Rain on My Window

No 78. Diaries offer a look into the past.

2010-06-11T04:23:00.000-07:00

No 78. Travelling Threshing Mills.

The earliest reference to thrashing mills on a personal note I have taken from the Diaries of William Tait of Ingsay, 1880 to 1939. These Diaries are going to intrude into my notes as time goes by. They accentuate much of what I have already written in Rain on My Window about yesterday.
William Tait, finally of Ingsay in Birsay, Orkney, was my father’s mother’s brother, bred off Caithness stock. His father was John Tait, born in 1820 in Grotistoft, Hill of Barrock, now a roofless ruin after being cleared in May 1843 by James Traill of Rattar. His mother was Janet Steven, born in Dunnet. They emigrated to Orkney circa 1850. These Diaries I knew about many years ago, had an occasional look inside them, but they are not mine. They possibly belong more to Archival History than to any one family, though Wm Tait’s grandson Sandy Scarth in Twatt in Birsay has present claim. But they are in my present care as I transcribe them into this marvellous computer age, making the contents available to a wider readership. I am now half way through the work, pencil written in old and old-fashioned farmers’ diaries full of much useless bits of information, such as M.P.s and the Right Honourable Members of the House of Lords !!! Interesting enough in it’s own way. The pencil writings are faint, but we are making progress.
Still much unfinished with 25 Diaries still to go by late May 2010, but at least over half of them are already done and are printed out and available for viewing and perusal in a green backed folder in Castlehill Heritage Centre. I am getting some help from them, so if anyone wants they can have a look into the past of farming in Orkney around 100 years ago, which was much the same as in Caithness. They still need a final editing but that is only a touching up to correct my typos. I will pick and choose from the Diaries from time to time, without apology, but this article at least introduces them to John O’ Groat readers.
The Diaries are nearer to me than I thought. Until I began transcribing them I did not know that from1894 to 1900 Wm Tait was farm manager at Rousam in Stronsay, farmed then by David Pottinger my grandfather and his brother-in-law. From 1907 to 1919 Wm Tait farmed at the Bay Farm next door to Rousam. So we have a span and a wonderful look back into 25 years of Stronsay farming either side of the turn of the last Century.

In Nov.1888 Wm Tait took over the farm of Work just outside Kirkwall as tenant. The system then was the in-coming tenant was bound to thrash down the crop for his out going predecessor. The straw was normally steelbow, a term to describe that the straw was bound to the farm and went to the incoming tenant for no payment. In the case of Work farm, as described in the Diaries, Wm Tait had to pay for the straw. This was balanced by reverse transaction on outgoing. And the thrashing down by Wm Tait in 1889 was done by a Steam Travelling Mill.
I have already written about barn thrashing mills and straw handling, but I wondered how far back our travelling thrashing mills went. I found a wonderful illustration on the internet of a horse powered travelling mill of 1881, easily downloaded if we cannot print it.
My first experience of travelling mills was at Greenland Mains. The ones I remember were owned by Wildy Allan from Mey and Donald (Injun Donald) Gunn from West Greenland, but there were many more. The excellent Museum at Kingussie is full of these old timers, the Mills I mean!! . But here in Wm Tait’s Diary for 1889 I came on the following entries, and the steam travelling threshing mill that thrashed down the crop.

I quote the Diaries, editing out most of the entries save on the Steam Mill :-
1889.
jan 30 wed Thrashing with Steam Mill - thrashed two stacks - stormy day.
jan 31 thur Orrow horse carting straw to Jas. Gunn - carting dung & turnips.
feb 01 frid Steam Mill thrashed two stacks.
feb 02 sat Very stormy - gathering up blown down straw in forenoon.
feb 04 mon 3 carts at Kirkwall with grain - catching up straw & 4 carts with grain
to Kirkwall in afternoon with oats - 28 qrs in all. (a Qr is 3 cwts, 150 kg. )
feb 05 tues Start the mill for a few minutes but was too windy.
feb 07 thur Steam mill thrashed in afternoon.
feb 09 sat Very stormy, taking in straw in forenoon, dressing oats in afternoon.
feb 12 tue Steam mill thrashed 8.1/2 hours - fine frosty day - ground covered with snow.
feb 13 wed Steam Mill Thrashed 8 hours - fine day.
feb 15 frid Two carts at Kirkwall a.m. with grain, 8 qrs. –
one with straw to Mrs Skea, 34 windlings - took in some straw a.m. -
feb 16 sat Taking in straw to the barn, a.m. - finished dressing oats today.
MEMO- 197 qrs & 1 bushel is all the grain of the crop of Work Farm.
Bought 4 qrs 2 bu. oats from R. Marwick, 32 lb. per bu. @ 11/- a qr.
[The Valuation Roll for 1888 lists Robert Thomas Marwick, farmer, as tenant of Work farm
hence the outgoing tenant. - M.P..]
feb 18 mon 4 carts carting oats to Kirkwall, 16 qrs.
MEMO:- Straw of 197.1/8 qrs at 6/- is £59.2.9d

