Sleet on my Window: 2013

Friday 15 March 2013

No 231 Tattie Riddling Newtonmore

Most crofters and many farmers stored their tatties outdoors in tattie pits. Shed space in many steadings was often scarce and farms, big or small, often stored their tatties in a clamp, changing site every year. Farm workers would have no shed space at all so clamping their tatties was the norm. Many preferred to have a clamp anyway as it kept the tatties better than shed storage.

A bit of ground was selected, usually on a slight rise or slope and therefore dry. In late autumn, 22^nd October 1896, the day after lifting his tatties, Tom Delday, a Deerness man then working for my grandfather at the Bu of Rousam in Stronsay, went to the hill for turf to cover his tatty pit. That turf would be old and tough, easily flayed off the hill. It might have been the turf flayed off the peat bank earlier in the year and set aside for later collection, though not all such turrings were suitable for the tattie clamp. There was a special turring breast spade that allowed a man to skim off a thin layer of turf, different from the turrings of a peat bank which were normally very much thicker.

Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster, about 1810, took skilled men from Westmorland in England to Thurso East to skim the turf off new land for taking into cultivation on the eventual farm thereof. That turf was but a few inches thick, fibrous grass and roots and maybe some heather. It was wind and sun dried, gathered into heaps, set on fire and the ashes spead as fertiliser on the new ground.

In places it was a bad practice as it denuded some land to improve bits elsewhere.

It was done about 1860 on my first farm of Lower Dounreay, under William Reid Tait, then factor for the Murkle Estate owned by Admiral Sir John Gordon Sinclair, Bart, (who died in 1863)

The old leases expired in 1859 and the whole Estate was remodelled, new farms laid out, crofters and cottars cleared .

The Rousam peat hill produced a great variety of differing turfs, some heather covered, some tough old grass, and Delday would know full well what was best suited to cover his tatty clamp or pit.

Such turf would have been great insulation for the winter, placed on top of the pit after the tatties were heaped in a conical row. Straw was placed over the tatties in a fairly thick layer, then the earth and turf which had been cleared to make the base of the pit was laid carefully on top, keeping the straw from blowing away overnight. A layer of turf ASAP to finish it all. A small thick vent of upright straw was often set into the top of the clamp, allowing the tatties to breath surplus moisture into the outer air.

Such clamps were remarkably frost free, even in a bad winter, the insulation as good as it gets. Shed stored tatties could get frosted if care was not taken in covering with straw and any old sacks past their prime, or re-covering when the heap was opened to take some tatties out for the kitchen.

Care was taken to see that the surface run of the heather or grass was slanted downwards to run off as much rain as possible. The same turf was used by many a crofter to roof his cottage. Culloden Battlefield has an old house roofed in the same manner, and we can still find a house or a building so roofed, a relic and reminder of the past but often still functional.

A quck run through William Tait’s Diaries gave a resume of tattie lifting.

October 17^th, 1907, lifting potatoes a.m. . Champions, a variety much grown, went into two pits, five barrels in each. Fine day, no drout, a good day for tattie lifting. Next day putting earth on tattie pits.

Following Spring on 3^rd April, a Saturday, they took in a pit of tatties a.m. Over the years it seems late March early April was a fairly usual time for taking in a pit of tatties.

Then to sorting them. One good reason for the time was to get the smaller seed tatties sorted as well as the bigger eating ones.

I came across a crofter doing just that recently and took a few photos, with his permission of course. !!! Two round hand-held riddles, a helper to fill them, a sunny day to enjoy. First the small riddle which let earth and small bits fall through. Then tip that riddle into the larger one to keep the big tatties within it and let the smaller seed tatties fall through into some recepticle. Backbreaking and tedious work on a long day, but it got the job done!!

Monday 4 March 2013

No 230 Sowing neeps.

No 230 Sowingt neeps.

