scraa

Updated: June 14, 2025

These were very low dormer rooms, with the bed in the angle where the roof was lowest. One had to crawl into bed and lie just under the whitewashed "scraa" or turf roofing, which smelt deliciously with an odor that at times still haunts the cottage lad in statelier homes.

- McClure's Magazine December, 1895

The days were long and the light was not yet failing. Beyond the gorse, the willows, the reeds, the rushes and the sally bushes of the flat land, the sun was setting over a streak of gold on the sea. They had left behind them the smell of burning turf, of crackling sticks, of fish, and of the cowhouse, and were come into the atmosphere of flowering gorse and damp scraa soil and brine.

Sir Hall Caine - The Manxman: A Novel - 1895