So Wm Tait had thrashed down all the crop and dressed all the oats and carted all the sacks to Kirkwall for sale for the outgoing tenant. For that he had the privilege of paying the sum of £59.2.9d for the straw. Not too easy an entry for a new tenant, but those were the terms on that So in 1889 we know that a team of steam engine and thrashing mill was travelling around Orkney.

. Many farms had some stacks left after the winter ended and the cattle went out to grass, a very nice state of affairs to be in but not too often seen after a hungry winter. The outside of summer stacks was usually covered with chaff and bits of half eaten grain surrounding the many visible holes of the inhabitants. Rats could make a motorway of tracks zig zagging up the outside of the stack, an easy way of getting around rather than burrowing a tunnel. So before the rats and mice could totally destroy the stack over the long summer, thrashing down was required.

In Caithness we had the travelling mills which were taken round the county to the various stackyards and moved along the line of stacks to thrash them down. The thrashing mill coming down the road meant a busy few days, both outdoors and in the farm kitchen.
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This outdoor thrashing meant building a gilt which was a long stack of straw, covered by stack nets when finished and left for another winter until carted in to the cattle courts as a layer of bedding. Or some other winter At least it used up surplus straw and made it into useful dung.
Or sometimes a gilt was forgotten about, left in solitary splendour at the far side of the stackyard forever !!!.

No 77. Straw from the Mill. pb 28.05.2010

2010-05-28T07:48:00.000-07:00

No 77. STRAW FROM THE MILL.

Straw, such a normal aspect of farming that we might take it for granted and so it might get overlooked. Yet I have seen so many changes in the handling of straw over so many years, produced by the Biblical flail on a croft in Rousam in Stronsay to the monster combines of today.The handling of straw comes to mind, easiest is to quote what I saw from my own experiences.
First was the Mill at Whitehaa in my early days, rebuilt by Davie Davidson and mentioned previously. Mainly the high speed drum and the grain carrier through the thick stone wall at the back of the barn.
Equally important was the straw end of the mill on the ground floor at the far end from the drum in the sheaf loft. The newly thrashed sheaf, now just a mix of loose straw, good grain and soft chaff, made its way over and along the well named straw shakers to sift out and collect the grain, then the straw went down over the end. No change at all in that system to today’s combine harvestors.
There at the end of the mill lay the apparently simple task of carrying away the straw from the end of the mill. It could be and was hard work with a four-toed graip fork or a two-toed pitchfork. Keep the end of the mill clear of straw, stack it in the barn for future use, pitch it up to someone building the straw in bouts across the barn, or carry some away from the end of the mill direct to the byres and sheds. If the cattleman had some time available he would lend a hand. It saved him time later on, stacking it in handy corners for later use, or just chucking it over into the cattle courts to be later spread for bedding.

