Thursday 29 December 2011
Monday 26 December 2011
Sunday 25 December 2011
No 110. PEAT REEK.
No 110. PEAT REEK..
Cutting peats was not one of our tasks at Whitehall, though our father many a time got a cart load of peats from one or other of his old friends in Rousam Head, usually getting in return a cart-load of straw. It must have brought back memories to him of his early days in the Bu of Rousam, 1893 to 1913.
Peats went on the sitting room fire on special occasions, or more often on the dining room fire where our Granny held sway, it being her “State Room”. An occasional blow down of the chimney in a storm emphasised the peat reek aroma, once smelt, never forgotten. Our main fire fodder was coal from Davie Chalmers in the Village where coal was easily available. From Whitehall to Rousam Head was about six miles and in the days of horses a long way to go. There were no other peat grounds on Stronsay.
We went to Rousam with our father on occasion and every house there was peat fuelled. The crofters on Rousam were on the doorstep of the peat moss, indeed they were part of it living on the edge of the Hill ground. Good black peats they were too. The peat reek permeated all their houses, even their Sunday best. The fire never went out, a big damp boorag being laid on the fire at night and next morning just needing a wee blow with the hand bellows to spring to life. There are tales of fires that lasted 100 years without ever being cold.
William Tait’s Diaries for 1897 when he was working at the Bu’ of Rousam gave a good insight at how much time was expended on peat cutting. On June 16th 1897 the Bowmen were at the Hill cutting peats. These were the farm workers having a day to themselves to cut their own peats. With a long six day working week on the farm and no work done on Sundays the men would have needed time off to cut their own. Getting a peat bank to cut in their own time was part of their meagre wages, and set down as such.
June 18th and 19th that year was again cutting peats, which would have been for the farm house of the Bu’. Peat cutting usually came in the brief period between sowing the neeps and them being ready for singling. There may have been other days at the Hill but if so then not entered in the Diary of 1897.
Peat cutting was all hands to the Hill for the whole day. Everyone available would go, women as well, and it could be quite entertaining even if it was hard work. It was very labour intensive.
Evenings might have been useful but after a long day at work on the farm there would be little enough time left to go to the Hill, though the Island evenings were long. No doubt it must have been done. And the crofters were right there.
My own personal experience of peat cutting was years later at Greenland Mains where we cut peats on the farm peat bank on the Greenland Moss. Poor peats they were, “funcless” was the Caithness word, full of old birch wood and a sulphurous smell when burnt, with much red ash to clean out of the fire. We later cut a bank on Burifa Hill on Dunnet Head, hard black peat like coal, a treasure.
Peat cutting itself was first cut or clean the drain from last year’s working from the previous year to let any water away. Then turr (turf) the breadth to be cut with the flaughter spade, the heathery or grassy turfs being thrown and regularly spaced out flat on the lowside of the bank previously cut. These would in time grow together and leave the surface as before, though at a lower level. Then according to which kind of peats one was cutting, take the appropriate tool. At Greenland Moss where we cut peats after coming to Caithness we used the spade peat, simple enough and leaving a flat peat which was then spread out flat on either side of the peat bank to do an initial drying. According to weather, which could be good or bad, the peats were turned after a few days to dry the other side. They were then stacked in small four peat cones for a further final dry. There were various tools used, tusker peats, sheil peats and the spade peat. The spade peat on Greenland Moss was flat and the peat of a consistancy that did not stand too much handling.
On June 28th 1897 there were 4 carts from the Bu’ at the hill for peats. Again on July 5th 4 carts at the hill for peats. George Logie, one of the Bowmen, had 7 loads which would have been for himself. Every day bar Sundays from Aug 2nd to 13th they were at the hill for peats, August 13th being the last entry for peat carting to the farm. Between these dates there were some entries for peats, either cutting or carting. There were occasional later entries during the autumn for carting peats to others, probably their own banks.
Not all the peats were taken home, there were entries in the Spring some years of going to the hill for peats. Not unknown, these peats would have been stacked in the hill to over winter, a waterproof build. With the approach of harvest peats not yet carted would have had to be quickly stacked at the peat banks to over winter.
So it went on, carting peats for other people every now and then throughout the year. Thomas Miller, a Bowman for our grandfather at the Bu’, was feed (hired) for 12 months at £7.5/- for six months, and he had to cut his peats for himself!!
Cutting peats was not one of our tasks at Whitehall, though our father many a time got a cart load of peats from one or other of his old friends in Rousam Head, usually getting in return a cart-load of straw. It must have brought back memories to him of his early days in the Bu of Rousam, 1893 to 1913.
Peats went on the sitting room fire on special occasions, or more often on the dining room fire where our Granny held sway, it being her “State Room”. An occasional blow down of the chimney in a storm emphasised the peat reek aroma, once smelt, never forgotten. Our main fire fodder was coal from Davie Chalmers in the Village where coal was easily available. From Whitehall to Rousam Head was about six miles and in the days of horses a long way to go. There were no other peat grounds on Stronsay.
We went to Rousam with our father on occasion and every house there was peat fuelled. The crofters on Rousam were on the doorstep of the peat moss, indeed they were part of it living on the edge of the Hill ground. Good black peats they were too. The peat reek permeated all their houses, even their Sunday best. The fire never went out, a big damp boorag being laid on the fire at night and next morning just needing a wee blow with the hand bellows to spring to life. There are tales of fires that lasted 100 years without ever being cold.
William Tait’s Diaries for 1897 when he was working at the Bu’ of Rousam gave a good insight at how much time was expended on peat cutting. On June 16th 1897 the Bowmen were at the Hill cutting peats. These were the farm workers having a day to themselves to cut their own peats. With a long six day working week on the farm and no work done on Sundays the men would have needed time off to cut their own. Getting a peat bank to cut in their own time was part of their meagre wages, and set down as such.
June 18th and 19th that year was again cutting peats, which would have been for the farm house of the Bu’. Peat cutting usually came in the brief period between sowing the neeps and them being ready for singling. There may have been other days at the Hill but if so then not entered in the Diary of 1897.
Peat cutting was all hands to the Hill for the whole day. Everyone available would go, women as well, and it could be quite entertaining even if it was hard work. It was very labour intensive.
Evenings might have been useful but after a long day at work on the farm there would be little enough time left to go to the Hill, though the Island evenings were long. No doubt it must have been done. And the crofters were right there.
My own personal experience of peat cutting was years later at Greenland Mains where we cut peats on the farm peat bank on the Greenland Moss. Poor peats they were, “funcless” was the Caithness word, full of old birch wood and a sulphurous smell when burnt, with much red ash to clean out of the fire. We later cut a bank on Burifa Hill on Dunnet Head, hard black peat like coal, a treasure.
Peat cutting itself was first cut or clean the drain from last year’s working from the previous year to let any water away. Then turr (turf) the breadth to be cut with the flaughter spade, the heathery or grassy turfs being thrown and regularly spaced out flat on the lowside of the bank previously cut. These would in time grow together and leave the surface as before, though at a lower level. Then according to which kind of peats one was cutting, take the appropriate tool. At Greenland Moss where we cut peats after coming to Caithness we used the spade peat, simple enough and leaving a flat peat which was then spread out flat on either side of the peat bank to do an initial drying. According to weather, which could be good or bad, the peats were turned after a few days to dry the other side. They were then stacked in small four peat cones for a further final dry. There were various tools used, tusker peats, sheil peats and the spade peat. The spade peat on Greenland Moss was flat and the peat of a consistancy that did not stand too much handling.
On June 28th 1897 there were 4 carts from the Bu’ at the hill for peats. Again on July 5th 4 carts at the hill for peats. George Logie, one of the Bowmen, had 7 loads which would have been for himself. Every day bar Sundays from Aug 2nd to 13th they were at the hill for peats, August 13th being the last entry for peat carting to the farm. Between these dates there were some entries for peats, either cutting or carting. There were occasional later entries during the autumn for carting peats to others, probably their own banks.
Not all the peats were taken home, there were entries in the Spring some years of going to the hill for peats. Not unknown, these peats would have been stacked in the hill to over winter, a waterproof build. With the approach of harvest peats not yet carted would have had to be quickly stacked at the peat banks to over winter.
So it went on, carting peats for other people every now and then throughout the year. Thomas Miller, a Bowman for our grandfather at the Bu’, was feed (hired) for 12 months at £7.5/- for six months, and he had to cut his peats for himself!!
Friday 2 December 2011
No 109. PRIVATE ENTERPRISE pb 02.12.2011
No 109. PRIVATE ENTERPRISE IN FARMING.
Today we have such plethora of food labelling - “origin of product”, “sell by “ dates , “best by” dates , “cook by” dates, store in fridge, store in freezer, thermal cold bags from shop to house, how to cook, how not to cook, heat to 82 C. degrees. How our mothers managed without a thermometer I do not know. It is quite possible none of us should now be alive.
I remember a certain Caithness farmer standing before the Sheriff in Wick trying to explain how his cows’ milk was a bit thin with too low a fat content and too low in “solids not fat”. He reckoned that his old mother must have inadvertently knocked the water tap in passing on her way to the dairy with the bucket of milk!!! “Good one”, said the Sheriff, “Guilty as charged. £10.”
That farmer was before his time, now we have thin milk, 1% milk, 2% milk, full cream milk, blue top milk, red top milk, green top milk, double cream, thin cream, whipping cream. Do the cows know, and do they really care!!
Another farmer, or it might have been the same one, was before the Sheriff charged under Potato Marketing Board Rules, trying to explain that the undersized potatoes he had been selling must have been that the van driver picked up the wrong bag of tatties which he had set aside for the pigs!! Today he would have got the Queen’s Award for Industry as being before his time in tapping the market for baby potatoes!!
Same verdict, £10.
On a later appearance he tried to explain that the blue stained potatoes that he was selling cheap were a variety called Black Hearties, or Forty-fold, blue inside when cooked and very tasty. Again he was in advance of his time. The possibility that they could be confused for surplus tatties blue stained by the Potato Marketing Board and disposed of by them very cheaply to be used for for stock feed only, had never occurred to him. Or so he said. Tasted the same anyway if eaten in a poor light!! Guilty. £10.
The potato peelings that he threw to his pigs were missing by many years the much more rewarding and modern market for potato skins, a money-spinning by-product of the oven-ready potato chip industry!!!
There was a great pig industry built on feeding swill mostly from Hotels and Restaurants. Our father knew a man from Orkney called Brass who had been feeding pigs on swill in a big way on a small farm just outside Edinburgh. When asked by father if he was still in that trade he said no, not any longer. When father asked him why he said that when he was dirt poor he could stand the smell, but once he had made enough money he could stand the smell no longer, bought more land, and was now more of a gentleman farmer. Did well at that too!! Swill feeding is now banned!!
Oliver Drever, who had emigrated in 1908 from Stronsay to Carnegie, Brandon, Manitoba, Canada, wrote 4/10/1908 in a letter to his brother-in-law Wm Tait in the Bay Farm, Stronsay:-
“In my opinion Willie Croy ( Stronsay ) is about the most particular farmer I see anyway near here. He does make the best certainly of everything. He has a big garden & he told me he had 150 dollars for onions alone & he has a great lot of strawberrys & all kind of berries which they do up in jars & sell in Brandon. He has a right managing wife & makes a big lot of butter & eggs. Bob Scott (probably Stronsay too ) farms well & people say he has improved his farm a lot since he went on it.
He also wrote “One man here had seed from Scotland last Spring & sowed it on breaking (ploughing land) & thrashed 115 bushel to the acre, that's about the best I've heard of. Oats in general goes anywhere from 40 to 80.(bushels)”
( 115 bushels would be just short of three ton an acre, a very good yield in 1908 anywhere.)
Nearer home during the 1939 War when the Royal Navy was hugely in Scapa Flow there
was a dearth of vegetables in the Far North. Cabbages were making good money. Our
father grew a fair bit at Whitehall and shipped them in to Kirkwall. Cabbages finished, but
no matter.
He cut the green shaws off the Swedish turnips and sent them in to Kirkwall to Charlie
Tait of J.and W.Tait who had the contract to supply the Navy. Seemed all right till many
years later I was sitting in the waiting room of then Motorway Tyres in Thurso while getting
new tyres fitted. An elderly English gentleman, retired by then and now living in Port Skerra,
was there too.
We talked, and he referred to my writing in “Parish Life on the Pentland Firth”
about the Swedish turnip leaves. I was quite proud of our father’s enterprise until my new
friend said:- “I was in the Bloody Navy in Scapa Flow during the War. Never did get used
to turnip shaws. Always wondered where they came from !!! “
Private Enterprise was a great thing.
Today we have such plethora of food labelling - “origin of product”, “sell by “ dates , “best by” dates , “cook by” dates, store in fridge, store in freezer, thermal cold bags from shop to house, how to cook, how not to cook, heat to 82 C. degrees. How our mothers managed without a thermometer I do not know. It is quite possible none of us should now be alive.
I remember a certain Caithness farmer standing before the Sheriff in Wick trying to explain how his cows’ milk was a bit thin with too low a fat content and too low in “solids not fat”. He reckoned that his old mother must have inadvertently knocked the water tap in passing on her way to the dairy with the bucket of milk!!! “Good one”, said the Sheriff, “Guilty as charged. £10.”
That farmer was before his time, now we have thin milk, 1% milk, 2% milk, full cream milk, blue top milk, red top milk, green top milk, double cream, thin cream, whipping cream. Do the cows know, and do they really care!!
Another farmer, or it might have been the same one, was before the Sheriff charged under Potato Marketing Board Rules, trying to explain that the undersized potatoes he had been selling must have been that the van driver picked up the wrong bag of tatties which he had set aside for the pigs!! Today he would have got the Queen’s Award for Industry as being before his time in tapping the market for baby potatoes!!
Same verdict, £10.
On a later appearance he tried to explain that the blue stained potatoes that he was selling cheap were a variety called Black Hearties, or Forty-fold, blue inside when cooked and very tasty. Again he was in advance of his time. The possibility that they could be confused for surplus tatties blue stained by the Potato Marketing Board and disposed of by them very cheaply to be used for for stock feed only, had never occurred to him. Or so he said. Tasted the same anyway if eaten in a poor light!! Guilty. £10.
The potato peelings that he threw to his pigs were missing by many years the much more rewarding and modern market for potato skins, a money-spinning by-product of the oven-ready potato chip industry!!!
There was a great pig industry built on feeding swill mostly from Hotels and Restaurants. Our father knew a man from Orkney called Brass who had been feeding pigs on swill in a big way on a small farm just outside Edinburgh. When asked by father if he was still in that trade he said no, not any longer. When father asked him why he said that when he was dirt poor he could stand the smell, but once he had made enough money he could stand the smell no longer, bought more land, and was now more of a gentleman farmer. Did well at that too!! Swill feeding is now banned!!
Oliver Drever, who had emigrated in 1908 from Stronsay to Carnegie, Brandon, Manitoba, Canada, wrote 4/10/1908 in a letter to his brother-in-law Wm Tait in the Bay Farm, Stronsay:-
“In my opinion Willie Croy ( Stronsay ) is about the most particular farmer I see anyway near here. He does make the best certainly of everything. He has a big garden & he told me he had 150 dollars for onions alone & he has a great lot of strawberrys & all kind of berries which they do up in jars & sell in Brandon. He has a right managing wife & makes a big lot of butter & eggs. Bob Scott (probably Stronsay too ) farms well & people say he has improved his farm a lot since he went on it.
He also wrote “One man here had seed from Scotland last Spring & sowed it on breaking (ploughing land) & thrashed 115 bushel to the acre, that's about the best I've heard of. Oats in general goes anywhere from 40 to 80.(bushels)”
( 115 bushels would be just short of three ton an acre, a very good yield in 1908 anywhere.)
Nearer home during the 1939 War when the Royal Navy was hugely in Scapa Flow there
was a dearth of vegetables in the Far North. Cabbages were making good money. Our
father grew a fair bit at Whitehall and shipped them in to Kirkwall. Cabbages finished, but
no matter.
He cut the green shaws off the Swedish turnips and sent them in to Kirkwall to Charlie
Tait of J.and W.Tait who had the contract to supply the Navy. Seemed all right till many
years later I was sitting in the waiting room of then Motorway Tyres in Thurso while getting
new tyres fitted. An elderly English gentleman, retired by then and now living in Port Skerra,
was there too.