No 230 Sowing neeps

Neep sowing, a time of looking to the sky and wondering what the day would bring. Dry weather in May and early June was desirable, nay, essential!! The land was worked to desperation, harrowed, rolled, grubbed, then all over again, sometimes re-ploughed, on occasion even crossways. The work was endless to get the desired tilth.

On larger farms it was an all hands task. Weeds were cleared where time allowed, chain harrows crossing and re-crossing again and again at right angles to the last run to gather heaps of knot grass or couch which was then loaded onto carts and dumped in some suitable out of the way spot.

Another method was to heap them up with graips - garden forks to the city man - and apply a match on a dry and windy day. A good breeze would greatly help to fan the fire which could smoulder on for days in calm weather. Weeds of course were universal, and a letter from Stronsay emigrant Oliver Drever, written from Brandon, Canada, in 1909, says:- .

“ In the first place the land is poorly ploughed in a great many cases. On this farm the land is in a measure lost for want of being properly ploughed & I saw this Spring any man that took time to harrow properly you could see it in the crop going by on the road. Another thing the land here is getting entirely overrun with weeds & wild oats is the worst. They are just like Murtle oats at home but have a very thick shell (skin or husk). They grow so fast & as soon as they are shot off ( come into ear and ripen) they fall off & seed the ground worse nor ever. The only way to make anything of them is in the summer fallow get them to grow & then plough them down. We ploughed some here three times this year It's worse nor Sinnie Grass a lot for it chockes everything else”.

( Sinnie grass, an Orkney word for couch grass.- Sinny is Old Norse for rush plant ).

Then the field, worried to death and smooth as only a fussy farmer could get it, or worse still his even more fussy grieve, was drilled and sown. Neighbours looked critically to judge the straighness of the ridges. Really quite beautiful when done to perfection, corrugating the countryside.

The old horse drawn two-row neep sower was got out of the shed and brushed down. Musty and mouldy seeds were emptied out of the canisters. After sowing any spare seed was usually stored above the mantleplace to keep dry to next year. Seeds from William Shearer in Kirkwall, established 1857, were selected, quantities carefully worked out to the nearest half pound. Varieties were carefully chosen. What was it again that your neighbour had last year that were so good, winning the Seed and Root Show hands down at Canisbay, or where-ever?

What of the crofter without all the horses and men of the large farms. On Mary-Ann Calder’s 11 acre croft in Dunnet they had 1 ¾ acres of neeps with ¼ acre of tatties. At Isauld we used to ridge and sow ten acres a day when the going was good, tractor power rather than horses and long 25 chain fields. Before the tractor with two pairs of horses we would ridge about two acres a day. Sowing had to be done before coming home up to the last drill and never left overnight, even if the man worked late on into the evening. Drilling usually stopped early enough to allow the sower to catch up.The ridges were never allowed to lie overnight and dry out, soil moisture was at a premium.

From Canisbay I got a surprise when Jimmy Bremner produced at lunch time last Friday from the boot of his car outside Ebenezers at Mackay’s Hotel in Wick a relic of the past, a crofters one row neep sower, or the canister and gear sprocket wheel anyway. The photo is self explanatory.

Back home I looked up my George Murray of Banff Catalogue, 1878, and found his contribution to neep sowing, crofter style!! Small scale was an understatement. Murray had a “New Self Acting Hand Seed Drill”, the very ultimate as far as I was concerned. His caption reads:-

“This celebrated little Machine is very useful for sowing all sorts of Garden Seeds.But more especially is it useful for mending blanks or patches among Turnips.When the Farmer is passing through the fields he can carry this little Machine along with him as it is not much heavier than a walking stick , and run in a blank whenever he comes upon it. The Rim of the travelling wheel is made conical (ensuing steady travelling, so necessaary in it’s use. ) and presses the soil ready for the Coulter. a result not to be obtained bywheels with flat or round rims, which must of necessity jolt up and down in passing over lumps, thereby wasting half the seed. Price 10s 6d “

So the crofter had available a small neep sower that needed neither horse nor cow nor wife to drag it along the furrows!!! .