When we came to Greenland Mains straw was laboriously stacked in the lowish barn as per usual. Then our father had a straw blower installed at the end of the Mill by Davie Davidson of Scarths in Kirkwall. The straw dropped into a fairly high speed four-bladed blower and on into a round section pipe which went round various corners and across various spaces to deliver the straw at suitable points in the steading. Along the way were a succession of hatches at various drop off points, a short section of square box with a two way movable panel to intercept the straw, open it to deliver the straw or close it to let the straw carry on to the next drop off point.
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There was the occasional choking of the pipe or of the blower, but handy slides allowed the blockages to be easily cleared. A safety feature was that a choke in the blower itself just meant the flat driving belt being cast off and no damage. It needed overseeing, but the changing thumping sound soon gave away a blockage.
The straw went many ways at Greenland Mains, straight ahead into the straw barn, right into the clipping shed under the main grain loft, left through the milkers byre to the far away sheds, a diversion into the Back Court where a stockade was erected to hold the straw, giving easy access for the cows.
The blower saved a great deal of straw carrying through narrow doorways and corridors. The blower was quite similar to the grain blowers we still have, but very much larger.

Next came the straw carrier. First one I saw was at Lower Dounreay, put in there before me, a shallow wooden trough about 5 feet wide with an endless chain and cross flights that dragged the straw along the trough to a convenient series of hatches to drop it where needed. The chain and flights returned above the straw. It worked straight ahead from the mill, and was made by Garvie in Aberdeenshire. We moved the whole assembly from Lower Dounreay to Isauld in 1956, adding a further length to extend it to 90 feet to carry the straw to a lofted area over the indoor silage pit. With all the hatches open it dealt unattended with the straw, as each dropping off point filled up to the hatch it just carried on to the next. Did very well though attention was needed to adjust the tension of the chains to avoid jumping a link. It did sterling service for many a year until the mill was superceded by the combine harvester, for us sometime in the 1960s. That straw loft was very handy as the straw just had to be pushed over the open sides down into a straw feeding passage on either side, no carrying at all. Bedding the courts could also be easily done from the loft, though the final spreading in the courts was with a graip or with some helpful cattle!!

Next came the buncher. We never had one, but a buncher was often used by various travelling mills, though not on the first ones I saw. This took the loose straw at the end of the mill and fed it into the buncher, just a larger version of the binder sheafing mechanism but a double assembly with two twine needles.
The buncher tied the straw into convenient sized bundles or sheaves. The action was similar to the binder, packing fingers and a pressure trip mechanism. It made handling the straw from the travelling mill a lot easier, especially on a windy day in the stackyard,
The buncher was also installed on various farms at the end of the mill. My brother Steven had one when he was in Baillie. The bunches still had to be carried though the steading to various byes and stables but were ready for the cattleman to carry, to use or to store in handy corners as thrashing went on. They were also handy for pitching over the cattle’s backs into the straw rack on the wall in front of them, saved walking up between every two cattle to fill the rack. Store some in the straw barn, carry some to the byres to handy corners as thrashing went on, it all depended on how many people were available, or if the cattleman had a spare moment. .
The bunches were close in appearance to the hand tied windlins we used to make in Stronsay to carry straw to the byres and the stable, and were most useful.
A quite extra use was to load it with a pitchfork like sheaves onto a cart to sell or to give a load to someone else, perhaps a neighbour, perhaps a crofter needing a bit of straw. It made for easier loading and building on the cart than loose straw which was a devil to work with on a windy day.
Today we have forgotten all these methods. The thrashing mill is an antique if it still exists. Some do, silently gathering dust in a forgotten corner of some steadings. We now have huge round balers swallowing up the harvested straw faster than the combine can produce it. Even the little square bale is seldom seen now though it is by no means entirely gone.
The big round straw bale is dumped into a machine that disintegrates it and blows it direct into the cattle courts. Untouched by human hand!!

No 76. Thrashing Mills pb 14.05 2010

2010-05-14T12:12:00.001-07:00

No 76. “THRASHING MILLS”

I remember the advent at Whitehall of the high speed thrashing drum, the rising echoing humming song as it got up to speed on a thrashing morning. Made of steel, the drum 4’6” wide, 18” diameter, the grooves on the rasp bars angled each way alternately. Davie Davidson, of Robert Scarths in Kirkwall, came out to Stronsay to rebuild the old Whitehaa Mill, fitting the new high speed drum, speed around 1100 revs. He did various other wonderful things with the Mill, changing this and that, a magician with wood, flat pulleys, grain elevators, bearings, shafts.
He fitted a shaking box grain conveyor carrier under the cross beams - the couple backs - of the rafters over the straw in the barn and on through the back wall of the barn to deliver grain into the bruiser loft beyond. How the grain moved along was beyond us, but it did. The angles and the shaking speed were critical, a slipping belt meant spilt grain. Davie subsequently rebuilt thrashing mills for our father at Greenland Mains in 1947 and at Stemster Mains in 1949, putting in straw blowers to distribute the straw around the various steading buildings and grain carriers to the various lofts. That saved an incredible amount of work, both in carrying straw from the barn to the byers and at Whitehaa sacks of grain on the men’s backs from the Mill out the barn door and along the sometimes wet flagstone pavement and up the Stone Stairs and into the grain lofts. Real hard work.