We talked, and he referred to my writing in “Parish Life on the Pentland Firth”
about the Swedish turnip leaves. I was quite proud of our father’s enterprise until my new
friend said:- “I was in the Bloody Navy in Scapa Flow during the War. Never did get used
to turnip shaws. Always wondered where they came from !!! “
Private Enterprise was a great thing.
Friday 18 November 2011
No 107. Bindertwine.
No 107. Saving Twine.
Nothing wasted on a farm in my early days. Nor on a croft either. Binder twine was initially used for the binder for cutting the grain crops and tying the sheaves of oats and bere, or barley. The binder with it’s binder twine was an advance in the twisted band of new-cut straw formerly made for tying the sheaves of grain after cutting by a scythe, or for harvesting with the reaper, either side delivery or back delivery.
There were many makes of twine, not all had a good reputation. It was talked about by many a farmer as to his results with Red Star, or Bluebell, or any of the other makes whose names have now slipped past me. Red Star was our long-time trouble -free favourite. Sometimes one got a bad bit in a ball, but not often.
It was made with sisal from North Africa. Only after I was farming on my own did plastic binder twine come in, sometimes with disasterous results in the early days until we got the knotters on the binder adjusted to the new feel. Thinner cord than sisal, and slippier, it needed a lot of TLC at the beginning.
Binder twine was used for almost everything on the farm. It was used for tying around your trousers below the knee to keep them tidy, it was used as a belt to keep your trousers from falling down, or round a jacket to keep it neat if you were working where a loose jacket could or might get caught, for a running repair on a torn coat, almost anything.
In a stormy harvest day doing stook drill, which was setting up sheaves knocked down by a gale, and often on a wet stormy day too, oilskins were kept tight around the waist to keep the wind out and the wearer a bit warmer. Oilskins did not have belts. It could be used to replace a broken boot lace.
Almost all of the farm men had a bit in their pocket, and until lately I was not surprised to put my hand in my own pocket to find a bit there.!! Useful, you never knew when it might come in handy!!
Gates of fields were often tied with a bit, very much not too safe but handy at the time. Not too long ago we met some cattle coming up a farm road, the temporary twine gate fastening made by that farmer till he got a proper fastening from the Town had not stood the test of a bunch of sturdy bullocks. No harm, we got them safely back into his field before he came home, and met him coming down the farm road with a brand new gate fastening!! Well worth the dram in his house as recompense!!.
Fences were often temporarily repaired with a length, fix it later, sometimes much later. I have seen a broken telephone line held together with a short length until the linesman appeared. Worked well with a bit of fencing wire to bridge the metallic gap.
Threshing was the great time for twine gathering. Some farmers and many crofters took the twine off the sheaf before putting it through the drum, saving it. Cut it beside the knot with a knife to have use of the full length. When a handful had been gathered it was looped through another length of twine and hooked onto a handy nail in the rafters. Some rafters were festooned with multitudinous bundles. Sometimes at threshing there was a “louser” at the sheaf board who cut the twine for the foreman to feed the mill, often a woman of the farm, and who kept the cut twines out of the straw.
Our foreman had a special glove knife which was excellent for cutting his own sheaves at the drum, most useful in preventing the loss of a favourite knife down the maw of the threshing drum. Did happen.
Short hand-woven twine ropes were made with cut twine, came in handy, a bit hairy but strong. Young calves were often tied in the byre to the wall behind their mothers by a length of home-made bindertwine rope, saved proper rope. Doors were fastened with a length. A running repair could be made to a binder canvas at harvest holding a broken strap together to get on with the cutting before it rained. Fix it later.
More serious were the occasions when a calf would get a length of twine and chew it endlessly. Dangerous if swallowed, I cannot remember ever losing a calf with a ball of bindertwine in its stomach but it did happen. Many a time I have taken a ball of well-chewed bindertwine out of a calve’s mouth. Unless saved off the sheaf it was found throughout the straw in the barn as we did not as a rule save the twine unless needed for “tialls” for tying bags of grain in the loft. Just the right length too.
Then the decorative inventiveness of many farm men in making fancy arrangements entirely of lengths of cut bindertwine saved from the mill - a twine doll, tablemats, a doily, a string basket, indeed there was no end to what could be devised. A bit of competiveness came in at times, and there was always one of the men who was an artist and could put all the others to friendly shame!!!
Nothing wasted on a farm in my early days. Nor on a croft either. Binder twine was initially used for the binder for cutting the grain crops and tying the sheaves of oats and bere, or barley. The binder with it’s binder twine was an advance in the twisted band of new-cut straw formerly made for tying the sheaves of grain after cutting by a scythe, or for harvesting with the reaper, either side delivery or back delivery.
There were many makes of twine, not all had a good reputation. It was talked about by many a farmer as to his results with Red Star, or Bluebell, or any of the other makes whose names have now slipped past me. Red Star was our long-time trouble -free favourite. Sometimes one got a bad bit in a ball, but not often.
It was made with sisal from North Africa. Only after I was farming on my own did plastic binder twine come in, sometimes with disasterous results in the early days until we got the knotters on the binder adjusted to the new feel. Thinner cord than sisal, and slippier, it needed a lot of TLC at the beginning.
Binder twine was used for almost everything on the farm. It was used for tying around your trousers below the knee to keep them tidy, it was used as a belt to keep your trousers from falling down, or round a jacket to keep it neat if you were working where a loose jacket could or might get caught, for a running repair on a torn coat, almost anything.
In a stormy harvest day doing stook drill, which was setting up sheaves knocked down by a gale, and often on a wet stormy day too, oilskins were kept tight around the waist to keep the wind out and the wearer a bit warmer. Oilskins did not have belts. It could be used to replace a broken boot lace.
Almost all of the farm men had a bit in their pocket, and until lately I was not surprised to put my hand in my own pocket to find a bit there.!! Useful, you never knew when it might come in handy!!
Gates of fields were often tied with a bit, very much not too safe but handy at the time. Not too long ago we met some cattle coming up a farm road, the temporary twine gate fastening made by that farmer till he got a proper fastening from the Town had not stood the test of a bunch of sturdy bullocks. No harm, we got them safely back into his field before he came home, and met him coming down the farm road with a brand new gate fastening!! Well worth the dram in his house as recompense!!.
Fences were often temporarily repaired with a length, fix it later, sometimes much later. I have seen a broken telephone line held together with a short length until the linesman appeared. Worked well with a bit of fencing wire to bridge the metallic gap.
Threshing was the great time for twine gathering. Some farmers and many crofters took the twine off the sheaf before putting it through the drum, saving it. Cut it beside the knot with a knife to have use of the full length. When a handful had been gathered it was looped through another length of twine and hooked onto a handy nail in the rafters. Some rafters were festooned with multitudinous bundles. Sometimes at threshing there was a “louser” at the sheaf board who cut the twine for the foreman to feed the mill, often a woman of the farm, and who kept the cut twines out of the straw.
Our foreman had a special glove knife which was excellent for cutting his own sheaves at the drum, most useful in preventing the loss of a favourite knife down the maw of the threshing drum. Did happen.
Short hand-woven twine ropes were made with cut twine, came in handy, a bit hairy but strong. Young calves were often tied in the byre to the wall behind their mothers by a length of home-made bindertwine rope, saved proper rope. Doors were fastened with a length. A running repair could be made to a binder canvas at harvest holding a broken strap together to get on with the cutting before it rained. Fix it later.
More serious were the occasions when a calf would get a length of twine and chew it endlessly. Dangerous if swallowed, I cannot remember ever losing a calf with a ball of bindertwine in its stomach but it did happen. Many a time I have taken a ball of well-chewed bindertwine out of a calve’s mouth. Unless saved off the sheaf it was found throughout the straw in the barn as we did not as a rule save the twine unless needed for “tialls” for tying bags of grain in the loft. Just the right length too.
Then the decorative inventiveness of many farm men in making fancy arrangements entirely of lengths of cut bindertwine saved from the mill - a twine doll, tablemats, a doily, a string basket, indeed there was no end to what could be devised. A bit of competiveness came in at times, and there was always one of the men who was an artist and could put all the others to friendly shame!!!
Saturday 5 November 2011
Wednesday 2 November 2011
No 107. Whin Mills.
A long time ago, but yesterday too. Rain On My Window (Tears in My Eyes) will be an ongoing tale of my early memories of life shared by my younger brother David on Whitehall Farm in Stronsay, Orkney, of our childhood on a working farm in the 1930s before we lost our innocence.
No. 107. WHIN MILLS. [ 4 Pics by Picasa ]
Today using that Scottish speciality crop of whins/gorse to feed your livestock seems a myth. How it was done even more so. Anyone who has ever come close to whins knows how prickly they are, even the new season’s fresh green growth. I think they are a more appropriate flower than our Scotch Thistle as our National Emblem. Or should be!!
In Laidhay at Dunbeath and in Corrigal and Kirkbuster Farm Museums in Orkney there are excellent examples of old whin cutters still in superb condition. They had a tough job to do and were built accordingly. Most people today would erroneously recognise these machines as chaff cutters for cutting or chaffing straw, and they were so described in these museums until told recently what they really were!!
In the Spring of the year when grass was not yet growing and winter feed was well over-stretched, whins were often used to eke out the fodder. Whin dykes were part of the farming scene, an earth bank with a deep ditch on either side serving as boundary between fields and between farms. Seeded with whins, they seemed to be always growing, even in winter by a small amount, were and are evergreen.
Whins have the superb facilty of flowering all year round to a greater or lesser degree and you can always find some in yellow bloom. Their sweet heady aroma always gets me, though in winter the scent is muted. They have some green branches always soft with new growth, though still thorny, they also have some very hard stems.
First task was to cut the green shoots, a thorny enough job, then cart them home and put them through the whin cutter into small pieces. Cutting the whin hedges must have been by long-handled hedging knives and the standard two-toed pitchforks for loading the carts. These cuttings were further ground through a whin mill grindstone of which the upper half of one is still at Barrock Mains, but in the garden where it looks well!! The side face of the stone is vertically grooved, I think showing how it was drilled in a circle before being lifted out of the bed-rock in the grey granite quarry, probably in Aberdeenshire.
Wonderfully heavy, beautifully cut, the grey granite as hard as iron, it was driven by two horses with shafts bolted into grooves cut in the top of the stone. It looks to me as if a seat for a man might have also been fitted on top in a fifth groove. He would have ridden round on the stone with the horses and fed the cut whins into the square hole in the centre. Alternatively there might have been a funnel or hopper fixed to the square hole and fed from outside the stone by a fork, but I like the idea of man on top. This grinding produced a green whin pulp which could be made use of straight or mixed with oat chaff or chopped straw for feeding to cattle. I think horses ate the most of it, for all their soft muzzles they can eat pretty sharp material.
Whin mills could also be driven by water wheels where a dam fed off a burn or a stream was available, leaving the horses to do other tasks, or have a rest. Water wheels were always used where possible but not all farms had that resource.
Gorse/ whin is high in protein and in former days was very much used as feed for livestock, particularly in a hard winter when other greenstuff is not available. Traditionally long ago it was used as fodder for cattle, being made palatable by being "bruised" (crushed) by hand-used mallets. Gorse was also eaten as forage by some livestock such as feral ponies, who may have eaten little else in a hard winter. Ponies may also eat the thinner stems of regrown burnt gorse, the new season’s growth being not quite so thorny.
The seeds are oily, capable of lying dormant for 100 years before germinating. They seem to prefer dry thin soil with perhaps a trace of iron. Burning seems to help germinate the dormant seeds, and a section of burnt over whins springs with new seedlings the next Spring.
Whins were introduced to New Zealand by early Scottish settlers who were credited with sentimentally taking a bit of their home-land with them. Not quite so simple. These settlers were as poor as church mice, often cleared in the 1800s off the land that they had long farmed by landlords making larger farms, the so-called age of “Agricultural Improvement”. Whins would have been so much a feed for their livestock in their native Scotland that taking whin seeds with them to New Zealand was quite understandable, along with seed oats and bere.
Whins have now taken over large tracts of land in New Zealand, especially poorer land too thin to be taken into good farms.
There was one area I travelled through in the centre of North Island where the yellow bloom of whins stretched to the horizon, their superb scent hanging heavy in the air, honey bees buzzing over them. I never did get to taste honey from whins.
No. 107. WHIN MILLS. [ 4 Pics by Picasa ]
Today using that Scottish speciality crop of whins/gorse to feed your livestock seems a myth. How it was done even more so. Anyone who has ever come close to whins knows how prickly they are, even the new season’s fresh green growth. I think they are a more appropriate flower than our Scotch Thistle as our National Emblem. Or should be!!
In Laidhay at Dunbeath and in Corrigal and Kirkbuster Farm Museums in Orkney there are excellent examples of old whin cutters still in superb condition. They had a tough job to do and were built accordingly. Most people today would erroneously recognise these machines as chaff cutters for cutting or chaffing straw, and they were so described in these museums until told recently what they really were!!
In the Spring of the year when grass was not yet growing and winter feed was well over-stretched, whins were often used to eke out the fodder. Whin dykes were part of the farming scene, an earth bank with a deep ditch on either side serving as boundary between fields and between farms. Seeded with whins, they seemed to be always growing, even in winter by a small amount, were and are evergreen.
Whins have the superb facilty of flowering all year round to a greater or lesser degree and you can always find some in yellow bloom. Their sweet heady aroma always gets me, though in winter the scent is muted. They have some green branches always soft with new growth, though still thorny, they also have some very hard stems.
First task was to cut the green shoots, a thorny enough job, then cart them home and put them through the whin cutter into small pieces. Cutting the whin hedges must have been by long-handled hedging knives and the standard two-toed pitchforks for loading the carts. These cuttings were further ground through a whin mill grindstone of which the upper half of one is still at Barrock Mains, but in the garden where it looks well!! The side face of the stone is vertically grooved, I think showing how it was drilled in a circle before being lifted out of the bed-rock in the grey granite quarry, probably in Aberdeenshire.
Wonderfully heavy, beautifully cut, the grey granite as hard as iron, it was driven by two horses with shafts bolted into grooves cut in the top of the stone. It looks to me as if a seat for a man might have also been fitted on top in a fifth groove. He would have ridden round on the stone with the horses and fed the cut whins into the square hole in the centre. Alternatively there might have been a funnel or hopper fixed to the square hole and fed from outside the stone by a fork, but I like the idea of man on top. This grinding produced a green whin pulp which could be made use of straight or mixed with oat chaff or chopped straw for feeding to cattle. I think horses ate the most of it, for all their soft muzzles they can eat pretty sharp material.
Whin mills could also be driven by water wheels where a dam fed off a burn or a stream was available, leaving the horses to do other tasks, or have a rest. Water wheels were always used where possible but not all farms had that resource.
Gorse/ whin is high in protein and in former days was very much used as feed for livestock, particularly in a hard winter when other greenstuff is not available. Traditionally long ago it was used as fodder for cattle, being made palatable by being "bruised" (crushed) by hand-used mallets. Gorse was also eaten as forage by some livestock such as feral ponies, who may have eaten little else in a hard winter. Ponies may also eat the thinner stems of regrown burnt gorse, the new season’s growth being not quite so thorny.
The seeds are oily, capable of lying dormant for 100 years before germinating. They seem to prefer dry thin soil with perhaps a trace of iron. Burning seems to help germinate the dormant seeds, and a section of burnt over whins springs with new seedlings the next Spring.
Whins were introduced to New Zealand by early Scottish settlers who were credited with sentimentally taking a bit of their home-land with them. Not quite so simple. These settlers were as poor as church mice, often cleared in the 1800s off the land that they had long farmed by landlords making larger farms, the so-called age of “Agricultural Improvement”. Whins would have been so much a feed for their livestock in their native Scotland that taking whin seeds with them to New Zealand was quite understandable, along with seed oats and bere.
Whins have now taken over large tracts of land in New Zealand, especially poorer land too thin to be taken into good farms.
There was one area I travelled through in the centre of North Island where the yellow bloom of whins stretched to the horizon, their superb scent hanging heavy in the air, honey bees buzzing over them. I never did get to taste honey from whins.
