The system, however, was encouraged by land-lords as the area of land given to each tenant was small, allowing more people to stay on the land and work in the kelp industry. Of course it was only a matter of time until the system would collapse, due to the insufficiency of the land and the lack of opportunity for the tenant to provide the traditional fertiliser for his crop - seaweed - which was now entirely taken up by the land-lord's greed.
Area Lealt
OS Grid Ref 5061 6074