No 229 THE REVERSIBLE PLOW

No 229 THE REVERSIBLE PLOUGH.

So you thought we were making progress, did you? Reversible ploughs, so much a part of our ploughing matches today with classes for reversibles of all kinds, as well as demonstrators showing just why we should buy their latest multi-furrow creations. There is very little ploughing being done now on any farm other than with reversibles. There is also an old saying “There is nothing new under the sun.” So a look back not just to our crofters but to blacksmithjs and foundry men of long ago might be interesting.

The series of THE CROFTER’S BARN has brought me many photographs of some ancient farming appliance with sometimes a request as to what it is and sometimes a challenge to identify it as well. One was a photograph of a garden ornament which the owner-gardener did not know what it was. He lives near Leeds in Yorkshire. Took some time amd some help before we indentified it as a reversible plough. Not too ancient and not too far back, but I had not seen one like it. Turned out to be a semi-mounted reversible plough possibly for a Ferguson tractor, or a tractor of that size and time.

Looked at it by turning the photograph 90 degrees and there it was. Cleaned up and painted with black enamel paint, it looked good in that garden anyway. The owner had seen it on eBAY, liked it and bought it. He knows now, but intends to leave his lawn unploughed!!. It tripped or turned over each way with a pull lever reached from the tractor seat.

When I re-printed the 1878 Catalogue of G.W.Murray of Banff there was on page 8 a PATENT ONE-WAY PLOUGH for horses. Not his invention as there had been one way ploughs used earlier by the Duke of Sutherland to break in virgin land around Lairg and Dalchork, and ultimately used by the Earl of Caithness to break in Phillips Mains in Mey. These massive multi-furrow reversible ploughs worked with two steam engines each moving along and across either end of the field, each with a winch and a continuous steel rope pulling the plough backwards and forwards over the land. The work at Phillips Mains and Holomey was done around 1860 and later about 1872 there was another set working there. Fowler was one set of engines, the other pair I cannot now remember but they might well have been Marshall. These two firms I believe amalgamated later, the name Marshall-Fowler sticks with me into my own times when we had several tractors of that name working in Caithness. Good machines too.

In the Highland Agricultural Society Transactions of 1875 an article on Caithness Agriculture by James Macdonald, Aberdeen Correspondent for the Scotsman Newspaper, referred to The Earl of Caithness and his steam ploughing.

The Earl, himself a well-known mechanic, had been working steam implements for several years by Murray’s Catalogue time of 1878. The Earl invented a steam-carriage which he steered throughout Caithness, and it was said excited the wonder and admiration of every one who saw it. It also scared the h*** out of the horses.

The engines doing the ploughing were constructed so that they could be used in pumping out flagstone quarries with which the Earl was involved, particularly at Harrow. The Earl reclaimed by steam, from heathery moorland, the whole of Philip's Mains and also Holomey, but the exact dates I am unsure of. Macdonald’s article of 1875 stated that the Earl was still ploughing and harrowing by steam. It was found to work most satisfactorily, and the noble Earl intended to continue the system!!.

The article went on to state that at least one-half of the arable land of Caithness was quite as well adapted for steam cultivation as Philip's Mains; while a visit to the operations going on at Dalchork at Lairg, the Duke of Sutherland's property, afforded an excellent opportunity of judging the advantages of steam in the cultivation of land, and especially in the re-clamation thereof. Re-clamation actually was not re-clamation, it was breaking in newly cleared virgin ground covered with heather and various depths of peat covering the acres of the newly cleared former tenants.

But on a smaller farm scale and for horses G.W.Murray was making by 1978 a Murison One Way Plough . I do not know who Murison was, did he work for Murray and design the plough or was he someone whose design was made by Murray in his Banff Foundry.