Friday 21 October 2011
No 103. A Burden of Straw.
A long time ago, but yesterday too. Rain On My Window (Tears in My Eyes) will be an ongoing tale of my early memories of life shared by my younger brother David on Whitehall Farm in Stronsay, Orkney, of our childhood on a working farm in the 1930s before we lost our innocence.
No 103. A Burden of Straw.
In my early days straw came loose from the threshing mill in the barn, no balers to make it into neat bundles, no bunchers to pack it into handy packages, no straw carriers or blowers. At Whitehall making windlins was a constant task, large windlins for the feeder and cow byres, medium for the yearalts, small windlins for the calfie byres. An early morning task before it got light enough to see outside in winter, the paraffin oil lanterns warm flickering glow making shadows dance on the barn wall.
Rats scurrying out of sight, mice too, rustling in the straw. A pigeon resting on the easwas, maybe a few. Easwas for the uninitiated is the flat ledge on the top of the stone walls on which the rafters sat, handy for storage of many things in a low building but too high in the straw barn.!!!] A nesting place for the pigeons later in the year, though they did nest over the long spread of summer. I do not remember sparrows resting there though we had hundreds around. More often sitting on the rafters among many other places.
Doors kept the gale outside, cosy. Oddly in William Tait’s Diaries he makes no mention of making windlins though making simmins was a frequent enough task for wet days. Usually the cattlemen who made their own windlins though on a bad day the other men could be found doing that task, storing the windlins in high stacks around the barn walls.
The stable at Whitehall was blessed by having a door directly through a wall into the back of the straw barn so carrying along a wind swept passage in a howling gale was not required. All the rest of the stock accomodation was fiercely exposed around the square.
Windlins were not just handy but took care of loose straw in the wind. The men could carry quite amazing burdens of windlins under each arm, how they did it I never did learn. Load up in the barn, ease sideways out of the door and off to whatever byre needed. Saturday was a day when straw windlins would be carried to the byre for the cattlemen, gave them a slightly easier Sunday. No half days then, though I do remember when they came in. “Id’ll never work, bhoy!!”
I do not remember any loose straw being carried at Whitehall except loading a cart for a crofter or “Building oot”. The cattle buildings were in a square around the central dung midden, out one door and in at another.
Later at Greenland Mains I was introduced to carrying a “burden” of straw. The steading was all enclosed, passages leading directly from one building to another. The only outdoor bit was a short step to the Back Court, out and in a few yards and sheltered. Much straw was carried there to bed the cows that usually went out during the day to the Flats beside Loch Heilen. Sometimes if we had a surplus to get rid off it went into that Back Court to be trampled under.
A “burden” was built up in the barn with a four-toed graip, layers of loose straw being carefully stacked pancake-style man-high just so. Then a shoving of the graip into the base of the burden, helped in by a tackety boot, making sure it was deeply embedded.
A careful lifting and tipping towards the man, carry some of the weight on his hip. It was a balancing act, if not done properly the whole heap would fall away to be redone.
In my days at Greenland Mains I worked with the cattle during the winter with Jock Coghill the cattleman, a expert and monstrous burden carrier. The only byres were the milking byre and the sucklers cum feeders byre, otherwise it was all loose courts. Straw was carried along the narrow passageways to fill the straw racks and also to throw over the racks into the courts for the cattle to half spread with a toss of their heads, and we would finish it off ourselves. The cattle did a pretty good job of head down into the loose straw, they had a Ball.
The other method of carrying a burden of straw was with a length of rope, enough to lay on the ground in an “off and back” loop. On that loop the cattleman built a burden of straw, then took the loose ends back over the top and through the loop, pulled tight and off we go. It took a bit longer to build than a graip burden but held more, and was more secure for the great outdoors. The amount of straw carried was unbelievable.
That same method was used for many tasks World wide. I once saw in 1979 some Chinese women carrying huge burdens of firewood over the Border from China into Hong Kong using the same technique. There is nothing new under the sun.
No 103. A Burden of Straw.
In my early days straw came loose from the threshing mill in the barn, no balers to make it into neat bundles, no bunchers to pack it into handy packages, no straw carriers or blowers. At Whitehall making windlins was a constant task, large windlins for the feeder and cow byres, medium for the yearalts, small windlins for the calfie byres. An early morning task before it got light enough to see outside in winter, the paraffin oil lanterns warm flickering glow making shadows dance on the barn wall.
Rats scurrying out of sight, mice too, rustling in the straw. A pigeon resting on the easwas, maybe a few. Easwas for the uninitiated is the flat ledge on the top of the stone walls on which the rafters sat, handy for storage of many things in a low building but too high in the straw barn.!!!] A nesting place for the pigeons later in the year, though they did nest over the long spread of summer. I do not remember sparrows resting there though we had hundreds around. More often sitting on the rafters among many other places.
Doors kept the gale outside, cosy. Oddly in William Tait’s Diaries he makes no mention of making windlins though making simmins was a frequent enough task for wet days. Usually the cattlemen who made their own windlins though on a bad day the other men could be found doing that task, storing the windlins in high stacks around the barn walls.
The stable at Whitehall was blessed by having a door directly through a wall into the back of the straw barn so carrying along a wind swept passage in a howling gale was not required. All the rest of the stock accomodation was fiercely exposed around the square.
Windlins were not just handy but took care of loose straw in the wind. The men could carry quite amazing burdens of windlins under each arm, how they did it I never did learn. Load up in the barn, ease sideways out of the door and off to whatever byre needed. Saturday was a day when straw windlins would be carried to the byre for the cattlemen, gave them a slightly easier Sunday. No half days then, though I do remember when they came in. “Id’ll never work, bhoy!!”
I do not remember any loose straw being carried at Whitehall except loading a cart for a crofter or “Building oot”. The cattle buildings were in a square around the central dung midden, out one door and in at another.
Later at Greenland Mains I was introduced to carrying a “burden” of straw. The steading was all enclosed, passages leading directly from one building to another. The only outdoor bit was a short step to the Back Court, out and in a few yards and sheltered. Much straw was carried there to bed the cows that usually went out during the day to the Flats beside Loch Heilen. Sometimes if we had a surplus to get rid off it went into that Back Court to be trampled under.
A “burden” was built up in the barn with a four-toed graip, layers of loose straw being carefully stacked pancake-style man-high just so. Then a shoving of the graip into the base of the burden, helped in by a tackety boot, making sure it was deeply embedded.
A careful lifting and tipping towards the man, carry some of the weight on his hip. It was a balancing act, if not done properly the whole heap would fall away to be redone.
In my days at Greenland Mains I worked with the cattle during the winter with Jock Coghill the cattleman, a expert and monstrous burden carrier. The only byres were the milking byre and the sucklers cum feeders byre, otherwise it was all loose courts. Straw was carried along the narrow passageways to fill the straw racks and also to throw over the racks into the courts for the cattle to half spread with a toss of their heads, and we would finish it off ourselves. The cattle did a pretty good job of head down into the loose straw, they had a Ball.
The other method of carrying a burden of straw was with a length of rope, enough to lay on the ground in an “off and back” loop. On that loop the cattleman built a burden of straw, then took the loose ends back over the top and through the loop, pulled tight and off we go. It took a bit longer to build than a graip burden but held more, and was more secure for the great outdoors. The amount of straw carried was unbelievable.
That same method was used for many tasks World wide. I once saw in 1979 some Chinese women carrying huge burdens of firewood over the Border from China into Hong Kong using the same technique. There is nothing new under the sun.
Friday 7 October 2011
No 104. Water No 104. Water. A simple enough thing now to get water, turn on the tap and there it is. But to my first memory it was not so. At Wh
No 104. Water in the Well.
A simple enough thing now to get water, turn on the tap and there it is. But to my first memory it was not so.
At Whitehall we were privileged in the Big Hoos and had at least water in the Farmhouse pumped up from the Reservoir which served the Village. We had a bathroom with hot and cold taps, a back boiler in the kitchen stove which worked intermittently.
We also had an outdoor water tank filled with rain water from the roof gutters, softer water and better for the Washhouse. There was a largeish stone walled water tank I remember our father building at the steading, again filled with roof water. At Airy he built a similar but much larger watertank with quarried stone from the Hundy Quarry, rendered inside with layers of cement until water proof. That was built around 1939 I think. He sold Airy to the Spences of Millfield in May 1943. Sharon and I were back in Stronsay in July 2009 and the big stone tank is still there, still holding roof water for the steading after 70 years.
The men and their wives in the cottages at Whitehall had no tap water, a well just up the road at the back of the stackyard had to do them for buckets of drinking water. They all had water barrels at the corners of their house, again filled from the roofs. Clean enough for washing clothes but it was not used for drinking water. Too many sea gulls perched on the roofs!!
The byres had no water bowls or taps and all the cattle had buckets of water carried to their heads in the stalls. The feeders byre cattle were let off their asks - neck chains - and went to the horse pond for a drink, then back to the byre and up each into their own stall. There were feeding cattle that only got a big basket of turnips twice a day and no water, but there was enough water in the turnips. And as has been said many a time, “Gey good water!”
Hen houses often had a water barrel and a gutter to collect the roof water when it rained. If not, and with dry weather, it had to be labouriously carried in buckets, sometimes quite a distance.
Much more pressing was water for the cattle when out in the fields in summer. The horse drawn water-cart was much used to carry water to a field trough, again hard repetitive work for two men filling it with buckets from the water tank at the steading.
One of the fields with no water, Blackha, suggested a well might find some. Our father decided to dig at the bottom of the field near the shore. Jamie Moad from Airy, a master hand of almost everything, came over to supervise the task. They dug down into the rock with simple hand tools, sledge hammer, pick, pinchbar, heavy punch crowbar drill. It was all hard work which went on as other farm work allowed in summer. Eventually the well was deep enough to find water seeping in from the surrounding rock.
Then they build a stone wall around it, covered it with large flagstones and mounted a pump at the top of a long iron pipe which went down to the bottom of the well. It had a long curved iron handle, a piston with a thick rubber washer to fit the pipe. Operating it was a simple up and down pumping movement but a bucket or two of water had to be first poured into the pipe to prime it and create suction. Got the priming water out of the well with a pail on a rope, though dropping it face down just so in order to fill it was an art to be learned.
A water trough was also built beside the well cast in concrete and the pump emptied into it. Pumping water was a daily task in summer when cattle were in the field and we kept hen houses near that well for the water supply which saved a lot of carrying of pails.
The well is now disused as time has moved on and water is piped by our successors from a County Water Supply to all the fields and all the houses.
Digging wells was a constant task in Stronsay in William Tait’s Diary at Rousam with our grandfather on 27th June 1899 he writes “ Master and Peter Stevenson digging a well in Doonatoon.” On 28th July 1899 they quarried & carted 11 loads of stones for the well at Doonatoon.
On 22nd June 1900 he refers to digging a well in the field called Geogar. So digging wells was a steady job when time allowed from other farm work.
Wells were everywhere, some near a house, others quite a bit to go. Carrying buckets of water with two buckets and a square wooden frame to keep the pails off your legs was a constant task for the women of the house. I do not remember ever seeing a man carrying water.!!!.
A simple enough thing now to get water, turn on the tap and there it is. But to my first memory it was not so.
At Whitehall we were privileged in the Big Hoos and had at least water in the Farmhouse pumped up from the Reservoir which served the Village. We had a bathroom with hot and cold taps, a back boiler in the kitchen stove which worked intermittently.
We also had an outdoor water tank filled with rain water from the roof gutters, softer water and better for the Washhouse. There was a largeish stone walled water tank I remember our father building at the steading, again filled with roof water. At Airy he built a similar but much larger watertank with quarried stone from the Hundy Quarry, rendered inside with layers of cement until water proof. That was built around 1939 I think. He sold Airy to the Spences of Millfield in May 1943. Sharon and I were back in Stronsay in July 2009 and the big stone tank is still there, still holding roof water for the steading after 70 years.
The men and their wives in the cottages at Whitehall had no tap water, a well just up the road at the back of the stackyard had to do them for buckets of drinking water. They all had water barrels at the corners of their house, again filled from the roofs. Clean enough for washing clothes but it was not used for drinking water. Too many sea gulls perched on the roofs!!
The byres had no water bowls or taps and all the cattle had buckets of water carried to their heads in the stalls. The feeders byre cattle were let off their asks - neck chains - and went to the horse pond for a drink, then back to the byre and up each into their own stall. There were feeding cattle that only got a big basket of turnips twice a day and no water, but there was enough water in the turnips. And as has been said many a time, “Gey good water!”
Hen houses often had a water barrel and a gutter to collect the roof water when it rained. If not, and with dry weather, it had to be labouriously carried in buckets, sometimes quite a distance.
Much more pressing was water for the cattle when out in the fields in summer. The horse drawn water-cart was much used to carry water to a field trough, again hard repetitive work for two men filling it with buckets from the water tank at the steading.
One of the fields with no water, Blackha, suggested a well might find some. Our father decided to dig at the bottom of the field near the shore. Jamie Moad from Airy, a master hand of almost everything, came over to supervise the task. They dug down into the rock with simple hand tools, sledge hammer, pick, pinchbar, heavy punch crowbar drill. It was all hard work which went on as other farm work allowed in summer. Eventually the well was deep enough to find water seeping in from the surrounding rock.
Then they build a stone wall around it, covered it with large flagstones and mounted a pump at the top of a long iron pipe which went down to the bottom of the well. It had a long curved iron handle, a piston with a thick rubber washer to fit the pipe. Operating it was a simple up and down pumping movement but a bucket or two of water had to be first poured into the pipe to prime it and create suction. Got the priming water out of the well with a pail on a rope, though dropping it face down just so in order to fill it was an art to be learned.
A water trough was also built beside the well cast in concrete and the pump emptied into it. Pumping water was a daily task in summer when cattle were in the field and we kept hen houses near that well for the water supply which saved a lot of carrying of pails.
The well is now disused as time has moved on and water is piped by our successors from a County Water Supply to all the fields and all the houses.
Digging wells was a constant task in Stronsay in William Tait’s Diary at Rousam with our grandfather on 27th June 1899 he writes “ Master and Peter Stevenson digging a well in Doonatoon.” On 28th July 1899 they quarried & carted 11 loads of stones for the well at Doonatoon.
On 22nd June 1900 he refers to digging a well in the field called Geogar. So digging wells was a steady job when time allowed from other farm work.
Wells were everywhere, some near a house, others quite a bit to go. Carrying buckets of water with two buckets and a square wooden frame to keep the pails off your legs was a constant task for the women of the house. I do not remember ever seeing a man carrying water.!!!.
Friday 23 September 2011
No 105 A Tea to Remember.
No 105. A tea to remember.
A bowl o’tea was standard in many houses of my early aquaintance. Along with a jug of milk and a bowl of sugar, though I have often seen an empty 1lb jam jar doing sterling service as a sugar bowl.
The bothy men had bowls filled with milk and set aside at night for their porridge in the morning. Then the same bowl held their tea to finish their breakfast with oatmeal bannocks or beremeal or flour scones.
Most farmhouses used bowls or mugs rather than teacups but would always have a set of best china for visitors or for the Minister. This was often a set passed down from a previous generation. If so it was treasured and washed only by the Mistress. If any damage was done it was her own fault!!! Kept safely on a shelf in a locked sideboard in the dining room.
We used to admire the different patterns on the fancy tea sets when visiting but as children we never got a cup for ourselves. Far too precious. Always some mugs would be found for us to have a “glass of milk”. The Mugs of 6th May, 1935 of George Vth and Queen Mary’s Silver Jubilee were much in demand, and we all got ones from school as a memento of a special day. Some are still treasured, most I guess are now broken but definitely not all!! I saw one quite recently, it brought back memories.
I never did like having a cup of tea and a saucer in my hand or on my lap, much too precarious. Still don’t!!!
Along with the bowl of tea a table would be blessed with new baked scones, flour scones, bere bread, oatcakes. Cheese and crowdie. Drop scones thickly covered with home made butter and spread with crowdie. Drop scones covered with butter and jam.
Home made jam at that, mostly rhubarb which grew wild as well as in the gardens, often with a bit of ginger in it. Or blackcurrant.