The thrashing mills of yesterday were very crude but these were the times. The oldest mills I remember had big diameter drums with driven-in wooden replaceable pegs of hard wood to thrash the grain. Drum speed maybe 500 revs a minute, probably less, often driven by a water wheel where the land provided enough water to fill a mill dam, fed by a burn or even by connected ditches. At Forss Estate nr Thurso there was a magnificent trail of ditches criss-crossing across the face of the land, channelling the same water by a series of ditches from one mill dam to the next as it came down the hill, the same water used many times over by each lower farm.
Where there was no mill dam the mill was driven by horses everlastingly going round and round in circles in the Mill Course. They did a lot of work in their time.
The result of such thrashing was grain with many a bit of straw or chaff still there. The fanners in the loft were used to take that out and deliver a clean sample for selling or for the local miller for grinding into oatmeal or bere meal as case needed.
Lower down the scale in size were the hand mills, simple and worked by a man on a handle. Output was miniscule but they did the thrashing on many a croft. Some are still around in farm museums, I think one at Laidhay.
Even earlier than that was the flail. I saw one being worked on a croft at Rousam, serious hard work but not for the amateur. The swinging hinged flying arm could catch you a fair crack on the head if not swung with the expertise of the old timers. I know, we tried it !! Effortless when done by an expert, an easy swing, a sharp flick of the wrist on the down stroke, and the oats came flying off the sheaf. Usually two men in unison time about and opposite each other. What wood the flails were made of I do not know, but it was a real hard and heavy wood. The soople, the flexible joining of the two arms, was usually a woven leather rope but sometimes hempen. Took a lot of wear. Sometimes just a bit of good green horse hide did the job, easily replaced.

The thrashing mills were located in many a varied manner. At Lower Dounreay we had a stackyard high up on a sand dune above the shore at loft level. We backed the carts into the double loft door and just tipped the load of sheaves onto the floor ready for the threshing drum fed by Jamie Wares our foreman.
Most thrashing mills had a biggish sheaf loft with a sheaf window through which a man could pitch the sheaves from the cart while the horse stood patiently waiting. The sheaf loft was needed, indeed it was essential, as with horse driven mills there was neither enough horses nor enough men to take in a stack and thrash at the same time. So a stack would be taken in by a couple of men and stored in the sheaf loft ready for thrashing later when all hands and horses were available. It also allowed a stack to be taken in to the sheaf loft and thrashing to be done on a wet day when no outside work was possible.

With continuous thrashing as we did one cart was being loaded from the stack in the yard, a second cart stood outside the sheaf window. On that cart one man pitched the sheaves through the sheaf window to another man - or woman - who took the sheaves as they came flying through the window and pitched or placed them carefully on the sheaf table beside the foreman ready for feeding the drum. They had to lie just the right way, the grain head of the sheaf always pointing forward towards the feeder at the drum. Make a mistake and the sheaf as like as not came flying back to the pitcher butt end first. Not a nice experience at all, but it soon corrected a dopey pitcher. Nothing annoyed a feeder more than a sheaf the wrong way round.
I cannot recall any sheaf table not located to the left hand of the feeder. There must have been some the other way round, it all depended on the layout of the Mill in the barn. Take the sheaf in the left hand, slash the binder twine with a sharp knife, or in earlier days the straw band that held the sheaf together, and in one easy flowing movement from left to right spread the now loosened sheaf right across the mouth of the drum, giving as easy a flow of straw into the drum as possible.
We always had a leather glove for the feeder’s left hand with a short knife blade built in, better and safer than a loose knife which sometimes fell into the drum and vanished!! There were good feeders whose technique was such that you could not distinguish one sheaf from another. There were others where every sheaf went in with a bang, hard on everything.
. In the days when horses drove the mill from the Mill course it was imperative to maintain an easy feed to lesson any jerky loading on the poor beasts. Take good care when feeding, more than one man I knew had a hand taken off by the drum snatching the sheaf, and his hand with it.
Often there would be a louser who cut the sheaf band in readiness for the feeder, frequently a woman, placing the sheaf on the board just so to his hand. That made three people in the loft at the feeding end.

