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!!!