Bringing me back a long way, I was in a house just lately where the bowls appeared, beautifully patterned in deep blue. An empty glass had held a malt whisky, and a good one at that. An adventure with tea in a bowl. Drop scones new baked with crowdie on top, oven scones with thick butter!!! Most enjoyable it was.
I have had other adventures with tea in a bowl.
Going home to Stronsay from Wartime school in Inverness and going out on a very early sailing from Kirkwall on the old S.S.Thorfinn, I had breakfast on board. The galley was indeed small but warm. Another older Stronsay man I knew was also going home for a bit of leave from the Army.
Cooking was done beside us on the galley stove, the smells of Horne’s Orkney Bacon making the mouth water. Thick slices, no modern water cure then!! Fresh eggs. Thick sausages from John T. Flett’s butcher shop. Fried bread. Though rationing was now the order of the day, there was no sign of it on the Thorfinn!!
Orkney butter, Orkney cheese, jam, loaf bread in thick slices. Nestles Condensed Milk in a tin. Sugar in a jar. And scaldingly hot strong black tea in a bowl.
The other memorable tea in a bowl I had was many years later at the Dounby Show. David Leggat of Macdonald Fraser Marts from Perth, by then United Auctions, was going to Dounby to judge at the Show. I got a lift from him from the St Ola at Stromness in his hire car. It was early, the pens were just beginning to fill and judging not yet begun.
The tea tent, actually making use of an old slate roofed building, was open. I was first in, getting No 1 ticket off a roll of raffle tickets being made use of. Orphir W.R.I. was doing the catering that year, though I believe it rotates around the branches.
Trestle tables and stackable chairs. On the table home baked thick flour scones, beremeal bannocks, scones, oat cakes, loaf bread, home made butter and farm house cheese. I filled myself. And then one of the lassies topped it all when she came over to me and asked me “Wid thu like some fancies??” No chance, no room.
And to top it all, scaldingly hot strong black tea in a bowl.
A bowl o’tea was standard in many houses of my early aquaintance. Along with a jug of milk and a bowl of sugar, though I have often seen an empty 1lb jam jar doing sterling service as a sugar bowl.
The bothy men had bowls filled with milk and set aside at night for their porridge in the morning. Then the same bowl held their tea to finish their breakfast with oatmeal bannocks or beremeal or flour scones.
Most farmhouses used bowls or mugs rather than teacups but would always have a set of best china for visitors or for the Minister. This was often a set passed down from a previous generation. If so it was treasured and washed only by the Mistress. If any damage was done it was her own fault!!! Kept safely on a shelf in a locked sideboard in the dining room.
We used to admire the different patterns on the fancy tea sets when visiting but as children we never got a cup for ourselves. Far too precious. Always some mugs would be found for us to have a “glass of milk”. The Mugs of 6th May, 1935 of George Vth and Queen Mary’s Silver Jubilee were much in demand, and we all got ones from school as a memento of a special day. Some are still treasured, most I guess are now broken but definitely not all!! I saw one quite recently, it brought back memories.
I never did like having a cup of tea and a saucer in my hand or on my lap, much too precarious. Still don’t!!!
Along with the bowl of tea a table would be blessed with new baked scones, flour scones, bere bread, oatcakes. Cheese and crowdie. Drop scones thickly covered with home made butter and spread with crowdie. Drop scones covered with butter and jam.
Home made jam at that, mostly rhubarb which grew wild as well as in the gardens, often with a bit of ginger in it. Or blackcurrant.
Bringing me back a long way, I was in a house just lately where the bowls appeared, beautifully patterned in deep blue. An empty glass had held a malt whisky, and a good one at that. An adventure with tea in a bowl. Drop scones new baked with crowdie on top, oven scones with thick butter!!! Most enjoyable it was.
I have had other adventures with tea in a bowl.
Going home to Stronsay from Wartime school in Inverness and going out on a very early sailing from Kirkwall on the old S.S.Thorfinn, I had breakfast on board. The galley was indeed small but warm. Another older Stronsay man I knew was also going home for a bit of leave from the Army.
Cooking was done beside us on the galley stove, the smells of Horne’s Orkney Bacon making the mouth water. Thick slices, no modern water cure then!! Fresh eggs. Thick sausages from John T. Flett’s butcher shop. Fried bread. Though rationing was now the order of the day, there was no sign of it on the Thorfinn!!
Orkney butter, Orkney cheese, jam, loaf bread in thick slices. Nestles Condensed Milk in a tin. Sugar in a jar. And scaldingly hot strong black tea in a bowl.
The other memorable tea in a bowl I had was many years later at the Dounby Show. David Leggat of Macdonald Fraser Marts from Perth, by then United Auctions, was going to Dounby to judge at the Show. I got a lift from him from the St Ola at Stromness in his hire car. It was early, the pens were just beginning to fill and judging not yet begun.
The tea tent, actually making use of an old slate roofed building, was open. I was first in, getting No 1 ticket off a roll of raffle tickets being made use of. Orphir W.R.I. was doing the catering that year, though I believe it rotates around the branches.
Trestle tables and stackable chairs. On the table home baked thick flour scones, beremeal bannocks, scones, oat cakes, loaf bread, home made butter and farm house cheese. I filled myself. And then one of the lassies topped it all when she came over to me and asked me “Wid thu like some fancies??” No chance, no room.
And to top it all, scaldingly hot strong black tea in a bowl.
Friday 16 September 2011
No 105 Fanners.
No 105. FANNERS.
At Whitehall we had a fanners in the loft, hand powered, every farm had one. Some farms had two, much used to clean up grain for selling or for seed. Many farms had two lofts if not three, and each loft had its own fanners as they were relatively cheap and it was easier to have one in each loft rather than tediously moving one around. Not too heavy but a bit clumsy for moving through doors and down and up stairs to different lofts although moving along the floor of a loft to each heap of grain was easy. At Lower Dounreay from Nov. 1953 to May 1956 we had three lofts each with its own fanners, though we did not use them much.
At Isauld we had a good fanners taken up from Lower Dounreay in 1956 but we had an excellent new Garvie threshing mill that cleaned grain to perfection. Full finishing, double fan, adjustable wire screen, loft conveyer, bruising as we threshed.
Fanners preceded proper thrashing mills by quite some time and were the forerunner of the threshing mill. In 1784 Andrew Meikle, a Scotsman, put together the simple hand mill and the even older fanners to build his first proper threshing mill. This he patented. He improved his design which has lasted the test of long years and is still the basis of most threshing machines and then on to the combine. The only attempt to move away from Meikle’s old straw walker system was Massey Ferguson who quite some years ago built and sold a cylindrical straw walker combine which worked well enough but is I think now forgotten. It did not do too well with damp straw, Caithness has plenty!! It worked well enough in North America where the harvest conditions were so very much drier, but that machine did not last long in production.
Winnowing grain consisted of throwing it into the air and letting the wind blow the chaff and bits of straw to one side. Still done outdoors in some of the poorer parts of the World for rice or millet. There is the well known feature of two opposing winnowing doors in nearly all old roofless croft barns still to be found everywhere. The old system of having two doors opposite each other in the barn for winnowing only worked if the wind was blowing. Often grain was taken outdoors and winnowed on a clean flagstone-floored stance kept for that purpose. Or on a bit of hard beaten clay ground outside the barn door.
The invention of the fanners was much needed, but it was a tedious task, one man turning the handle, one man filling the hopper with a scoop box from the grain heap and taking away the cleaned grain. Then they would change round for a spell. They were a much needed adjunct to the flail and to early threshing machines which did not do a good job of cleaning chaff from grain.
I have done that work in my younger days, turning the fanners handle at a certain measured pace, not too fast, not too slow. That determined the force of the blast of air which separated the grain from the chaff and controlled the quality of the grain you wanted to sell or put to the meal mill. It was quite heavy work if you were at it all day.
I was told there was a design of fanners where there were two handles, one either side. The idea was to maintain a steadier flow of air from the fan as with the handles being opposed one man was pushing while the other pulled. It would have needed three men to work it and did not find favour. I never saw one.
At first there was only one grain outlet at the side but fanners soon developed into two outlets with heavier grain out of one and lighter out of the other. Chaff and bits of straw flew out over the end. There is an excellent fanners at Laidhay Museum, supplied by W. & A. Geddes Wick , Agents. I was informed they made their own fanners long since but they could have sold on ones made elsewhere. Back a 100 years ago many farm articles were made locally by skilled men. To make fanners in Wick would not have been difficult.
The Foundry in Thurso, McKidd followed by Hutchinson, made many bits for them and for others.
Two Shearer brothers who came from Canisbay went to Turriff, Aberdeenshire, and set
up in business as Millwrights. They could have learned their trade with Geddes. They
manufactured and distributed many good small hand mills suitable for crofters and also
made good fanners. Like so many other small businesses, as a firm they are long gone.
At Whitehall we had a fanners in the loft, hand powered, every farm had one. Some farms had two, much used to clean up grain for selling or for seed. Many farms had two lofts if not three, and each loft had its own fanners as they were relatively cheap and it was easier to have one in each loft rather than tediously moving one around. Not too heavy but a bit clumsy for moving through doors and down and up stairs to different lofts although moving along the floor of a loft to each heap of grain was easy. At Lower Dounreay from Nov. 1953 to May 1956 we had three lofts each with its own fanners, though we did not use them much.
At Isauld we had a good fanners taken up from Lower Dounreay in 1956 but we had an excellent new Garvie threshing mill that cleaned grain to perfection. Full finishing, double fan, adjustable wire screen, loft conveyer, bruising as we threshed.
Fanners preceded proper thrashing mills by quite some time and were the forerunner of the threshing mill. In 1784 Andrew Meikle, a Scotsman, put together the simple hand mill and the even older fanners to build his first proper threshing mill. This he patented. He improved his design which has lasted the test of long years and is still the basis of most threshing machines and then on to the combine. The only attempt to move away from Meikle’s old straw walker system was Massey Ferguson who quite some years ago built and sold a cylindrical straw walker combine which worked well enough but is I think now forgotten. It did not do too well with damp straw, Caithness has plenty!! It worked well enough in North America where the harvest conditions were so very much drier, but that machine did not last long in production.
Winnowing grain consisted of throwing it into the air and letting the wind blow the chaff and bits of straw to one side. Still done outdoors in some of the poorer parts of the World for rice or millet. There is the well known feature of two opposing winnowing doors in nearly all old roofless croft barns still to be found everywhere. The old system of having two doors opposite each other in the barn for winnowing only worked if the wind was blowing. Often grain was taken outdoors and winnowed on a clean flagstone-floored stance kept for that purpose. Or on a bit of hard beaten clay ground outside the barn door.
The invention of the fanners was much needed, but it was a tedious task, one man turning the handle, one man filling the hopper with a scoop box from the grain heap and taking away the cleaned grain. Then they would change round for a spell. They were a much needed adjunct to the flail and to early threshing machines which did not do a good job of cleaning chaff from grain.
I have done that work in my younger days, turning the fanners handle at a certain measured pace, not too fast, not too slow. That determined the force of the blast of air which separated the grain from the chaff and controlled the quality of the grain you wanted to sell or put to the meal mill. It was quite heavy work if you were at it all day.
I was told there was a design of fanners where there were two handles, one either side. The idea was to maintain a steadier flow of air from the fan as with the handles being opposed one man was pushing while the other pulled. It would have needed three men to work it and did not find favour. I never saw one.
At first there was only one grain outlet at the side but fanners soon developed into two outlets with heavier grain out of one and lighter out of the other. Chaff and bits of straw flew out over the end. There is an excellent fanners at Laidhay Museum, supplied by W. & A. Geddes Wick , Agents. I was informed they made their own fanners long since but they could have sold on ones made elsewhere. Back a 100 years ago many farm articles were made locally by skilled men. To make fanners in Wick would not have been difficult.
The Foundry in Thurso, McKidd followed by Hutchinson, made many bits for them and for others.
Two Shearer brothers who came from Canisbay went to Turriff, Aberdeenshire, and set
up in business as Millwrights. They could have learned their trade with Geddes. They
manufactured and distributed many good small hand mills suitable for crofters and also
made good fanners. Like so many other small businesses, as a firm they are long gone.
Saturday 27 August 2011
No 101 Little engines.
be an ongoing tale of my early memories of life shared by my younger brother David on Whitehall Farm in Stronsay, Orkney, of our childhood on a working farm in the 1930s before we lost our innocence.
BAMFORD TULIP GAS STATIONARY ENGINE. 1933 2.5 H.P.
Little engines were a feature of my early days. They were to be found in many situations and on many small farms, indeed on bigger ones too for many various purposes. Prime one was driving the small threshing mills which most crofters had. Where water was available many farms, big or small, had a dam and water wheel for powering threshing mills. But often water was not available so the two-horse mill course was used. More horses for larger mills on larger farms.
As time went on steam engines developed but again only larger farms could afford them. The best horse course I remember was the octagonal stone built roofed mill course at Rattar Mains. Later a chimney stack was added in one corner for a steam engine. Both are now long demolished. Many Caithness farms had high chimney stacks for a steam engine, few now if any are left. Perhaps Ackergill.
There was a steam engine at the Bu of Rousam in Stronsay with my grandfather David, fed by coal shipped in from Newcastle.
Wm Tait’s Diary records :-
“1896. Aug 08 sat 4 plows in Brecks a.m. - 3 carts at pier for coal p.m.
Got home 8 tons coal, 8½ tons in Engine house at this date. 8 cwt in coal house.”
So the steam engine got 8 tons, the farm house had 8 cwts.
Even a windmill was used on some farms but these were very rare and had to be free standing from the other buildings as the windmill had to rotate to catch the wind. Just like a Wind Turbine now. I think meal mills would have been the only reasonable users of windmills, as in Holland, through if a thrashing mill could have been worked it would have needed to have a sheaf loft to be first filled with sheaves before thrashing commenced. Or a windmill driving a water pump for the flagstone quarries at Castlehill, one now unused stone built tower is to be still seen there.
There was a multi-bladed windmill at the Ayre of the Myers which pumped water from almost sea level at the marshy Ayre o’ the Mires to the Reservoir situated half a mile up the road to Whitehall. It was one of the ones so beloved of photos of the Australian outback, pumping water at isolated sheep stations for livestock drinking troughs, and no doubt the houses as well.
Our father took care of the Windmill and the Reservoir which fed the Water Supply System for Whitehall Village. That Ayre o’ the Mires windmill had to be started and stopped as required, which task our father took care of himself, or more often had someone from the Village half a mile away do so for him on a regular basis. The water was pumped uphill to the red corrugated iron covered Reservoir where it went through first a large settling tank, then spilled over into a second settling tank filled with a bottom layer of gravel and sand off the beach. That was all the purification it got, a filtering system using what nature provided, no chemicals at all.
It was much used and kept the Village and the herring drifters in season and the Harbour supplied with water. I remember it being cleaned out once and the deep layer of muddy gravel and beach sand being replaced with a clean layer in the second tank, and a layer of fine mud being taken out of the first settling tank. Hard work for men with shovels, buckets on a rope and carts at the door. The system worked well though, simple if it does look now.
There was one little engine I remember half way to the Village at the Water Reservoir. It was our house water supply engine. I cannot recall what make it was, but Lister springs to mind. Smell of oil and and the petrol which was kept in a red metal two gallon can of which there are still a few around. Davie Chalmers in the Village supplied the petrol and oil. Generally father started the engine on his way to the Village, stopping it on his way home. Or put just enough petrol into it if he was to be in the Village for a long time so it stopped of its own accord when the fuel ran out, self regulating. Starting was by turning a handle and sometimes much hard turning before it fired and all was well, chugging away until the measure of petrol ran out, a self timing device.
The only other control was the overflow pipe from the header tank in the house which told father that the tank was full and he would go down to the Reservoir and stop the engine.
Small engines were fascinating apart from driving the threshing mills of crofts.
For farm thrashing mills Stronsay was not too well blessed with suitable water to fill a mill dam so the old horse mill course was used. Then small engines appeared. I do not know when but they generally replaced horses for thrashing the crop, possibly about 1900 or so. I can hear them still, the slow thump thump thump of these small engines echoing. Some of them are still around, beautifully polished and lovingly kept and in working condition at the Vintage Machinery Club Shows at John O’Groats. Or at the County Show.
