No 204. Small holders hand me down mills.

No 204. Early Crofter Mills. Revised 16th Jan 2012 George Campbell name taken out!!

The Machine Age came late to farms compared to the huge woollen mills of Yorkshire and the equally large cotton mills of Lancashire. Sheer scale dictated that only large farms could stand the cost of putting in a steam engine, which came in on a farm scale late in the 1800s. Caithness once had many such with their tall chimneys stacks of which Ackergill Mains have possibly the last ones still standing. They were usually built on the Home Farms of the Estates, or larger rented farms such as Greenland Mains and Rattar Mains on the Traill Estate, which no longer exists, the farms being sold to the sitting tenants.

Progress saw the simple hand mill being improved by adding another wooden pegged drum beyond the threshing drum to carry the straw a bit further, moving the straw over a grid of splits which allowed more room for separation of the grain. The oats or bere dropped underneath onto the floor to be taken away and later cleaned through the hand turned fanners. There is a hand mill with the added straw drum at Corrigal Farm Museum in Orkney, I have not so far found a similar one in Caithness.

These simple hand mills with the additional straw shaking drum would have been at the end of the power of one man to turn, and a 90 year old friend of mine in Orkney told me that in his youth on a croft it was hard and tiring work, only a few sheaves being threshed at a time for their few cows. The double handled drive for two men, or women, was a step forward.

G.W.Murray of Banff Foundry in his 1878 Catalogue, whose “Tiny” hand mill had two person drive, stated that such was the success of his “Tiny mill” that he had demand for ever better and larger threshing mills, and he went on to build an escalating range of up to No 6, which we will come to in due course.

Moving on to larger crofter mills, there is one to be seen at abandoned Lappin Croft Steading across the road from Laidhay Museum. Driven by a water wheel in it’s heyday, it has a straw drum behind the threshing drum. Unfortunately the door is off the barn, cattle are entering and sadly that mill is deteriorating badly. Built in 1811 I believe, so that is a pity.
More get-at-able and saved for posterity, Wick Heritage has a small crofter’s mill made by Meiklejohn and Sutherland, Millwrights in Wick. It has a wooden pegged straw shaking drum fitted.

There is another much larger dis-used old mill I came across. Quite impressive, originally driven from outside the barn wall by a horse mill course. The mill at first had but one wooden pegged straw shaker drum. Quite easily seen is that a millwright then lengthened the mill by splicing on a section with an additional straw shaking drum. These two in-tamden straw drums gave it considerably better grain separation power. A good mill, though the original mill course had been superseded by an engine by the time I saw it. These straw shaking drums were the forerunners of the oscillating shakers we know today. A good foto of the mill shows the steel teeth of the drum and the wooden straw shaker beyond it. It also had a fluted roller feed that held and moved the sheaf on slowly so the drum could better thresh the grain.


The original threshing drums were fairly large with hard wood replaceable pegs. About 4 feet in diameter, they turned more slowly but the larger diameter gave it enough striking power t5o thresh cleanly. Then steel teeth drums came in, some still with a wooden main frame, some steel throughout. These drums were lesser in diameter, about two feet, but had a higher speed. After high speed drums came in, about 1.000 revs per minute, these older drums were called semi-high speed drums, but obviously they were not so called in their early days.
Some of the older mills were rebuilt with these newer drums fitted but the old larger hood was usually left in situ. The mill also needed rebuilding at the feeding throat of the mill but easily done by skilled local mill-wrights.
Usually the rebuilding would be done at the change-over from horse course drive to engine drive.

The crofter for a long time had no resource to these improving mills, neither the barn room nor the power nor the money. Getting a hand-me-down old mill from a larger farm was welcome.

So they worked away with very simple mills, helped each other on a threshing day, or provided each other with an extra horse to make up a two-horse team.




Photo.
(1) Old Mill . Steel drum teeth and wooden pegged straw shaker drum.