The incredible total one could have at a continuous thrashing was:-
One man on the stack in the yard, one man building the cart load, one man on the other cart pitching sheaves in the sheaf window, one pitching the sheaves with a short handled pitchfork from the window to the sheaf board, one lousing the sheaves, one feeding the drum, always the foreman, one bagging off the grain at the end of the mill. Two men to take away the thrashed straw and store it in the barn, at Whitehall usually one carrying from the mill end and forking it to one building the straw in bouts across the barn.
And the Boss, or the Grieve, was usually there keeping an eye on things like a slipping flat belt or a spillage where no spillage was allowed. Tails – light grain – were usually delivered from a side chute and had to be kept clear. Riddles could choke with rubbish, the grain could come over the end of the mill with the strumps, which were short pieces of straw and odds and ends not carrying on with the straw shakers into the straw barn. He was also useful in clearing the chaff as it built up at the end of the mill.
That was a lot of men to get the job done. But that was yesterday - today’s farming is not so labour intensive..

No 75 Dressing oats.

2010-04-30T11:42:00.000-07:00

No 75. “THE FANNERS IN THE LOFT” . or “DRESSING OATS”.

Recently I got temporary possession of 50 years of the Diaries of Wm Tait of Ingsay in Birsay in Orkney, from 1880 TO 1936. I hope to transcribe them before giving them back to where they belong. Repetitive they may be, but these were his times. Not every year is there but most. There is a fund of information from farming 100 years ago contained in these small tattered pencil-written black booklets, and by chance quite a deal of it refers to the Bu’ of Rousam, tenanted by my grandfather David Pottinger from 1893 to 1913. The family then moved to Hobbister in Orphir in the Mainland of Orkney before returning to Stronsay in 1919. William Tait was his brother-in-law and William must have worked at Rousam for a time, at least from 1896 until leaving Rousam for Stennaquoy in Eday on 26th Nov. 1900. Rousam was where our father spent his early years.

One of the most common entries was “Dressing oats”, or corn which was the Orkney name for bere, the Northern version of barley, so quick to grow, so early to ripen, last sown, first harvested. Dressing oats was a never ending task on many a wet day, and on many a dark morning till enough light crept into the eastern sky to harness the horses and off to the plow, or cart neeps. I think bere is now banned under E.U. rules!!!. At Rousam in the Diaries from 1896 to 1900 Wm Tait refers many a day to:- “Heavy rain, no outside work, dressing oats”

Prime loft tool for dressing oats was the Fanners. There is still a good one to be seen at Mary Anne’s Cottage in Dunnet, opening at the end of May
Made of good wood, ash or pitch pine, with metal parts such as a handle to turn it with and neat gears and wheels and shafts and suspending wooden hangers for the various riddles. Sitting on four short legs but easily moved across the loft floor to be strategically near the heap of grain to be dressed.
A grain hopper on top, a fairly high lift for a man, too high for we kids but we upended a box and managed to fill enough to have a wee shot ourselves when no-one was around. A fairly safe machine for children to play with in the loft on a rainy day. Ridiculous to look back on but those were the times. There were fanners also at Greenland Mains, now gone, occasionally used to touch up an already good sample for the Meal Dealer!!!.

The grain hopper had an adjustable wooden slide to let grain through at a controlled rate, different settings to control the amount passing into the works. Some varieties of grain were stickier than others, light bushel weight not so runny as heavy. Badly threshed grain - full of bits of chaff and straw, strumps we called it - needed a larger opening to run. Different oats had different slippiness, the old variety Black oats were very slippy, almost oily to touch. Or bere which was much more runny than oats. The fanners had various interchangeable riddles with different sized holes to spread the grain evenly into the flow of air from the wooden bladed fan, constantly being turned at a measured pace by the man on the handle. And out of the fanners the bits of straw and chaff were blown out of the open end, the lighter grain called tails out of one side chute, the heavier grain another.