There is one to be seen in a corner at Mary Anne’s Cottage in Dunnet, used for driving the Crofter’s Mill and the 4 inch bruiser when needed. Still turns sweetly enough but the fuel tank has been removed so no need to fear for safety if someone started it!! Not much space for it but enough.
It is a Bamford Tulip Top Gas Stationary Engine. 1933 2.5 H.P. which ran on petrol. I got a wonderful photo of one from Princeton University in the U.S.A. I also turned one up on the Internet by entering the name above and, with earphones on, I watched it turning away with the old familiar sound of hitting and missing in my ears. Quite magical and almost emotional.
It was called “ a hit and a miss” engine because the speed was governed by a mechanical governor that pushed in a spring-loaded valve now and again when the engine ran a bit faster. That killed compression so the engine gave a miss and thus kept to a constant speed. It ran on petrol with no sparking plug or magneto and fired on compression, as do diesel engines today.
The final one I remember with affection was a Lister engine at Greenland Mains. It sat in the grain loft above a hatch below which was a horizontal shaft with 4 sheep shearing units, driving with a belt through the wooden floor. There I learned my sheepshearing with a 3 inch hand-piece. The engine was about 5 h.p., water cooled from a header tank, single cylinder, ran well. Where it is now I know not.
These small engines were remarkably good, and, on asking someone in Castletown old enough to remember the Bamford Tulup Top, he said he had never seen one taken apart as they just kept on working!!!
BAMFORD TULIP GAS STATIONARY ENGINE. 1933 2.5 H.P.
Little engines were a feature of my early days. They were to be found in many situations and on many small farms, indeed on bigger ones too for many various purposes. Prime one was driving the small threshing mills which most crofters had. Where water was available many farms, big or small, had a dam and water wheel for powering threshing mills. But often water was not available so the two-horse mill course was used. More horses for larger mills on larger farms.
As time went on steam engines developed but again only larger farms could afford them. The best horse course I remember was the octagonal stone built roofed mill course at Rattar Mains. Later a chimney stack was added in one corner for a steam engine. Both are now long demolished. Many Caithness farms had high chimney stacks for a steam engine, few now if any are left. Perhaps Ackergill.
There was a steam engine at the Bu of Rousam in Stronsay with my grandfather David, fed by coal shipped in from Newcastle.
Wm Tait’s Diary records :-
“1896. Aug 08 sat 4 plows in Brecks a.m. - 3 carts at pier for coal p.m.
Got home 8 tons coal, 8½ tons in Engine house at this date. 8 cwt in coal house.”
So the steam engine got 8 tons, the farm house had 8 cwts.
Even a windmill was used on some farms but these were very rare and had to be free standing from the other buildings as the windmill had to rotate to catch the wind. Just like a Wind Turbine now. I think meal mills would have been the only reasonable users of windmills, as in Holland, through if a thrashing mill could have been worked it would have needed to have a sheaf loft to be first filled with sheaves before thrashing commenced. Or a windmill driving a water pump for the flagstone quarries at Castlehill, one now unused stone built tower is to be still seen there.
There was a multi-bladed windmill at the Ayre of the Myers which pumped water from almost sea level at the marshy Ayre o’ the Mires to the Reservoir situated half a mile up the road to Whitehall. It was one of the ones so beloved of photos of the Australian outback, pumping water at isolated sheep stations for livestock drinking troughs, and no doubt the houses as well.
Our father took care of the Windmill and the Reservoir which fed the Water Supply System for Whitehall Village. That Ayre o’ the Mires windmill had to be started and stopped as required, which task our father took care of himself, or more often had someone from the Village half a mile away do so for him on a regular basis. The water was pumped uphill to the red corrugated iron covered Reservoir where it went through first a large settling tank, then spilled over into a second settling tank filled with a bottom layer of gravel and sand off the beach. That was all the purification it got, a filtering system using what nature provided, no chemicals at all.
It was much used and kept the Village and the herring drifters in season and the Harbour supplied with water. I remember it being cleaned out once and the deep layer of muddy gravel and beach sand being replaced with a clean layer in the second tank, and a layer of fine mud being taken out of the first settling tank. Hard work for men with shovels, buckets on a rope and carts at the door. The system worked well though, simple if it does look now.
There was one little engine I remember half way to the Village at the Water Reservoir. It was our house water supply engine. I cannot recall what make it was, but Lister springs to mind. Smell of oil and and the petrol which was kept in a red metal two gallon can of which there are still a few around. Davie Chalmers in the Village supplied the petrol and oil. Generally father started the engine on his way to the Village, stopping it on his way home. Or put just enough petrol into it if he was to be in the Village for a long time so it stopped of its own accord when the fuel ran out, self regulating. Starting was by turning a handle and sometimes much hard turning before it fired and all was well, chugging away until the measure of petrol ran out, a self timing device.
The only other control was the overflow pipe from the header tank in the house which told father that the tank was full and he would go down to the Reservoir and stop the engine.
Small engines were fascinating apart from driving the threshing mills of crofts.
For farm thrashing mills Stronsay was not too well blessed with suitable water to fill a mill dam so the old horse mill course was used. Then small engines appeared. I do not know when but they generally replaced horses for thrashing the crop, possibly about 1900 or so. I can hear them still, the slow thump thump thump of these small engines echoing. Some of them are still around, beautifully polished and lovingly kept and in working condition at the Vintage Machinery Club Shows at John O’Groats. Or at the County Show.
There is one to be seen in a corner at Mary Anne’s Cottage in Dunnet, used for driving the Crofter’s Mill and the 4 inch bruiser when needed. Still turns sweetly enough but the fuel tank has been removed so no need to fear for safety if someone started it!! Not much space for it but enough.
It is a Bamford Tulip Top Gas Stationary Engine. 1933 2.5 H.P. which ran on petrol. I got a wonderful photo of one from Princeton University in the U.S.A. I also turned one up on the Internet by entering the name above and, with earphones on, I watched it turning away with the old familiar sound of hitting and missing in my ears. Quite magical and almost emotional.
It was called “ a hit and a miss” engine because the speed was governed by a mechanical governor that pushed in a spring-loaded valve now and again when the engine ran a bit faster. That killed compression so the engine gave a miss and thus kept to a constant speed. It ran on petrol with no sparking plug or magneto and fired on compression, as do diesel engines today.
The final one I remember with affection was a Lister engine at Greenland Mains. It sat in the grain loft above a hatch below which was a horizontal shaft with 4 sheep shearing units, driving with a belt through the wooden floor. There I learned my sheepshearing with a 3 inch hand-piece. The engine was about 5 h.p., water cooled from a header tank, single cylinder, ran well. Where it is now I know not.
These small engines were remarkably good, and, on asking someone in Castletown old enough to remember the Bamford Tulup Top, he said he had never seen one taken apart as they just kept on working!!!
Thursday 18 August 2011
No 99. Little Mills.
No 99. Little Mills.
The Crofter’s Mill at Mary Anne’s Cottage, Dunnet.
Made by T.S.Allan, Cowgate, Thurso,
I have dwelt enough on flails, on small hand mills and the large high-speed drum mills I knew and worked with, but I must not overlook the Crofters Mill. The crofts of Rousam in Stronsay were peppered with them in my younger days, and most of the smaller farms too. There were so many of them at one time including Caithness but few are now left.
There is a Crofters Mill in Mary Anne’s Cottage in Dunnet, still erroneously described there as a hand mill in spite of my well-meant advice over many years that it is not. They say it was built in Orkney and came from there. Not so. The Mill may indeed have come ultimately from Orkney to Mary Annes, but it is a Crofter’s Mill built by T.S.Allan, Millwright, THURSO. His firms name is stenciled in black letters on the side. His long gone workshop was in the Coogate in Thurso next door to a blacksmith called Gunn.
Regrettably, the Coogate, that historic old Viking name for the street where old Thurso’s milking cows were kept, was changed long since to Riverside Place by the Atomics on the old Thurso Town Council, the Coogate being thought not quite proper enough for New Age Thursonians. Perhaps, but it is still good enough for not so snooty Edinburgh.
The milking cows kept in the Coogate were grazed on the Commons of Thurso above Ormlie, or any other grass available, and fed in winter on bought in or cadged hay. Just a reminder that towns not so long ago had milking cows
within their boundaries, and horses and stables too big time, both of which had dung middens needing to be cleared away and carted out of town to nearby farms.
Wm Tait, working a few miles outside of Kirkwall with his brother-in-law Robert Lennie at Work Farm, not too far to cart feed in and dung out, recorded in his Diaries:-
“1889.
feb 19 tues 4 carts a run to Town (Kirkwall) with oats 16 qrs - took out dung from J. & W. Tait a.m.
feb 20 wed 1 cart at Town with last of oats to Cumming - took out dung.
And in 1893, 23rd Jan, 6th Feb, 8th Feb, there were entries to taking out polise!!! manure (dung) from Kirkwall. “
Probably dung middens from their horses, and probably a milking cow or two.
So too with Thurso, and the late Dr Fell’s garage next to the Coogate could previously have been the Doctor’s stable for his horse and gig, now appropriately replaced by Dunnet’s Garage Showrooms.
T.S. Allan’s Crofter’s Mill at Mary Anne’s Cottage has two straw walkers each a mere 8 inches wide, an overall width for the Mill of 20 inches allowing for side clearance. The 24” diameter open drum has high grade steel pegs mounted in strong wooden crossbar beaters.
The concave is solid and would have kept the straw inside it for maximum separation of grain before being thrown out onto the slatted straw walkers. There the grain fell through and the straw carried on over the end of the Mill. The rest of the Mill is a mere enlargement or copy of the fanners used so long ago for cleaning grain from chaff and small bits of straw. Grain fell onto a shaking or oscillating shoe with a few perforated trays to allow grain to fall gently into a draft of air from the fan, which draft swept through it and separated the grain from the chaff. The chaff was blown into a closed-off compartment at the back of the Mill under the drum, keeping it from blowing all over. The chaff being blown in that direction was a reversal of the usual direction we all knew with our thrashing mills, being the only time I have seen it so. With a small Crofters Mill in a small building that was an advantage, having the benefit of keeping straw and chaff separate in a confined space.
The chaff door of course could be opened when needed for chaff for feeding the cows or filling a chaff bed!! It brought home to me that nothing was wasted on a croft, the chaff we put so cavalierly under the cattle in the courts for bedding was a much valued feed for a crofter. I have seen a byre on a Croft bedded down for the night with just one small pail of chaff, it worked well enough as the cattle immediately lay down. No straw wasted on bedding on a Croft!!
Good grain came out of one small chute in the side of the mill into a box. In Mary Anne’s it is a bushel measure, unstamped but regulation size all the same, sitting in situ on the floor. The tails or light grains would have been delivered from a second chute into another box, or perhaps just allowed to accumulate in a small heap.
A similar Mill is balanced precariously on top of an indoor wall at Andrew Mackay’s West Greenland Farm in his spacious implement shed. I was told it was hand made in Dunbeath by an Archie Sinclair, grand-father of the present Archie Sinclair, and I presume he bought the pulleys and shafts ready made and his part would have been in assembling the bits and pieces on his own well made wooden frame. It is still in working order, but not needed now as Andrew has bought a big combine.
With Crofts there were not too many people to help, so the continuous thrashing we did on bigger farms could not be done. The sheaves would have been carted in from the stack prior to thrashing and at Mary Anne’s would have been pitched in at the high sheaf window and stored behind the Mill on the floor ready for subsequent thrashing. Then the horse, or preferably two horses if you had them, would be hitched to the horse mill course outside the barn wall and all would be ready. Even these small mills needed a good bit of power so many neighbours shared, each helping the other with a horse to make up the pair needed. They might do the same for ploughing as keeping two working horses on a small croft was neither easy nor very affordable.
A very good example of the iron harness work of a horse mill course can be seen outside the barn gable end at Laidhay at Dunbeath, well laid out and worth a look in passing if you can spare a moment, as indeed is the whole complex. Large beveled Crown wheel and small beveled sprocket at right angles on a shaft that went in underground through the barn wall to a large toothed wheel to take the drive to the Mill. One of the heavy wooden shaft poles for the horse course is inside the barn hung from the rafters.
In the wall beside the Crofter’s Mill at Mary Anne’s is a small opening window called the “Whoa Hole”. From there the Crofter could call through the open window to his horse or horses and control their movements as he thrashed, “Hup” to go and “Whoa” to stop. Well trained horses answered immediately to such commands. There were not enough people available on a croft to have someone looking after the horses while thrashing. Horses were well trained, and I have used such commands when carting neeps from the field. They would answer the commands to go or stop with these well chosen words, better trained than a tractor, moving on and halting when needed!!!
Mary Anne’s does have many other things to see and is open 2.00 pm to 4.30 pm every day till the end of September. It is well worth a visit with your overseas visitors!! I have met there on occasion, when passing by, people visiting from all over the World, and recently met with a couple from near Pukekohe in New Zealand who shopped at the same superstore there as our daughter Janet. And they were farmers too!! It is indeed a small World.
The Crofter’s Mill at Mary Anne’s Cottage, Dunnet.
Made by T.S.Allan, Cowgate, Thurso,
I have dwelt enough on flails, on small hand mills and the large high-speed drum mills I knew and worked with, but I must not overlook the Crofters Mill. The crofts of Rousam in Stronsay were peppered with them in my younger days, and most of the smaller farms too. There were so many of them at one time including Caithness but few are now left.
There is a Crofters Mill in Mary Anne’s Cottage in Dunnet, still erroneously described there as a hand mill in spite of my well-meant advice over many years that it is not. They say it was built in Orkney and came from there. Not so. The Mill may indeed have come ultimately from Orkney to Mary Annes, but it is a Crofter’s Mill built by T.S.Allan, Millwright, THURSO. His firms name is stenciled in black letters on the side. His long gone workshop was in the Coogate in Thurso next door to a blacksmith called Gunn.
Regrettably, the Coogate, that historic old Viking name for the street where old Thurso’s milking cows were kept, was changed long since to Riverside Place by the Atomics on the old Thurso Town Council, the Coogate being thought not quite proper enough for New Age Thursonians. Perhaps, but it is still good enough for not so snooty Edinburgh.
The milking cows kept in the Coogate were grazed on the Commons of Thurso above Ormlie, or any other grass available, and fed in winter on bought in or cadged hay. Just a reminder that towns not so long ago had milking cows
within their boundaries, and horses and stables too big time, both of which had dung middens needing to be cleared away and carted out of town to nearby farms.
Wm Tait, working a few miles outside of Kirkwall with his brother-in-law Robert Lennie at Work Farm, not too far to cart feed in and dung out, recorded in his Diaries:-
“1889.
feb 19 tues 4 carts a run to Town (Kirkwall) with oats 16 qrs - took out dung from J. & W. Tait a.m.
feb 20 wed 1 cart at Town with last of oats to Cumming - took out dung.
And in 1893, 23rd Jan, 6th Feb, 8th Feb, there were entries to taking out polise!!! manure (dung) from Kirkwall. “
Probably dung middens from their horses, and probably a milking cow or two.
So too with Thurso, and the late Dr Fell’s garage next to the Coogate could previously have been the Doctor’s stable for his horse and gig, now appropriately replaced by Dunnet’s Garage Showrooms.
T.S. Allan’s Crofter’s Mill at Mary Anne’s Cottage has two straw walkers each a mere 8 inches wide, an overall width for the Mill of 20 inches allowing for side clearance. The 24” diameter open drum has high grade steel pegs mounted in strong wooden crossbar beaters.
The concave is solid and would have kept the straw inside it for maximum separation of grain before being thrown out onto the slatted straw walkers. There the grain fell through and the straw carried on over the end of the Mill. The rest of the Mill is a mere enlargement or copy of the fanners used so long ago for cleaning grain from chaff and small bits of straw. Grain fell onto a shaking or oscillating shoe with a few perforated trays to allow grain to fall gently into a draft of air from the fan, which draft swept through it and separated the grain from the chaff. The chaff was blown into a closed-off compartment at the back of the Mill under the drum, keeping it from blowing all over. The chaff being blown in that direction was a reversal of the usual direction we all knew with our thrashing mills, being the only time I have seen it so. With a small Crofters Mill in a small building that was an advantage, having the benefit of keeping straw and chaff separate in a confined space.
