Croft House, Skye Museum of Island Life, Kilmuir, Skye

Croft House, Skye Museum of Island Life is a group of three traditional Skye-type thatched buildings dating from the late 18th and 19th centuries, now refurbished for use as a museum. The buildings—the Croft House, Byre, and Cottar's or Ceilidh House—are detached and arranged in a roughly linear group running south to northwest at the west of the museum site, which lies northeast of the Isle of Skye just south of the A855.

The Croft House and Ceilidh House may have origins in the late 18th century but appear as they were in the mid-19th century. The Byre, to the immediate north of the Croft House, dates from the late 19th century. All three are single-storey structures built of rubble stone with thick, slightly battered walls and rounded corners. The piended roofs are thatched in straw and secured with wire netting and stone weights hanging at the eaves. The largest structure is the three-bay croft house, which has a central entrance opening to the northeast elevation, flanking windows, and end chimneystacks with clay cans. The Byre and Ceilidh House are slightly lower in height, each with a single entrance and no chimneystacks. The Ceilidh House is built into the hillside with its southeast elevation entirely concealed.

Internally, the croft house has whitewashed walls, hessian sacking tacked to the timber roof structure, stone floors, and 19th century fixtures, fittings and artefacts on display. It comprises an entrance way, a large bedroom to the south, a kitchen to the north, and a smaller bedroom behind the entrance accessed via the kitchen. Rooms are divided by timber panelling. The other buildings have exposed roofs with replacement rough timbers, earthen or stone rubble floors, replacement timber-lined walls, and museum artefacts on display.

The original croft house was occupied until 1958 and first opened to the public in 1965. By 1971, when listed, the site was operating as Osmigarry Croft Museum. The three early buildings continue to show regional traditional building methods and materials and retain a significant proportion of their historic fabric, vernacular form and character. Notable features include the thick battered rubble walls with rounded corners and the thatched roofs secured with stone weights and netting. These vernacular buildings, once prolific across the Highlands and Islands, are now extremely rare. There are around 200 thatched buildings remaining in Scotland, of which only around 12 survive on the Isle of Skye. The site also includes five other buildings dating from the 20th and 21st centuries—the Old Smithy, the Shop, the Barn, the Weaver's House, and a visitor centre and retail unit added around 2015—which are excluded from the listing as they are not part of the early grouping.