. Anyway priced at £10 Sterling for a single furrow plough, two bodies of course on the whole rig, with steel Breasts and Shares, £9 with metal Breasts and Shares, 15 shillings extra for a wheel which was recommended, it was within the reach of most farmers if not crofters. And it was within the strength of a pair of horses!!

No 228 That ole petrol pump.

No 228. That Old Petrol Pump.

“That old petrol pump, she just keeps pumping, she just keeps pumping along!!”

Not so many around these days. Yet many a crofter might put one in at the end of his barn to augment his living on hard ground. Sufficient for small townships and villages, and small towns too, but town ones were replaced by better pumps as time moved along, leaving the old hand-worked petrol pump to soldier on in many a remote township. The reservoir tank below ground was filled from heavy galvanised iron 50 gallon barrels, taken by horse and cart from the pier in the case of the Stronsay of my youth, or just rolled up the pier to Davie Chalmers store and his two pumps beside his coal yard. The pumps were painted green, but you could have whatever colour you wished. Red was good for obvious reasons.

There was no electricity to power them so petrol was dispensed by a hand pump that worked with a seesaw backwards and forwards movement. At the top of the pump assembly were two glass cylinders that contained the petrol once it had been drawn up by the pump from the underground tank.

Sometimes, depending on the efficiency of the pump, it took quite a few minutes to prime the cylinders. Then, showing that they were full, the hose pipe could be turned on by a top lever and filling the car, or the can as chance would have it, could begin. The petrol flowed into the car by gravity. The operator had to keep his or her arm going to keep the flow going, back and fore, back and fore, endless in the case of a big car, or what we called a big car in these bygone days!!. .

There were no metering devices other than the glass cylinders which were filled and emptied just so many times to give the required gallons. Payment of course was by cash, no credit cards then!!

Towards the end of the War, or rather soon after, we got five gallon jerricans, near enough 25 litres, weighing about 60 lbs when full. It is probably illegal to lift such a weight now under Health and Safety rules and regulations!!! .

Their origin is interesting. The Africa Corps Germans at El Alamein and other places had them, and filled their armoured tanks with fuel many times faster than the traditional British red two gallon square cans. Hence “jerricans”

These original jerricans had a small tube inside the top which let in air so the flow was not interrupted by gurgling snatches of air trying to replace the petrol as it was poured out. Very efficient indeed, they worked very well and the flow was rapid. They also did not have a screw-on top but a latched lid that snapped open in one movement when needed. The modern ones still do but with our present version without the inset tube as far as I have seen, they pour that much less quickly. Hence the name of “jerrican” comes down to us. They were very efficient, and I have an old one somewhere still in use for the sit-on lawnmower.

The other petrol can was the two gallon can, always red to my memory. There was a green Pratt can, a red Shell can, a BP can, and no doubt many others . Standard size was two gallons. They had a flexible steel wound hose pipe which screwed onto the top for pouring, capable of being bent to whatever angle you wanted. There was always a few of these cans in the garage.

At the Water Reservoir half way down to Whitehall Village the engine which pumped the water uphill to our Whitehall Farm House had a couple of two gallon cans in the wee shed. Our father would take one down to the Village for re-filling as he passed by and drop it off at the shed on his return to the farm, stopping the engine as well. He also had a self timer when needed in only putting a measured amount of petrol in the engine, having a can for that purpose.

We had other cans for petrol over the years. An empty five gallon oil can could be used.

When petrol was either rationed or in short supply I had an old 1927 Austin12 car that ran well on a mixture of half petrol, half tractor paraffin. It did need to warm up to get the best results, but once warmed up on petrol alone it would do 60 mph flat out on a level road, on the mixture it did 63.!!

There was a time when to clean an oily greasy tractor we took about half a bucket of petrol and washed the machine. No smoking!!

Saturday 19 January 2013

No 227 The Crofter's Barn Itself

No 227 Crofter's Barn Itself.