The chaff door of course could be opened when needed for chaff for feeding the cows or filling a chaff bed!! It brought home to me that nothing was wasted on a croft, the chaff we put so cavalierly under the cattle in the courts for bedding was a much valued feed for a crofter. I have seen a byre on a Croft bedded down for the night with just one small pail of chaff, it worked well enough as the cattle immediately lay down. No straw wasted on bedding on a Croft!!
Good grain came out of one small chute in the side of the mill into a box. In Mary Anne’s it is a bushel measure, unstamped but regulation size all the same, sitting in situ on the floor. The tails or light grains would have been delivered from a second chute into another box, or perhaps just allowed to accumulate in a small heap.
A similar Mill is balanced precariously on top of an indoor wall at Andrew Mackay’s West Greenland Farm in his spacious implement shed. I was told it was hand made in Dunbeath by an Archie Sinclair, grand-father of the present Archie Sinclair, and I presume he bought the pulleys and shafts ready made and his part would have been in assembling the bits and pieces on his own well made wooden frame. It is still in working order, but not needed now as Andrew has bought a big combine.
With Crofts there were not too many people to help, so the continuous thrashing we did on bigger farms could not be done. The sheaves would have been carted in from the stack prior to thrashing and at Mary Anne’s would have been pitched in at the high sheaf window and stored behind the Mill on the floor ready for subsequent thrashing. Then the horse, or preferably two horses if you had them, would be hitched to the horse mill course outside the barn wall and all would be ready. Even these small mills needed a good bit of power so many neighbours shared, each helping the other with a horse to make up the pair needed. They might do the same for ploughing as keeping two working horses on a small croft was neither easy nor very affordable.
A very good example of the iron harness work of a horse mill course can be seen outside the barn gable end at Laidhay at Dunbeath, well laid out and worth a look in passing if you can spare a moment, as indeed is the whole complex. Large beveled Crown wheel and small beveled sprocket at right angles on a shaft that went in underground through the barn wall to a large toothed wheel to take the drive to the Mill. One of the heavy wooden shaft poles for the horse course is inside the barn hung from the rafters.
In the wall beside the Crofter’s Mill at Mary Anne’s is a small opening window called the “Whoa Hole”. From there the Crofter could call through the open window to his horse or horses and control their movements as he thrashed, “Hup” to go and “Whoa” to stop. Well trained horses answered immediately to such commands. There were not enough people available on a croft to have someone looking after the horses while thrashing. Horses were well trained, and I have used such commands when carting neeps from the field. They would answer the commands to go or stop with these well chosen words, better trained than a tractor, moving on and halting when needed!!!
Mary Anne’s does have many other things to see and is open 2.00 pm to 4.30 pm every day till the end of September. It is well worth a visit with your overseas visitors!! I have met there on occasion, when passing by, people visiting from all over the World, and recently met with a couple from near Pukekohe in New Zealand who shopped at the same superstore there as our daughter Janet. And they were farmers too!! It is indeed a small World.
Friday 29 July 2011
No 100. My Worst Sea Voyage on the Leda. Dec .1959.
No 100. My Worst Sea Voyage.
To mark a Century of Articles for the Groat written under “Rain on my Window”, I took a long look back over the ones I have done, and enjoyed doing. I have had a lot of fun in writing of my long gone times, a lot of good crack with many readers nearly as old as myself, and with not so many now even older !!!
The sea is probably my favourite topic, with recorded family connections going far back into the early 1600s.
I turn to John Masefield’s memorable poem:-
“ I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.
I must down go to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way, where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.
On Monday 7th Dec 1959 Nettie and I made the first of our many trips to Norway to visit my sister Isobel, married Dec 1958 to Thorlief Johannessen. They lived in the town of Voss inland from Bergen.The sailing was from Newcastle to Bergen on the Leda of the Fred. Olsen Line. Sailing time from North Shields was 4 pm. On board we went out on the boat deck to have a brief look in the gathering gloom at the Tyne River. On the South Shields side were the huge cranes of the ship building industry that is no longer there. The wind had got up to a ferocious gale, the noise was horrendous, howling through the towering riverside cranes snugged down against the wind.
Going down the River Tyne at 4pm the ship was already listing to port with the weight of the South Easterly gale on her starboard side. Immediately the ship’s public address system called us all to assemble in the saloons where we had a head count and were told not to go outdoors under any circumstances. A crew-man at each door took care of that. When all heads had been counted the double steel outer doors were shut and locked. Porthole and window steel covers were likewise shuttered and locked. Ominous indeed.
We were told there would be no dinner that evening and were advised to go to our cabins forthwith and stay there. Suggested, indeed advised, was to change into our night attire and take to our bunks. We were in for a very bad crossing.
Our small cabin was well aft with an upper and lower bunk, probably about the cheapest we could get!! Drawbacks were closeness to the noisy propeller shaft and we would get an exaggerated movement compared to a cabin midships. No port holes either. We were entombed.
Abruptly the ship’s easy movement down the sheltered River Tyne changed as we crossed the Bar into the teeth of one of the heaviest South East gales ever recorded, immediately pitching and falling in the huge seas we could not see. Up and down, up and down, that stern cabin was no place to be that night.
We slept not at all. Our upper and lower bunks against the bulkhead had an outer rail like a hospital bed which kept us safely in place. As we pitched we would rise on the uplift, fall back down to meet our bunk on its way up again. Nearest thing to a bucking bronco is the best way I can describe it.
Over that long midwinter night we held on. The Leda pitched mightily. Then it rolled. Then it corkscrewed, a particularly bad movement. Then it tried to do áll three together. We could feel the ship was over shallower water, then deeper. The sea changed in direction and malevolence. Possibly the Captain changed course now and again as the sea dictated. I think he would have tried to head into the gale when he could as that pitching movement was the least uncomfortable.
Anyway we had every possible gyration a ship could go through other than turning turtle or just diving straight down. It did happen to a destroyer during the 1939/45 War which disappeared in an instant with all hands in full view of other ships, its back broken. I think we were too frightened to be frightened!! Just hold on, speak to each other now and again for re-assurance. That night was endless.
Morning came according to our watches but still the hell continued. Eventually a perceptible lessening of movement, enough to get our clothes tidy. By my calculation we had to be nearing the coast of Norway and coming into the lee of the land. We were due into Bergen at 1pm. No point in leaving the cabin just yet, and we were not hungry. No breakfast was served anyway that morning.
Then a calming, we were entering Bergen Fiord though still a fair bit to go. We ventured onto the now level deck to breathe deeply of fresh sharp air and enjoy the spectacular beauty of one of Norway’s wonderful fiords. The tops of far away inland mountains were snow capped.
Small islands slid past, wooden houses balanced precariously on the shore edge with small boats garaged to tiny timber jetties. The water was calm. The wind still howled above us but less so. The water-side wooden houses had splendid and varied colours, none of our British “You can have any colour you like as long as it is grey.”
Then a wonderful announcement, we would have plenty time for lunch before we docked in Bergen. The Captain came on over the public address thanking us in Norse and English, admitting it was the worst crossing he had ever done. He told us they would try to make up for it with the best lunch they could provide, and hoped we would enjoy Norwegian Cuisine.
And it was so. Buffet style, help yourself, unlimited lobster, crab, monstrous prawns, fresh salmon, smoked salmon with soured cream, gravalax salmon, pickled herring as only Norwegians can do, spiced herring, fairly tasteless fish balls like eating sea foam, nothing to get a bite on; meat balls Norwegian style which I liked, slices of cured ham Norwegian style, lamb in various guises, bowls of hot hard-boiled eggs, fresh bread and tasty rolls that the galley crew must have been working on as we neared the coast, croissants, real butter, real cream, jugs of good rich creamy milk, kultur milk very like the buttermilk of my youth and to which I became quite addicted, cheese in abundance, both Norwegian and French. Seriously good coffee with lumps of rock sugar that you put into your mouth and drank your hot coffee over, delicious. We made up for the missed meals, our appetites quite back to normal. Out of the now unshuttered windows we saw Bergen Fiord slide past, an ever changing kaleidoscope of colour.
Only when we reached Voss did we hear of the savagery of that storm. The eight members of the crew of the Broughty Ferry lifeboat Mona lost their lives going to the assistance of the North Carr Lightship which had broken from its moorings opposite Fife Ness. After the Lightship had been adrift for 36 hours the crew of seven were taken off by helicopter.
Two ships - the Norwegian freighter Elfrida and the German coaster Merkur, had foundered in the North Sea with a loss of 27 lives. Other vessels had been riding out the storm since it began, a number of ships had not been heard of for days.
Back home in Caithness there was another tragic loss that night of which we heard on the Radio. The trawler George Robb, outward bound from Aberdeen, was driven onto Duncansby Head, missing safety round Duncansby Head by a short half mile. The Coastguard helplessly watched the stricken vessel from the cliff top, unable to do anything to help. They fired a rocket to try to carry a line to the ship, the gale blew it back over their heads!!! At times they had to go on their hands and knees or be blown over. The twelve crew men of the George Robb lost their lives. So too did Eric Campbell, Station Officer of the Coastguard in Wick, who collapsed and died on the cliff top. Thirteen lost lives!!
A comment made by John Green, New Houses, Groats, summed it all up:- "The siren was being sounded at five minute intervals," he said, "but after it went four or five times, it became silent."
To mark a Century of Articles for the Groat written under “Rain on my Window”, I took a long look back over the ones I have done, and enjoyed doing. I have had a lot of fun in writing of my long gone times, a lot of good crack with many readers nearly as old as myself, and with not so many now even older !!!
The sea is probably my favourite topic, with recorded family connections going far back into the early 1600s.
I turn to John Masefield’s memorable poem:-
“ I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.
I must down go to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way, where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.
On Monday 7th Dec 1959 Nettie and I made the first of our many trips to Norway to visit my sister Isobel, married Dec 1958 to Thorlief Johannessen. They lived in the town of Voss inland from Bergen.The sailing was from Newcastle to Bergen on the Leda of the Fred. Olsen Line. Sailing time from North Shields was 4 pm. On board we went out on the boat deck to have a brief look in the gathering gloom at the Tyne River. On the South Shields side were the huge cranes of the ship building industry that is no longer there. The wind had got up to a ferocious gale, the noise was horrendous, howling through the towering riverside cranes snugged down against the wind.
Going down the River Tyne at 4pm the ship was already listing to port with the weight of the South Easterly gale on her starboard side. Immediately the ship’s public address system called us all to assemble in the saloons where we had a head count and were told not to go outdoors under any circumstances. A crew-man at each door took care of that. When all heads had been counted the double steel outer doors were shut and locked. Porthole and window steel covers were likewise shuttered and locked. Ominous indeed.
We were told there would be no dinner that evening and were advised to go to our cabins forthwith and stay there. Suggested, indeed advised, was to change into our night attire and take to our bunks. We were in for a very bad crossing.
Our small cabin was well aft with an upper and lower bunk, probably about the cheapest we could get!! Drawbacks were closeness to the noisy propeller shaft and we would get an exaggerated movement compared to a cabin midships. No port holes either. We were entombed.
Abruptly the ship’s easy movement down the sheltered River Tyne changed as we crossed the Bar into the teeth of one of the heaviest South East gales ever recorded, immediately pitching and falling in the huge seas we could not see. Up and down, up and down, that stern cabin was no place to be that night.
We slept not at all. Our upper and lower bunks against the bulkhead had an outer rail like a hospital bed which kept us safely in place. As we pitched we would rise on the uplift, fall back down to meet our bunk on its way up again. Nearest thing to a bucking bronco is the best way I can describe it.
Over that long midwinter night we held on. The Leda pitched mightily. Then it rolled. Then it corkscrewed, a particularly bad movement. Then it tried to do áll three together. We could feel the ship was over shallower water, then deeper. The sea changed in direction and malevolence. Possibly the Captain changed course now and again as the sea dictated. I think he would have tried to head into the gale when he could as that pitching movement was the least uncomfortable.
Anyway we had every possible gyration a ship could go through other than turning turtle or just diving straight down. It did happen to a destroyer during the 1939/45 War which disappeared in an instant with all hands in full view of other ships, its back broken. I think we were too frightened to be frightened!! Just hold on, speak to each other now and again for re-assurance. That night was endless.
Morning came according to our watches but still the hell continued. Eventually a perceptible lessening of movement, enough to get our clothes tidy. By my calculation we had to be nearing the coast of Norway and coming into the lee of the land. We were due into Bergen at 1pm. No point in leaving the cabin just yet, and we were not hungry. No breakfast was served anyway that morning.
Then a calming, we were entering Bergen Fiord though still a fair bit to go. We ventured onto the now level deck to breathe deeply of fresh sharp air and enjoy the spectacular beauty of one of Norway’s wonderful fiords. The tops of far away inland mountains were snow capped.
Small islands slid past, wooden houses balanced precariously on the shore edge with small boats garaged to tiny timber jetties. The water was calm. The wind still howled above us but less so. The water-side wooden houses had splendid and varied colours, none of our British “You can have any colour you like as long as it is grey.”
Then a wonderful announcement, we would have plenty time for lunch before we docked in Bergen. The Captain came on over the public address thanking us in Norse and English, admitting it was the worst crossing he had ever done. He told us they would try to make up for it with the best lunch they could provide, and hoped we would enjoy Norwegian Cuisine.
And it was so. Buffet style, help yourself, unlimited lobster, crab, monstrous prawns, fresh salmon, smoked salmon with soured cream, gravalax salmon, pickled herring as only Norwegians can do, spiced herring, fairly tasteless fish balls like eating sea foam, nothing to get a bite on; meat balls Norwegian style which I liked, slices of cured ham Norwegian style, lamb in various guises, bowls of hot hard-boiled eggs, fresh bread and tasty rolls that the galley crew must have been working on as we neared the coast, croissants, real butter, real cream, jugs of good rich creamy milk, kultur milk very like the buttermilk of my youth and to which I became quite addicted, cheese in abundance, both Norwegian and French. Seriously good coffee with lumps of rock sugar that you put into your mouth and drank your hot coffee over, delicious. We made up for the missed meals, our appetites quite back to normal. Out of the now unshuttered windows we saw Bergen Fiord slide past, an ever changing kaleidoscope of colour.
Only when we reached Voss did we hear of the savagery of that storm. The eight members of the crew of the Broughty Ferry lifeboat Mona lost their lives going to the assistance of the North Carr Lightship which had broken from its moorings opposite Fife Ness. After the Lightship had been adrift for 36 hours the crew of seven were taken off by helicopter.
Two ships - the Norwegian freighter Elfrida and the German coaster Merkur, had foundered in the North Sea with a loss of 27 lives. Other vessels had been riding out the storm since it began, a number of ships had not been heard of for days.
Back home in Caithness there was another tragic loss that night of which we heard on the Radio. The trawler George Robb, outward bound from Aberdeen, was driven onto Duncansby Head, missing safety round Duncansby Head by a short half mile. The Coastguard helplessly watched the stricken vessel from the cliff top, unable to do anything to help. They fired a rocket to try to carry a line to the ship, the gale blew it back over their heads!!! At times they had to go on their hands and knees or be blown over. The twelve crew men of the George Robb lost their lives. So too did Eric Campbell, Station Officer of the Coastguard in Wick, who collapsed and died on the cliff top. Thirteen lost lives!!
A comment made by John Green, New Houses, Groats, summed it all up:- "The siren was being sounded at five minute intervals," he said, "but after it went four or five times, it became silent."
Friday 22 July 2011
Friday 15 July 2011
No 98. Old Threshing Mills.
No 98. SIMPLE THRASHING MILLS.
On a recent visit to Stroma, the birth place of my maternal grandmother Isabella Robertson, Sharon and I saw the remains of a very simple threshing machine. Little more than a device, it lay scattered on the barn floor in the steading just above the Haven. An old map shows the house as being occupied by Manson. It was a mirror image of an old hand mill I saw recentally with David Oag at Dalmore, Invergordon, photo attached. David keeps some wonderful old museum-worthy relics as a hobby. I hasten to add it was not his proper threshing mill !!
