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!! 

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