- Barvas Latitude 58.3583° N Longitude -6.5130° W
- Barvas Postcode HS2
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Barvas Ross & Cromarty some 12 miles north west from Stornoway at the junction of the A857 with the A858. which goes south west to Shawbost and Carloway while the former continues north east to Port of Ness. Near the Burr of Lewis is a township and parish. This district is noted particularly in Lewis as the place where, during the Napoleonic wars, the minister encouraged his parishioners to reclaim barren moorland for pasture by enriching the soil with powdered sea shells and seaweed and re-seeding it for grass.
The scheme had some success but was abandoned after Waterloo.
After the Second World War, however, Lewismen remembered the Barvas experiment and with the aid of modern chemicals, based on ground sea shells. returned to re-seeding appropriately at Barvas. The idea spread and was most successfully adopted at Garynahine and Brue with the result that in less than twenty years more than 10,000 acres of mostly useless moorland had been valuably reclaimed.
The re-seeding scheme, moreover, was a remarkable example of communal effort under the crofting system, each Grazing Committee For a re-seeding area received atoll from each croft towards the cost of scientific materials and technology.
At Ballanthrushal somne 3 miles north from Barvas is the ‘Thrushel Stone‘ a 20 ft high monolith, and nearby are the ‘Steinacleit’ cairn and stone circle of Neolithic date (c. 2000 B.C.), in the care of the Department of the Environment.
