Scottish household bacon chimney

A chimney used for curing

This build is a household chimney used as part of meat preservation, rather than a separate smokehouse designed only for curing. Scottish building historian Bruce Walker reproduces an early-eighteenth-century bacon recipe that calls for a large chimney, a top arranged to let smoke out while keeping rain off, and meat hung high with space around each piece. The recipe describes the use of a chimney; it is not an architectural plan, and it does not establish that every domestic chimney was suitable for smoking.

Walker also recounts Robert Henderson, a Dumfriesshire farmer who carried flitches and hams to farmhouses and hung them in their chimneys to dry. He found the arrangement commercially troublesome when meat remained hanging while awaiting orders and became over-dry. Walker reports that Henderson had set up smoke rooms before the end of the eighteenth century, while other curers still used farm chimneys in 1811. These details show the chimney's place in a changing household and small-scale curing economy, without making every account the same process.

The hanging lum and its varied forms

The Scottish term “lum” means chimney. Historic Environment Scotland describes a hanging lumb in some eighteenth-century rural properties as a flue built against a masonry wall in timber and clay. Walker's survey records broader variation among canopy chimneys: timber frames, wattle and straw mat with a finish of cow sharn, clay or lime, and structures made entirely of timber with planked sides. His article discusses different support arrangements rather than a single standard design.

The sources therefore support a family of domestic smoke paths, not one universal bacon chimney. Walker cautions that not all canopy chimneys necessarily had provision for hanging meat or fish. This page uses “hanging chimney” as a useful related name while keeping the specific evidence—the chimney smoking of bacon—separate from assumptions about the structure of any one surviving example. No measured footprint, height, capacity or complete build sequence is supplied.

Scottish examples, not one recipe

The National Trust for Scotland says the hanging lum in Hugh Miller's early-eighteenth-century birthplace cottage at Cromarty was once used to smoke and preserve fish. That is direct evidence for another food use in a particular household, not proof that this cottage followed the bacon recipe. A licensed photograph by Nigel Corby shows a close view of the hanging lum at Auchtavan in Aberdeenshire: timber boards form the visible canopy beside the masonry. The photograph documents that chimney's form, but not bacon smoking there.

Taken together, the sources place the documented practice in Scotland and show how an ordinary hearth could connect cooking, heating and smoke-based preservation. The examples come from distinct houses and evidence types; no single cross-section should be read as the universal form.

Limits and care

The historical recipe is evidence of past practice, not a present-day guide. It supplies no validated modern food-safety controls and does not justify smoking food in an ordinary household flue. Historic Environment Scotland advises that an in-use original fireplace flue be swept at least once a year to help reduce chimney-fire risk. The sources give no universal dimensions, fuel specification or construction instructions for recreating this build. No complete construction tool inventory is identified in the historical building survey.