Yesterday I went on the UAE Architectural Heritage Society field trip to see some mountain houses at Wadi Muweilah in Ras al Khaimah. RAK is one of the emirates that forms the UAE. We started off by visiting a pre-historic tomb in Wadi Suq, then drove into the mountains to the deserted village at Wadi Muweilah. Most of the houses in the village date back to the 17th-18th centuries though some were older. The houses were built when people wanted to grow wheat and barley to sell to the expanding city of Julfar on the plains below. One of the fields is still being used to grow wheat, the photo of the scarecrow wearing a dishdash was taken there. Though the Hajar Mountains are barren and rocky, the people constructed terraced fields for crops. They enclosed areas of ground with rock walls and then filled the enclosed area with a foundation of rock and then up to half a metre of silt. The silt had to be carried in from either the plains or anywhere in the wadi where it could be found. The number of hours and the sheer hard manual labour it would have taken to build just one field is staggering. The people may have had a few donkeys but otherwise all the work would have been done by hand in the crushing heat. The people also built irrigation channels and we saw cisterns which have been dug into the rock to store whatever water was available. The trip was led by the resident archaeologiest from the RAK Dept of Antiquities who also showed us around RAK Fort which is being extensively restored. The building reminded me of Taqa Castle in Salalah. The photos are here
We then did a quick visit to the Blue Souq in Sharjah. It's an attractive building in a Persian style with blue tiles on the outside and domes on the roof. Inside, the souq is a tourist trap place, usual pashminas, gold, electronics and sales
That's the funniest scarecrow I've ever seen. They didn't even try!!!! It's basically a shirt on a stick.
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