Harnessing horse power for thrashing

I HAVE dwelt enough on flails, on small hand mills and the large high-speed drum mills I knew and worked with, but I must not overlook the crofter’s mill.

The crofts of Rousam in Stronsay were peppered with them in my younger days, and most of the smaller farms too.

There were many of them at one time, including in Caithness, but few are now left.

There is a crofter’s mill in ?Mary-Ann’s Cottage in Dunnet, still erroneously described there as a hand mill in spite of my well-meant advice over many years that it is not. They say it was built in Orkney and came from there.

Not so. The mill may indeed have come ultimately from Orkney to Mary-Ann’s, but it is a crofter’s mill built by T.S.Allan, Millwright, Thurso. His firm’s name is stenciled in black letters on the side. His long-gone workshop was in the Coogate in Thurso, next door to a blacksmith called Gunn.

Regrettably, the Coogate, that historic old Viking name for the street where old Thurso’s milking cows were kept, was changed long since to Riverside Place by the Atomics on the old Thurso Town Council, the Coogate being thought not quite proper enough for New Age Thursonians. Perhaps, but it is still good enough for not-so-snooty Edinburgh.

The milking cows kept in the Coogate were grazed on the commons of Thurso, above Ormlie, or any other grass available, and fed in winter on bought in or cadged hay. Just a reminder that towns not so long ago had milking cows within their boundaries, as well as horses and stables, too – both of which had dung middens needing to be cleared away and carted out of town to nearby farms.

T.S. Allan’s crofter’s mill at Mary-Ann’s Cottage has two straw walkers each a mere eight inches wide, an overall width for the mill of 20 inches allowing for side clearance. The 24-inch-diameter open drum has high-grade steel pegs mounted in strong wooden crossbar beaters.

The concave is solid and would have kept the straw inside it for maximum separation of grain before being thrown out onto the slatted straw walkers. There the grain fell through and the straw carried on over the end of the mill. The rest of the mill is a mere enlargement or copy of the fanners used so long ago for cleaning grain from chaff and small bits of straw.

Grain fell onto a shaking or oscillating shoe with a few perforated trays to allow grain to fall gently into a draught of air from the fan, which swept through it and separated the grain from the chaff. The chaff was blown into a closed-off compartment at the back of the mill under the drum, keeping it from blowing all over.

Having the small crofter’s mill in a small building was an advantage, having the benefit of keeping straw and chaff separate in a confined space. The chaff door, of course, could be opened when chaff was needed for feeding the cows or filling a chaff bed.

It brought home to me that nothing was wasted on a croft – the chaff we put so cavalierly under the cattle in the courts for bedding was a much-valued feed for a crofter. I have seen cattle on a croft bedded down for the night in a byre with just one small pail of chaff; it worked well enough as the animals immediately lay down. No straw wasted on bedding on a croft.

Good grain came out of one small chute in the side of the mill into a box. In Mary-Ann’s it is a bushel measure, unstamped but regulation size all the same, sitting in situ on the floor. The tails or light grains would have been delivered from a second chute into another box, or perhaps just allowed to accumulate in a small heap.

A SIMILAR Mill is balanced precariously on top of an indoor wall at Andrew Mackay’s West Greenland Farm in his spacious implement shed. I was told it was handmade in Dunbeath by an Archie Sinclair, grandfather of the present Archie Sinclair, and I presume he bought the pulleys and shafts ready made and his part would have been in assembling the bits and pieces on his own well-made wooden frame. It is still in working order, but not needed now as Andrew has bought a big combine.

With crofts there were not too many people to help, so the continuous thrashing we did on bigger farms could not be done. The sheaves would have been carted in from the stack prior to thrashing and at Mary-Ann’s would have been pitched in at the high sheaf window and stored behind the mill on the floor, ready for subsequent thrashing.

Then the horse, or preferably two horses if you had them, would be hitched to the horse mill course outside the barn wall and all would be ready. Even these small mills needed a good bit of power so many neighbours shared, each helping the other with a horse to make up the pair needed.

They might do the same for ploughing as keeping two working horses on a small croft was neither easy nor very affordable.

A VERY good example of the iron harness-work of a horse-mill course can be seen outside the barn gable end at Laidhay at Dunbeath. It’s well laid out and worth a look in passing if you can spare a moment, as indeed is the whole complex.

You’ll see a large, beveled crown wheel and small beveled sprocket at right angles on a shaft that went in underground through the barn wall to a large toothed wheel to take the drive to the mill. One of the heavy wooden shaft poles for the horse course is inside the barn hung from the rafters.

In the wall beside the crofter’s mill at Mary-Ann’s is a small window called the “whoa hole”. From there the crofter could call through the open window to his horse or horses and control their movements as he thrashed – “hup” to go and “whoa” to stop. Well-trained horses answered immediately to such commands.

There were not enough people available on a croft to have someone looking after the horses while thrashing.

Horses were well trained, and I have used such commands when carting neeps from the field. They would answer the commands to go or stop with these well chosen words.

Mary-Ann’s does have many other things to see and is open from 2pm to 4.30pm every day till the end of September.

It is well worth a visit with your overseas visitors. I have met there, on occasion, people visiting from all over the globe, and recently spoke with a couple from near Pukekohe in New Zealand who shopped at the same superstore there as our daughter, Janet. And they were farmers too.

It is indeed a small world.

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