But it is in working order, if you felt like a bit of really hard work, while the Stroma one lay in scow. [ Orcadian for small bits!!! ] Really just a grain stripper to take the grain off a sheaf, one sheaf at a time and don’t feed too fast. The man on the handle had a hard job to do. That mill would just strip off the oats from the straw but not sort out the grain nor blow away the chaff, merely dump it on the floor below. The straw would come out over the end, thown out by the drum. It was so basic that you could hold on to the sheaf for a while till the drum had done its work of stripping. No shakers or any other frills at all, just a wooden pegged drum and light enough to be carried around by two handles at either end.
In my early days in Stronsay I saw crofters using something similar but never one quite so rudimentary. As I had seen David’s one some time ago at Dalmore, to find the same on Stroma gave me quite a shock, though it shouldn’t have. There are many other rusting relics of bygone farming days lying around Stroma, poignant reminders of the past. There was, among other items, the remains of an old Fordson tractor, an early petrol/paraffin Fergy, the starting handle still sticking out of its front, the carburettor still there along with some sparking plugs now rusted into it forever, a lorry chassis or two, many other odds and ends. Stroma could well supply a Museum if all was collected in one spot before it all rusts away entirely in the salty air!!
The Rousam crofters in Stronsay had some very simple and similar methods of threshing grain. The basic one was the flail, two hard wood staves joined by a leather souple, and very hard work indeed. To see a man using the flail was a ballet on its own, easy when you knew how. The tyro trying to emulate him was to court a crack on the back of the head, quite sore too!!
Next up the scale was indeed the hand mill, but the ones I saw were not so rudimentary as the Stroma relic. They still depended on a man laboriously turning a handle with someone else feeding slowly and carefully into the drum. As children we sometimes were allowed when visiting a croft to try one, there was little enough to go wrong. Still, one never knows with even the simplest of machines.
The next threshing mill was next Yernesetter in Stronsay, or rather the old steading that had belonged to one of the Churches, sometimes called the Chapel. Yernesetter was a frequent haunt of ours, their children and ourselves were of a time. The Chapel had a good barn with an old mill powered by horses walking the everlasting circular horse-course treadmill. It had a large diameter slow moving drum with hard wood replaceable pegs. There had been a similar one at Whitehall but Davie Davidson of Robert Scarth’s in Kirkwall, a most skilful millwright whom I got to know well over the years, had rebuilt it in my very early days with the high speed drum I really remember. The old one is but a faint memory, the drum lay out in the stackyard until it vanished.
The old mill at the Chapel still turned sweetly on the old bearings, and I think the Marshalls at Yernesetter used it to thrash their crop at one time and used the barn for straw and grain. It was in a fair sized building, still in use now as an implement store for another farm. The work rate was slow but quite enough for one pair of horses. These old mills were incredibly well made, even if using just wood and nails and skillfull joinery and big cast iron bearings with brass shells. The woods used I do not know entirely but ash would certainly have been one. Pitch Pine and Oak featured also for many farm uses other than just the trevise posts in the stable for the horses.
I still marvel going into an old steading and finding the mill still there. One remains at the old steading at Gillock, Wick. It turns as sweetly as ever, the belts still good, the bearings still well oiled though unused this long time.
I think the threshing mill at any place we visited as boys had a great fascination for us. The byres were predictable and somewhat smelly as byres were. But the mills with their sheaf lofts and grain lofts and straw barns provided a wonderful variety of styles and shapes and layouts. No two were alike, and had been modernised if at all as the buildings allowed. I never saw a new barn built in Stronsay, indeed apart from the Madhoos at our father’s other farm of Airy I never saw a new farm building built there in my time. Some of the old steadings were massive and lent themsleves to adaption. Others were a miracle of make do and mend.
Back in Caithness I looked in at Laidhay the other day just to remind me of what they had. Outside is the iron shafts and pinions of an old horse mill course though it would have been just under the surface when in use. In the barn stood two of these old hand mills I saw in Stroma, but these were in superb working order, standing one either way so you could see the ends without going to the wall, so to speak.
Next to them at Laidhay was a grain fanners. It reminded me that in bygone days fanners were an essential adjunct to these old mills, needed to separate chaff and odd bits of straw and weed seeds to leave a clean sample for the miller or for selling. We did such at Isauld in my time to clean up a sample to impress the meal dealer, or for our own seed oats, though the mill was excellent. Seriously hard work.
Fanners must have predated the full threshing mills that developed over the years. The diaries of William Tait of 1880 to 1941 contained monotonous and numerous references to dressing oats, practically every wet day was spent in the loft doing that boring task.
The example of a fanners at Laidhay is fully functional and of modern design. When I saw the two together, hand mill and fanners, the whole mileu of mechanising of threshing in bygone days fell into place. Only later would the full threshing mill be developed, Scotsman Andrew Meikle being given the credit for inventing the first one in 1784.
The later expansion of use of these machines with the need for not so many workers led to the Grain Riots. Notable were the Swing Riots of 1830 with farmers’ threshing machines being smashed as they were doing away with the need for so many workers. The rioters were dealt with very harshly, nine of the principal ones were hanged and 450 deported to Australia!!!
On a recent visit to Stroma, the birth place of my maternal grandmother Isabella Robertson, Sharon and I saw the remains of a very simple threshing machine. Little more than a device, it lay scattered on the barn floor in the steading just above the Haven. An old map shows the house as being occupied by Manson. It was a mirror image of an old hand mill I saw recentally with David Oag at Dalmore, Invergordon, photo attached. David keeps some wonderful old museum-worthy relics as a hobby. I hasten to add it was not his proper threshing mill !!
But it is in working order, if you felt like a bit of really hard work, while the Stroma one lay in scow. [ Orcadian for small bits!!! ] Really just a grain stripper to take the grain off a sheaf, one sheaf at a time and don’t feed too fast. The man on the handle had a hard job to do. That mill would just strip off the oats from the straw but not sort out the grain nor blow away the chaff, merely dump it on the floor below. The straw would come out over the end, thown out by the drum. It was so basic that you could hold on to the sheaf for a while till the drum had done its work of stripping. No shakers or any other frills at all, just a wooden pegged drum and light enough to be carried around by two handles at either end.
In my early days in Stronsay I saw crofters using something similar but never one quite so rudimentary. As I had seen David’s one some time ago at Dalmore, to find the same on Stroma gave me quite a shock, though it shouldn’t have. There are many other rusting relics of bygone farming days lying around Stroma, poignant reminders of the past. There was, among other items, the remains of an old Fordson tractor, an early petrol/paraffin Fergy, the starting handle still sticking out of its front, the carburettor still there along with some sparking plugs now rusted into it forever, a lorry chassis or two, many other odds and ends. Stroma could well supply a Museum if all was collected in one spot before it all rusts away entirely in the salty air!!
The Rousam crofters in Stronsay had some very simple and similar methods of threshing grain. The basic one was the flail, two hard wood staves joined by a leather souple, and very hard work indeed. To see a man using the flail was a ballet on its own, easy when you knew how. The tyro trying to emulate him was to court a crack on the back of the head, quite sore too!!
Next up the scale was indeed the hand mill, but the ones I saw were not so rudimentary as the Stroma relic. They still depended on a man laboriously turning a handle with someone else feeding slowly and carefully into the drum. As children we sometimes were allowed when visiting a croft to try one, there was little enough to go wrong. Still, one never knows with even the simplest of machines.
The next threshing mill was next Yernesetter in Stronsay, or rather the old steading that had belonged to one of the Churches, sometimes called the Chapel. Yernesetter was a frequent haunt of ours, their children and ourselves were of a time. The Chapel had a good barn with an old mill powered by horses walking the everlasting circular horse-course treadmill. It had a large diameter slow moving drum with hard wood replaceable pegs. There had been a similar one at Whitehall but Davie Davidson of Robert Scarth’s in Kirkwall, a most skilful millwright whom I got to know well over the years, had rebuilt it in my very early days with the high speed drum I really remember. The old one is but a faint memory, the drum lay out in the stackyard until it vanished.
The old mill at the Chapel still turned sweetly on the old bearings, and I think the Marshalls at Yernesetter used it to thrash their crop at one time and used the barn for straw and grain. It was in a fair sized building, still in use now as an implement store for another farm. The work rate was slow but quite enough for one pair of horses. These old mills were incredibly well made, even if using just wood and nails and skillfull joinery and big cast iron bearings with brass shells. The woods used I do not know entirely but ash would certainly have been one. Pitch Pine and Oak featured also for many farm uses other than just the trevise posts in the stable for the horses.
I still marvel going into an old steading and finding the mill still there. One remains at the old steading at Gillock, Wick. It turns as sweetly as ever, the belts still good, the bearings still well oiled though unused this long time.
I think the threshing mill at any place we visited as boys had a great fascination for us. The byres were predictable and somewhat smelly as byres were. But the mills with their sheaf lofts and grain lofts and straw barns provided a wonderful variety of styles and shapes and layouts. No two were alike, and had been modernised if at all as the buildings allowed. I never saw a new barn built in Stronsay, indeed apart from the Madhoos at our father’s other farm of Airy I never saw a new farm building built there in my time. Some of the old steadings were massive and lent themsleves to adaption. Others were a miracle of make do and mend.
Back in Caithness I looked in at Laidhay the other day just to remind me of what they had. Outside is the iron shafts and pinions of an old horse mill course though it would have been just under the surface when in use. In the barn stood two of these old hand mills I saw in Stroma, but these were in superb working order, standing one either way so you could see the ends without going to the wall, so to speak.
Next to them at Laidhay was a grain fanners. It reminded me that in bygone days fanners were an essential adjunct to these old mills, needed to separate chaff and odd bits of straw and weed seeds to leave a clean sample for the miller or for selling. We did such at Isauld in my time to clean up a sample to impress the meal dealer, or for our own seed oats, though the mill was excellent. Seriously hard work.
Fanners must have predated the full threshing mills that developed over the years. The diaries of William Tait of 1880 to 1941 contained monotonous and numerous references to dressing oats, practically every wet day was spent in the loft doing that boring task.
The example of a fanners at Laidhay is fully functional and of modern design. When I saw the two together, hand mill and fanners, the whole mileu of mechanising of threshing in bygone days fell into place. Only later would the full threshing mill be developed, Scotsman Andrew Meikle being given the credit for inventing the first one in 1784.
The later expansion of use of these machines with the need for not so many workers led to the Grain Riots. Notable were the Swing Riots of 1830 with farmers’ threshing machines being smashed as they were doing away with the need for so many workers. The rioters were dealt with very harshly, nine of the principal ones were hanged and 450 deported to Australia!!!
Friday 8 July 2011
No 96. Pigeons. pb 8thy July, 2011.
A long time ago, but yesterday too. Rain On My Window (Tears in My Eyes) will be an ongoing tale of my early memories of life shared by my younger brother David on Whitehall Farm in Stronsay, Orkney, of our childhood on a working farm in the 1930s before we lost our innocence.
No 97. One for the pot!!.
Today shooting is not so accepted as once it was but these were the times we lived in long ago. The old phrase “One for the pot” applied to many things, a salmon from a river pool, a deer off the heather hill, a pheasant out of a tall tree on a dark night. Pigeons were one of them but they were, though not domesticated, to some extent farmed.
Most farms and all large houses had a doocot for pigeons. At Whitehall it was at the far end of the sheaf loft, partitioned off and with a small door for entry. In the gable end were an array of pigeon-holes with a series of nest boxes inside along the walls which you can still visualise if you look in at any Post Office sorting office. The word will stay with us forever in daily usage though few might now know its origin.
Pigeon lofts, or doocots, were a feature of most farms and most large houses. In Caithness there is one at Freswick Castle but I believe the roof has now fallen in on this historic old building. The last time I saw it there was a wonderful heap of very old organic fertiliser inside. That must have been made good use of in bygone days in the Castle kitchen garden. There is one at Brabster House well away from the rest of the buildings, one at Dunbeath Castle just to seaward of the main road South, one at Stemster Mains up from the House. There is one on Stroma at the old Cemetary in the upper part of the famed Kennedy Mausoleum, beautifully built in stone. There is one at the Mill at Westerdale where I have shot pigeons as they escaped from the doocot. Fast work too while it lasted. There are many more scattered round.
At Cleat in Westray our Uncle Bill had a doocot, part of the farm steading. We had an adventure there. Our cousin Dave was home from studying Medicine at Edinburgh University. We were visiting and we had an evening after dark catching pigeons for the pot. A herring net was let down to close off the pigeon holes, then with tiny torches we caught our dinner. Today I would not, but this was how we lived long ago, and it should be recorded.
We take a different view now of these birds, they are not with us in the same vast numbers and we farmers have much to do with that. Modern farming has become much more efficient as we feed ever-growing numbers of people. The grain that sustained pigeons among so many other birds is swept efficiently up by combines and immediately into vermin-proof containers so the stooks and stacks and weed seeds that fed so many birds in my early days is long gone. There are some who would have us go back to the binder and stook, indeed there are schemes existing to be paid to grow grain and not to harvest it, to leave it for the birds. And there are people who are deadly serious about it, would have it increased and would indeed make it obligatory.
At Isauld in days long gone away we had flocks of blue rock pigeons sweeping across the Bay from Sandside Head on their way to feed on Upper Dounreay, or anywhere else. On occasion there would be one white one among the throng. They ran to their own clock, a predictable time in the mornings and a certain time in the afternoons on their way back to the Cliffs of Sandside where they dwelt in the caves. Called rock pigeons but just the same kind as the homing pigeon we still have. Or cluttering up Trafalgar Square for the tourists to feed, and adorning the adjacent buildings and Nelson’s Column in the usual manner!!! Fast fliers.
There were similar flocks at the back of Holborn Head, unfortunately featured in a really bad accident some years ago when three men I knew lost their lives on a pigeon shooting expedition into the caves with a boat. It was thought an unexpectedly big swell lifted their boat up against the roof of the cave and smashed the cabin with fatal consequences. The pigeons are no longer there.
We had our own litttle window on the pigeons. In the Whitehall straw barn pigeons at times would nest between the couple legs. There they laid their two white eggs which we would watch until they hatched. The chicks grew rapidly under our eyes till fully fledged and then out into the wide world. The pigeons were quite tame and not easily disturbed though we did not touch the nest nor come too close nor touch the eggs. Our vantage point for viewing was the sheaf loft looking out at a partition opening into the straw barn.
We could make friends, well, sort off, with a few pigeons. There was often some recognizable touch, a bit of white here, a mottled wing, a red or pinkish anyway pigeon or some other indivdual characteristic.
There were the ones that stayed close with us in winter, usually in the straw barn. A few grains of oats or some small titbits of bread were enough to make them quite friendly. Not to touch but to come down and pick our offerings off the ground. We tried to get them to eat out of our hands but, close as they came, we never quite succeeded. One would appear at the back door now and again for a few crumbs or to pick at a bit of stale bread thrown out for it, strutting proudly around with one eye cocked towards us, the other on the cat.
General feeding for the pigeons in winter was the stack yard. Blue clouds would descend upon the corn stacks, particularly when there was snow. Equally they descended upon the steadles after a stack had been taken in for threshing, cleaning up with many other birds, particularly blackbirds and sparrows. They would cluster on the barn roof, quite happy to share a bit of space with us. They would descend upon a field to pick up I know not what. They did not like the turnip field though an abandance of weed seeds were usually there. Landing among the turnips shaws I think was not to their liking.
Clover was, and both the rock pigeon and particularly the wood pigeon would take their share of the sweet leaves. The wood pigeons from the woods at Achvarasdal were lethal to young turnips at Isauld, sitting on the field dyke before swooping down for a good bite. Thankfully the young turnip plants grew fast and were soon beyond too much harm, though the headrigs took a battering.
There were some who had homing pigeons and now and again one would go AWOL and join up with the wild bunch. A ring on the leg denoted where from if one by mischance appeared among the shot ones. The owner was interested in finding out it’s fate and where found, but not in getting it back!! A homing pigeon that did not come back home was a dead loss in more ways than one!!!. You could not really blame one for joining up with it’s country cousins anyway.
No 97. One for the pot!!.
Today shooting is not so accepted as once it was but these were the times we lived in long ago. The old phrase “One for the pot” applied to many things, a salmon from a river pool, a deer off the heather hill, a pheasant out of a tall tree on a dark night. Pigeons were one of them but they were, though not domesticated, to some extent farmed.