No 227 THE CROFTER'S BARN ITSELF

No 227. THE CROFTRE'S BARN ITSELF

What of the Crofter’s Barn itself, the actual building So much of the crofter’s land was hard won by himself or his forebears from non productive heathery peat covered land, full of stones and boulders. And water. The peat would eventually have been cut, dried and burnt in the kitchen fire. The clay soil underneath when the peat had been cleared would be spade or caschrom dug, slowly brought into productive fertility. A favourite pioneer crop was potatoes, making good use of the poor turf and providing sustainance sooner than any crops of grain. Many crofts were made following the Clearances. Melvich is but one example, Badbea is another. There are many many more, all too many!!

Of Melvich there is a letter witten in February 1831 to Dunrobin Castle, the Landlords.

The letter, written either by Innes of Sandside or by the Rev David Mackenzie, Minister of Farr, stated that the crofter’s at Melvich, newly cleared from Strath Halladale, some from Golval, some from the Bighouse which lies half way up the west side of the river, did not even have the security of leases though allocated small unimproved plots of newly laid out sea side heath.

The letter went on to state that the crofters, trying to make crofts out of hard land, were prevented from using sea ware as fertiliser by the Landlords, in this case the Sutherland Estate, or their factor. Sea weed, and little enough there was of it, was being burnt at that time as kelp for the Landlord’s profit!! .

From this small patch of land stones, or sometimes rough boulders, were laboriously dug out and moved to clear the land for the plough. Nothing or no effort was wasted, so the stones were made use of to make field dykes, still to be seen at Melvich, or to build a small enough house, byre and barn on the crofts.

The barns of the big Caithness farms were built at the same time with quarried stone and by skilled masons. The barn at Greenland Mains, then called the Ha’ of Greenland, was built by James Traill of Castelhill, the Landlord. The date 1832 is still on the gable end.

William Pyper, a mason and one of my forebears, spent about ten years down at Dunbeath building the steadings there for Sinclair of Dunbeath before finally moving to Castletown. He spent the rest of his life building new steadings for James Traill, a never ending task. That time span illustrated just how long a time was needed to build these larger steadings which still stand today. The barn at Stanstill, still standing and in good use, was built in 1802 for Colonel Williamson of Banniskirk, the then owner. I have a copy of the old account somewhere!!!

A comparison of the crofter’s barn and the bigger farms shows that while the large farm quarried stone and built to a very regular rythym of stonework, the crofter used whatever stone was handy at the time, and built it to his own particular or peculiar design, or lack of design!!. Some stones were heavy boulders and could only have been raised and built in place by more than one man.

The barn at Strathan, Skerray, is a good example. Though now roofed with modern but green painted galvanised sheeting, the gable end is as it was. The walls have an inward slope called batter which helped the building to stand the more secure There was no horizontal layering pattern to be seen as with barns built with Caithness quarried flagstone. At Greenland Mains a large quarry was opened up the hill to provide stone for the new steading and the extensive field dykes.

At Strathan any large stone lay in the wall where it was placed, to be built around with smaller stones. A big stone like that was sometimes called a riser, which applied to dry stone dyking too. A few of these well placed stones allowed building to proceed much faster, though more than one man would be needed to lift such a heavy stone into place . The shape of these boulders was not designed for building, some boulders being almost round. Still, they were dug out of the often peaty ground and made good use of. Probably of glacial origin, the result was a multi-coloured wall with stones obviously carried from another place to be left after the glacier melted, to lie just where they fell. Years ago, when draining a field at Isauld, we found rounded fist sized granitic pebbles and a few small boulders over 4 feet down and much below ploughing depth. They had obviously been carried there by the ice sheet from the granitic or dioritic rock lying to the west of Reay. They did not belong to the Caithness sedimentary flagstone bedrock lying underneath.

I still marvel at the sight of roofless crofts in Caithness, Brubster being but one of many such areas. On passing them by I find an empty sadness within me that will not go away !!

Friday 4 January 2013

No 228 THAT OLD PETROL PUMP.