The work was tedious. Fill the shoulder-high hopper from the grain heap, set the slide just so to let the right amount of grain into the fanners. One man turned the handle, usually a shared task time about. Another man filled the hopper and also took away the clean grain and removed the small amounts of odd bits and pieces, putting each on to it’s own heap.

Fanners were much needed to clean the grain from the more simple thrashing mills of former times. The first old mills I first remember had wooden pegs on the large drum to thrash the grain, pegs made of hard wood and replaceable. Drum speed was maybe 500, probably less, often driven by a water wheel or by several horses everlasting going round and round in circles on the Mill Course. Even earlier than that was the flail, I saw one being worked on a croft at Rousam, serious hard work. Sometimes these fanners were handed down through generations, long lasting if looked after well.

Another essential was square wooden grain boxes, lightly made, a wooden handle on either side and an angled lip which lay flat on the floor to scoop grain out of the heap. Near enough to a bushel measure, capable of scooping up just the right amount of oats in four full lifts, or to my memory three heaped full lifts and just a small amount to finish. It depended much on the bushel weight of the grain. Low weights around 38 lbs needed four very full measures, good heavy grain around the standard 42 lbs the bushel needed three and a half boxes - or “thereby” - to fill the one and a half cwt grain sack with oats, or 2 cwts. if with barley.

A necessary accompaniment to the fanners was the weighing machine, we had two. The first was just a balance with a platform tray either side. On one platform the sacks of grain were placed, the opposite platform had an assortment of iron weights, descending from a 56lb all the way down to ½ lb. The larger weights had either a handle cast into it as part of the weight, or a ring handle. Three 56 lbs made the 1.1/2 cwt needed for a sack of oats, four bushels for oats or 3 bushels for bere or barley. You can still see the 56lb weight being easily thrown over the bar at the Halkirk Games by Alistair Gunn, last Saturday in July!! The sacks were filled until the whole thing was tipping in balance, add a little, take out a little, just right.
The other kind of more modern weights had one platform with a graduated arm on which a sliding brass weight was moved along to the correct place. Still got one at Isauld, bought 55 years ago and as good as ever. The platform on which to set the sacks had two hooks or two clamps to hold a bag open for one man to fill, slower than with a helper but functional. Or turn the top of the bag down over the frame. We weighed many a bag on it.

It was amazing how near to full measure an experienced man could work, off by a mere few pounds from correct weight. An easy swinging shove into the heap, top it up to full with scooped hands, an equally easy lift and swing to the sack held open by another man to receive its four scoops. His helper would then, with hands and an easy knee-helped swing, set the bag onto the weighing machine, a very small topping up or taking out to level the weight bar to balance.

Bagging up was sometimes done at the same time as fanning, but the fanners were slow so the bagging might be done just now and then as the heap built up, clearing the floor. Many of the entries in my Grandfather’s day was dressing oats in the early morning, then off to the plow. Or to the Mill with 24 sacks on 3 carts, getting back 19 bolls of 140 lbs a piece from the last lot. That gave a yield of meal of about two thirds, the rest being lost through moisture, grop, sids, by-products of meal making. Some oats were good meal yielders, some were pretty poor. Sandy variety of oats were good.

A two-wheeled spanker or two to wheel full sacks here or there, still widely used today with no improvements needed to the old design other than perhaps rubber wheels instead of iron. Wheel the bags to rest just inside the outer door for eventual loading off the Stone Steps.

And in the long dark dreich mornings of Orkney winters the work would be done by the light of a few paraffin oil lanterns.

No 61. FOOD, or Pickled, Salted or Dried.

2010-04-16T07:16:00.000-07:00

Young gannets, the grey ones, called guga on Sule Sgeir off Lewis.
Guga on Sula Sgeir. Via Malcom Murray
“The ile is full of wild fowls, and when the fowls has their birds ripe, men out of the parish of Ness in Lewis sail and tarry there seven or eight days and to fetch with them home their boatfull of dry wild fowls with wild fowl feathers” – Donald Monro, Archdeacon of the Isles, 1549.

