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.