Most farms and all large houses had a doocot for pigeons. At Whitehall it was at the far end of the sheaf loft, partitioned off and with a small door for entry. In the gable end were an array of pigeon-holes with a series of nest boxes inside along the walls which you can still visualise if you look in at any Post Office sorting office. The word will stay with us forever in daily usage though few might now know its origin.
Pigeon lofts, or doocots, were a feature of most farms and most large houses. In Caithness there is one at Freswick Castle but I believe the roof has now fallen in on this historic old building. The last time I saw it there was a wonderful heap of very old organic fertiliser inside. That must have been made good use of in bygone days in the Castle kitchen garden. There is one at Brabster House well away from the rest of the buildings, one at Dunbeath Castle just to seaward of the main road South, one at Stemster Mains up from the House. There is one on Stroma at the old Cemetary in the upper part of the famed Kennedy Mausoleum, beautifully built in stone. There is one at the Mill at Westerdale where I have shot pigeons as they escaped from the doocot. Fast work too while it lasted. There are many more scattered round.
At Cleat in Westray our Uncle Bill had a doocot, part of the farm steading. We had an adventure there. Our cousin Dave was home from studying Medicine at Edinburgh University. We were visiting and we had an evening after dark catching pigeons for the pot. A herring net was let down to close off the pigeon holes, then with tiny torches we caught our dinner. Today I would not, but this was how we lived long ago, and it should be recorded.
We take a different view now of these birds, they are not with us in the same vast numbers and we farmers have much to do with that. Modern farming has become much more efficient as we feed ever-growing numbers of people. The grain that sustained pigeons among so many other birds is swept efficiently up by combines and immediately into vermin-proof containers so the stooks and stacks and weed seeds that fed so many birds in my early days is long gone. There are some who would have us go back to the binder and stook, indeed there are schemes existing to be paid to grow grain and not to harvest it, to leave it for the birds. And there are people who are deadly serious about it, would have it increased and would indeed make it obligatory.
At Isauld in days long gone away we had flocks of blue rock pigeons sweeping across the Bay from Sandside Head on their way to feed on Upper Dounreay, or anywhere else. On occasion there would be one white one among the throng. They ran to their own clock, a predictable time in the mornings and a certain time in the afternoons on their way back to the Cliffs of Sandside where they dwelt in the caves. Called rock pigeons but just the same kind as the homing pigeon we still have. Or cluttering up Trafalgar Square for the tourists to feed, and adorning the adjacent buildings and Nelson’s Column in the usual manner!!! Fast fliers.
There were similar flocks at the back of Holborn Head, unfortunately featured in a really bad accident some years ago when three men I knew lost their lives on a pigeon shooting expedition into the caves with a boat. It was thought an unexpectedly big swell lifted their boat up against the roof of the cave and smashed the cabin with fatal consequences. The pigeons are no longer there.
We had our own litttle window on the pigeons. In the Whitehall straw barn pigeons at times would nest between the couple legs. There they laid their two white eggs which we would watch until they hatched. The chicks grew rapidly under our eyes till fully fledged and then out into the wide world. The pigeons were quite tame and not easily disturbed though we did not touch the nest nor come too close nor touch the eggs. Our vantage point for viewing was the sheaf loft looking out at a partition opening into the straw barn.
We could make friends, well, sort off, with a few pigeons. There was often some recognizable touch, a bit of white here, a mottled wing, a red or pinkish anyway pigeon or some other indivdual characteristic.
There were the ones that stayed close with us in winter, usually in the straw barn. A few grains of oats or some small titbits of bread were enough to make them quite friendly. Not to touch but to come down and pick our offerings off the ground. We tried to get them to eat out of our hands but, close as they came, we never quite succeeded. One would appear at the back door now and again for a few crumbs or to pick at a bit of stale bread thrown out for it, strutting proudly around with one eye cocked towards us, the other on the cat.
General feeding for the pigeons in winter was the stack yard. Blue clouds would descend upon the corn stacks, particularly when there was snow. Equally they descended upon the steadles after a stack had been taken in for threshing, cleaning up with many other birds, particularly blackbirds and sparrows. They would cluster on the barn roof, quite happy to share a bit of space with us. They would descend upon a field to pick up I know not what. They did not like the turnip field though an abandance of weed seeds were usually there. Landing among the turnips shaws I think was not to their liking.
Clover was, and both the rock pigeon and particularly the wood pigeon would take their share of the sweet leaves. The wood pigeons from the woods at Achvarasdal were lethal to young turnips at Isauld, sitting on the field dyke before swooping down for a good bite. Thankfully the young turnip plants grew fast and were soon beyond too much harm, though the headrigs took a battering.
There were some who had homing pigeons and now and again one would go AWOL and join up with the wild bunch. A ring on the leg denoted where from if one by mischance appeared among the shot ones. The owner was interested in finding out it’s fate and where found, but not in getting it back!! A homing pigeon that did not come back home was a dead loss in more ways than one!!!. You could not really blame one for joining up with it’s country cousins anyway.
Friday 17 June 2011
N o 95. One man and his dog.
David on Whitehall Farm in Stronsay, Orkney, of our childhood on a working farm in the 1930s before we lost our innocence.
No 95. One man and his dog.
My first friend was Spot, father’s old dog, a bowfert on the old style with shaggy coat, brown and white, heavy and capable of dealing with sheep or cattle without fear or favour. Not many of these hardy old-style dogs around now, the sleek nervy Border Collie has taken over.
Spot was coming on a bit and you could teach him nothing. But he was big enough that when we were still small we tried to ride on his back. Very patient. We tried to make and put a harness on him to pull our sledge but not too effective. He would lie patiently at the back door until father came out, then off they went. Trim was his younger companion, a more traditional dog but chained up when not working. I think our father did not trust him too much, but it is also a truism that two dogs can get up to mischief if allowed loose together that neither would do on their own.
I had little to do with dogs then for many years until working at Greenland Mains. Donald Nicholson was our shepherd then and I was in my very early years of learning a trade which you never cease to learn, i.e. farming.
Donald had a Beardie, I forget his name or where he came from. Possibly I think from his Coghill relatives at Kirk, Bower. Lets call him Beardie. Again not many left. Hair down over his eyes like a Romney sheep. Quiet, but when we were going out of Dickies lambing field heading for our 3 o’clock cup of tea at Donald’s nearby house, we would find the dog no longer at our heels.
Maybe three hundred ewes or more in the lambing field. But out of that number Beardie would appear gently moving a ewe towards us, picked out by himself I know not how.
If Donald said ”Leave it and come here”, Beardie ignored him. He knew better. And sure enough when he had taken the ewe up to us it was in the process of lambing. We had not seen it, but he had. And knew what to do. Take the ewe to us for assistance, even if it was a perfectly normal lambing with no distress. No hurry. And he was always right. Quite uncanny, we could only marvel.
He would catch any lamb we wanted by nosing it over on the run, then lying on top of the lamb and holding it down gently with his fore paws until we came up. That was sometimes needed when we saw what we called a “Stuck Lamb” out in the field, a few days old, a euphemism for a lamb that badly needed it’s bottom cleaned. Not attended to that lamb would die. Beardie knew it, and again would take appropriate action even on his own. Beardies had a great reputation for brains, and no way am I going to dispute it.
Donald had various dogs but had one bitch who produced a litter to Beardie, though none of them were Beardies. I was usually working at the Square in winter with the cattle and brother David was working out doors. But going down to the lambing field in the evenings was our normal practice.
We each got a pup from Donald, I think David’s was white, mine was the traditional black with a very little bit of white under his throat.
We were introduced by Donald to the choosing of a pup, six weeks old and time to wean them. Donald told us to pick one and lift him by the tail. If he squealed or struggled, reject him. If he had a wall eye, reject him. If the pup neither squealed nor struggled but just looked at you, put him on one side as a possible. Such stoicism was desirable.
I am sure today that process would be banned if the Welfare people knew of it, but we were picking a working dog to share the hard vicissitudes of life with us and that method of choosing had a long history. Then final choosing. Which one did we fancy. Which one met your eye without looking away. Look at the pup’s feet - big feet, big dog. Even at six weeks they would show very positive individuality, a foretaste of what they would become when grown up working dogs. I called my pick an unimaginative Ben. He was a good friend of mine for many long years.
We had a few milking cows at Greenland Mains that in summer went out to the field to graze, to be brought in at milking time morning and evening. The gate of the 36 acre field of New Hansel was left open, the cows found their own way there after milking.
Came 4.30 pm, and, whatever we were doing, and in a quiet conversational voice I could talk to Ben. But if I said the words “Fetch the Cows, Ben” off he would go, take the cows out of the field entirely on his own and gently and without any chasing or fuss up the road and round to the milking byre door. If I forgot to send him off he went anyway at the appointed hour. A great time keeper. The cows were pretty well trained too, each went into their own stall and waited to be milked, often without tying the neck chain. They knew their names and their places.
Ben had another characteristic. About 4 o’clock in the afternoon he would disappear. The mystery was solved when Danny Morrison, who drove his bus up to Barrock and then back down to go to Wick, told me Ben waited for him to go up, raced alongside him in the field, waited for Danny’s return to race him back. Then, honour satisfied, he came home. He never went onto the road, just had a good chase with the bus. Not interested in cars.
Time went on. I bought Lower Dounreay and Nettie Dunnet from Keiss and I married on 23rd Nov. 1953 and went to our first home, the excellent farmhouse of Lower Dounreay, built 1860, demolished by UKAEA Oct. 2003. We left it unwillingly in May 1956 for Isauld, but had no choice in the matter. Ben came too.
Ben had the most useful trait of his father of knocking down any lamb we wanted, but as gentle as could be. To see him nudge the lamb over with his nose was a treat. Just say “Catch the lamb” and he did. No biting or nipping at all, just that nudge under it’s backside.
He would catch a ewe for us when asked, gripping it under the throat by the wool but never biting, holding it for us to take over. Very good at it too. Though the ewe would be much heavier than Ben, it seemed mesmerised by his grip and would stand still. Made lambing outdoors feasable but now we are long moved on to indoor lambing, and could do no other.
I went to Aberdeen late one October to buy some Leicester Ram Lambs. Borrowed father’s Ford Consul car as the Ford 5 cwt I had then was mighty cold with no heating. Went to Aberdeen late one day, sale next day, home third day. I forgot that I had transferred Ben from my van into the boot of father’s car.
Home again at Isauld I opened the boot. Ben regarded me with his usual patient charm, jumped out and relieved himself for what seemed a long hour, though that was I think impossible. All the long way to Aberdeen and back he had not uttered a sound, and his manners had been impeccable !!!.
He lived to be 16 years old, died peacefully one night. He lies buried at Isauld under an apple tree in the walled garden.
No 95. One man and his dog.
My first friend was Spot, father’s old dog, a bowfert on the old style with shaggy coat, brown and white, heavy and capable of dealing with sheep or cattle without fear or favour. Not many of these hardy old-style dogs around now, the sleek nervy Border Collie has taken over.
Spot was coming on a bit and you could teach him nothing. But he was big enough that when we were still small we tried to ride on his back. Very patient. We tried to make and put a harness on him to pull our sledge but not too effective. He would lie patiently at the back door until father came out, then off they went. Trim was his younger companion, a more traditional dog but chained up when not working. I think our father did not trust him too much, but it is also a truism that two dogs can get up to mischief if allowed loose together that neither would do on their own.
I had little to do with dogs then for many years until working at Greenland Mains. Donald Nicholson was our shepherd then and I was in my very early years of learning a trade which you never cease to learn, i.e. farming.
Donald had a Beardie, I forget his name or where he came from. Possibly I think from his Coghill relatives at Kirk, Bower. Lets call him Beardie. Again not many left. Hair down over his eyes like a Romney sheep. Quiet, but when we were going out of Dickies lambing field heading for our 3 o’clock cup of tea at Donald’s nearby house, we would find the dog no longer at our heels.
Maybe three hundred ewes or more in the lambing field. But out of that number Beardie would appear gently moving a ewe towards us, picked out by himself I know not how.
If Donald said ”Leave it and come here”, Beardie ignored him. He knew better. And sure enough when he had taken the ewe up to us it was in the process of lambing. We had not seen it, but he had. And knew what to do. Take the ewe to us for assistance, even if it was a perfectly normal lambing with no distress. No hurry. And he was always right. Quite uncanny, we could only marvel.
He would catch any lamb we wanted by nosing it over on the run, then lying on top of the lamb and holding it down gently with his fore paws until we came up. That was sometimes needed when we saw what we called a “Stuck Lamb” out in the field, a few days old, a euphemism for a lamb that badly needed it’s bottom cleaned. Not attended to that lamb would die. Beardie knew it, and again would take appropriate action even on his own. Beardies had a great reputation for brains, and no way am I going to dispute it.
Donald had various dogs but had one bitch who produced a litter to Beardie, though none of them were Beardies. I was usually working at the Square in winter with the cattle and brother David was working out doors. But going down to the lambing field in the evenings was our normal practice.
We each got a pup from Donald, I think David’s was white, mine was the traditional black with a very little bit of white under his throat.
We were introduced by Donald to the choosing of a pup, six weeks old and time to wean them. Donald told us to pick one and lift him by the tail. If he squealed or struggled, reject him. If he had a wall eye, reject him. If the pup neither squealed nor struggled but just looked at you, put him on one side as a possible. Such stoicism was desirable.
I am sure today that process would be banned if the Welfare people knew of it, but we were picking a working dog to share the hard vicissitudes of life with us and that method of choosing had a long history. Then final choosing. Which one did we fancy. Which one met your eye without looking away. Look at the pup’s feet - big feet, big dog. Even at six weeks they would show very positive individuality, a foretaste of what they would become when grown up working dogs. I called my pick an unimaginative Ben. He was a good friend of mine for many long years.
We had a few milking cows at Greenland Mains that in summer went out to the field to graze, to be brought in at milking time morning and evening. The gate of the 36 acre field of New Hansel was left open, the cows found their own way there after milking.
Came 4.30 pm, and, whatever we were doing, and in a quiet conversational voice I could talk to Ben. But if I said the words “Fetch the Cows, Ben” off he would go, take the cows out of the field entirely on his own and gently and without any chasing or fuss up the road and round to the milking byre door. If I forgot to send him off he went anyway at the appointed hour. A great time keeper. The cows were pretty well trained too, each went into their own stall and waited to be milked, often without tying the neck chain. They knew their names and their places.
Ben had another characteristic. About 4 o’clock in the afternoon he would disappear. The mystery was solved when Danny Morrison, who drove his bus up to Barrock and then back down to go to Wick, told me Ben waited for him to go up, raced alongside him in the field, waited for Danny’s return to race him back. Then, honour satisfied, he came home. He never went onto the road, just had a good chase with the bus. Not interested in cars.
Time went on. I bought Lower Dounreay and Nettie Dunnet from Keiss and I married on 23rd Nov. 1953 and went to our first home, the excellent farmhouse of Lower Dounreay, built 1860, demolished by UKAEA Oct. 2003. We left it unwillingly in May 1956 for Isauld, but had no choice in the matter. Ben came too.
Ben had the most useful trait of his father of knocking down any lamb we wanted, but as gentle as could be. To see him nudge the lamb over with his nose was a treat. Just say “Catch the lamb” and he did. No biting or nipping at all, just that nudge under it’s backside.
He would catch a ewe for us when asked, gripping it under the throat by the wool but never biting, holding it for us to take over. Very good at it too. Though the ewe would be much heavier than Ben, it seemed mesmerised by his grip and would stand still. Made lambing outdoors feasable but now we are long moved on to indoor lambing, and could do no other.
I went to Aberdeen late one October to buy some Leicester Ram Lambs. Borrowed father’s Ford Consul car as the Ford 5 cwt I had then was mighty cold with no heating. Went to Aberdeen late one day, sale next day, home third day. I forgot that I had transferred Ben from my van into the boot of father’s car.
Home again at Isauld I opened the boot. Ben regarded me with his usual patient charm, jumped out and relieved himself for what seemed a long hour, though that was I think impossible. All the long way to Aberdeen and back he had not uttered a sound, and his manners had been impeccable !!!.
He lived to be 16 years old, died peacefully one night. He lies buried at Isauld under an apple tree in the walled garden.
Monday 30 May 2011
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