No 61. FOOD FOR WINTER. Groat - 16th April, 2010

Today we come home from the supermarket, unload the boot of the car, take the packets of already frozen plastic wrapped plastic tasting food out of the insulated bags and straight into the freezer compartment of the fridge/freezer. Not so frozen bits go into the upper fridge compartment. But we had no fridges in my early days. We had never heard of “Sale by dates”. So how did we survive at all? Should we not have all been food poisoned into extinction? Certainly if one listens to all the pundits we should not now be alive. From my memory the list of things we stored and later ate is much too long, but we will give it a go.

Winter coming meant laying down food in summer for winter use. Prime one was making jam with home grown berries, or rhubarb from the garden with added ginger. An absolute special was jam made with ling heather berries from Rothiesholm Head, all too small in quantity but so exquisite in taste. It was a day adventure going there and collecting them, 5 long miles away. Jam making meant days of wonderful smells coming through the house from the large brass jam pan bubbling away on the stove, the rattling of jam jars being boiled to sterility in large pans of water, then set out round the sink or table for filling with a large soup ladle or a spouted jug dipping into the scalding jam. Cooled, a waxed disc of paper on top of the jam, a paper cover on top of all with a rubber band to hold it in place. Then into the pantry to be stored on the shelves or in the cupboards in serried rows of this or that with stickers on their sides telling if blackcurrant or rhubarb or whatever, and the year of making. Well made, it would last for years of need be. Different houses had different tasting jams, even with the same ingredients. I never worked it out.

Bottling fruit was also part of winter, the surplus of summer being sterilised by boiling and stored in spring clip topped glass pressure jars which when they had cooled down created their own vacuum. Difficult to prise open the lid later. Our mother dried apple rings but they were not home grown, getting a large case of apples from J. & W. Taits in Kirkwall. Peeled, cored, cut into thin rings and strung on a string in the open air on a sunny day. They lasted well, nicely chewy. And of course they were reconstituted and made into stewed apples, apple puddings and apple crumble later in the winter.
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Butter of course was in surplus in summer, some was salted down in a medium sized brown earthenware crock. Practically uneatable but it was done, the bothy boys seemed not to notice. Hunger is the greatest of all sauces!! It was almost unspreadable as well. Best used for cooking.
There were numerous big brown earthenware crocks, glazed inside, stored in the cool dairy until needed. Sizes differed. There were smaller ones for butter, one to open, one to keep for another day. Once opened the butter deteriorated slowly. Very salty indeed, but in mid winter the cows were not milking much except maybe one or two for milk for boss and the men. No fresh butter available, nor long life milk, nor milk powder. The best we could come up with was Nestles Condensed Milk in tins from the van.
The newly made soft butter was worked over in the dairy on the butter working roller tray, backwards and forwards, how much salt I cannot remember. It was worked until a high degree of saltiness was achieved that the expert taster said was enough. Then it was packed into one of the brown crocks and a thin layer of melted white suet fat poured carefully over the butter. Sealed perfectly, store as cool as possible.

Cheese. Kept long enough. Rubbed down with salt for several days when new made, turned over each day on the flagstone shelves. The salt gave it a hard durable rind. Then stored on a high shelf out of reach of varmints. Green mould on an opened cheese was just scraped off, not thrown away as today as if it had turned to poison. A good cheese did not last long once on the table, vanishing in thick slices on bere bread or oatcakes. Or just a fly slice on its own. Again varying tastes or flavours in different houses.

Long years ago in the 1600s, and maybe not as long ago as that either, the Mertinmas beast was just that, the killing of an ox for whom there was not enough winter feed. Came November – Martinmas - and he had to go. So the meat was pickled with much rubbing in of salt on the flagstone shelves of the dairy, then sunk for the winter in salt brine in capacious 50 gallon wooden barrels. When taken out for cooking it needed a fair degree of soaking in many changes of cold fresh water for a couple of days before it was edible. Sometimes boiling with plenty tatties helped which took some of the salt out of it, throw away the tatties!! The last of the barrel was almost inedible came Spring but it was used.

