The Houses · H-03

Scottish Borders · Established 1981 · Limited public program

Fell House stands at the end of a farm track with fourteen acres of hill pasture behind it and a bindery in what used to be the dairy.

Region

Europe

Residential places

18

Residence

Eighteen places, in periods of five to twelve days.

Recurring form

The house keeps the Open Table, at longer intervals than most.

Fabric

The ground floor and bindery are step-free. The bedrooms are upstairs. The track is impassable to low cars after rain.

This is a register entry. No address, telephone line, or arrangement to visit is published here, and none can be taken up through this website.

The house

The house was established in 1981 in a farmhouse that had stood empty for six years. Its founding predates the archival consolidation of 1982 to 1986, and most of its surviving public records were reconciled afterwards; the house's own account of its first five years therefore rests largely on the household books, which were kept by hand and were not part of the consolidation.

The bindery was set up in 1994 by a conservator who had retired to the village and disliked retirement. It repaired books for regional library services and charged nothing, on the argument that a charge would require an invoice and an invoice would require an office.

Land restoration began as fence repair and grew, over twenty years, into a serious programme of scrub clearance and native planting run with a local trust.

The work

• Land restoration: hedge laying, scrub clearance, and a planting programme now in its nineteenth season.
• Book repair for library services, at no charge, at a rate entered each year in the work report.
• Rural isolation: a driving rota and a telephone round, kept by residents for households a long way from a bus.

Observance kept here

The shared forms, here

The Repair Table

Books and bindings, worked on the long table in the reading room during the winter reading period.

The Boundary Walk

The established walk: the property boundary in full, by whoever is in the house, in whatever weather is offered. The hill road and the culvert are inspected with it.

The house year

Kept in use

• The kitchen bell

  Timekeeping. It is rung for the meal, and at most houses to mark the end of the twelve minutes.

• The white cups

  Tea, at the table and at the bench. They recur in house photographs from the late seventies onward, which is an accident of ordering and not a design.

The house, day to day

Fell House cannot make bread. It has tried the Shore House recipe, a different flour, a proofing box built for the purpose in 2016, and a course. The consensus is that the kitchen is too cold and the water too soft; the actual reason is thought by most of the house to be that the oven runs forty degrees under its dial and nobody will pay to replace it.

A stone farmhouse and steading of the 1840s, 300 m up, with 60 cm rubble walls that hold cold like a cellar. Slate roof relaid in 2015. Heating is a wood boiler and the house is honest with visitors that the far end of the steading does not really get warm.

Rooms

The book room, The top garden, The track, and the usual others (11 in all).

In the kitchen

The fell loaf. Dense, pale, and improved by butter. Printed in RCP/1988/09 with a footnote, added 1994, reading: 'Fell House is content with this.'

Outstanding

The track — Regraded 2011 and 2020. Two culverts cleared every autumn by hand. The oven — Runs cold. Quoted for twice; deferred twice. Now a standing item at the house meeting under 'bread'. Book room humidity — Held between 45 and 55 per cent by a dehumidifier that must be emptied daily. It is on the rota.

Said here

“That's a soft-water problem.” — We know the real reason and are not going to say it.

Local custom

The bread. Fell House cannot make bread, has a written and probably wrong explanation for why, and offers it to every visitor first.

The life of a house

Local participation

• The boundary walk, weekly, in pairs.
• Opening the reading room on Saturday mornings.

Separation

Notice may be given to any steward or convener, including at a circle. It reaches the house book the same week.

Succession

When the reading-room key changes hands the outgoing holder sits one Saturday with the incoming one. This is the whole of the handover. The work is reassigned; the person is not replaced.

A life in the practice
The term a steward holds, and its limits

The steward

Records

• Reconciliation notices

Other houses

• Karst House — Upper Carniola
• Briar House — Albemarle County, Virginia

Entry H-03 · reviewed 9 January 2026