We never did kill a cattle beast at Whitehall, though there was one half grown calf that someone hit with a too well thrown stone just behind the ear, killing it instantly. It was butchered on the spot and made good use of, shared out even to the thrower!! .

Sheep meat from a yeld gimmer, or a ewe hopefully not too old, home butchered and salted down for winter in the usual capacious barrel of pickle. We called it mutton but now it is unobtainable unless a farmer kills his own, which is getting a scarcer practice as time goes by and there are less people on the farms. Lambs were never home killed unless a casualty like a broken leg, tender but pretty tasteless when compared to mature mutton. It was not that long ago that mutton made as good a price as lamb but fashions change, and the wedder hirsels on the hills of Sutherland with up to 4 year old male castrated sheep are long gone.

I do know a couple, I cannot possibly say they are old fashioned, who got two Blackface sheep carcases from the Western Isles for their recent Golden Wedding. I was told the meal was very acceptably memorable.

Pig meat was normal, killing one every six months, but that I will deal separately as it was another big adventure.

Fish of course were plentiful, evenings out on the water with fishing rods called wands and fitted with white goose feather lures on the three hooks for cuddin, called caithes in Stronsay. Or mackeral. Or a long line with lures for bottom fish such as haddock, ling, skate, cod, occasionally a dogfish but not to everyone’s taste. Should have been called catfish as many found their way to the cats who relished any fish at all. These acceptable fish such as sillocks, caithes, saithe, ling, cod especially, were either salted down into a barrel of pickle or split and wind dried on a long line hanging on the cottage wall facing the sun. The firkin of salt herring (fourth of a barrel) was of course obligatory.

Eggs were set aside for winter, stored in a crock in either a heavy salt pickle or in isinglass, a gelatinous substance obtained from certain seaweeds, which sealed the shell. They lasted a long time in either medium but definitely did not taste like a fresh egg. Possibly used more for baking but at least it made good use of a surplus of eggs in summer.
This is just a taste of some of our winter provisions. In places like St Kilda and Foula and the Guga of Ness in North Lewis, or Copinsay in the days of my great great great grand father Edward Pottinger, split, salted or dried young sea birds were stored for winter. Fishy tasting I am told!! Taken just before being able to fly, going down the cliffs on long ropes to get them. Again, hunger is a great sauce!!!

Young gannets, the grey ones called guga, on Sule Sgeir off Lewis.
Guga on Sula Sgeir. Via Malcom Murray

“The ile is full of wild fowls, and when the fowls has their birds ripe, men out of the parish of Ness in Lewis sail and tarry there seven or eight days and to fetch with them home their boatfull of dry wild fowls with wild fowl feathers” – Donald Monro, Archdeacon of the Isles, 1549.

No 61. Food, = or = Pickled, salted or dried.

2010-04-16T07:09:00.000-07:00

2010-04-02T05:01:00.000-07:00

No 72 The SQUARE No 2.

2010-04-02T04:58:00.001-07:00

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 72 “ THE SQUARE.” pb 02.04.2010.

The social side of “The Square”, that self-contained world all on its own, proud in it’s solitude, where so many people lived and worked out their lives, from whence they took their last journey with their friends walking to the Bay Cemetary behind the ornate two horse black hearse which I remember.
The fairm hoos, the cottages, a happy Square or a sad one. The Boss for whom people liked to work, where men stayed a long time, or the opposite before moving on if they could get another place, not always too easy. A man’s reputation often went before him. Like the man who asked for a reference from his boss, and proudly carried for the rest of his days in his inside pocket the scrap of paper with the words written in pencil :- “During his time working for me Jon **** did everything I asked him to do entirely to his own satisfaction”.
Some men just liked to move on anyway, nothing personal but the appeal of a new place was profound with some farm servants. Perhaps it enlivened their dreary days of constant work, a new place very much like the old one but at least a shift, greener grass over the dyke - maybe!!.

The Square is remembered now by mainly urban dwellers as where their grandparents lived, returning on a summer pilgrimage from America to “The Square” and staring unbelievingly at the old house or cottage from whence their grandfather emigrated. I met one to whom that refers, her grandfather George Shearer leaving Whitehaa in 1927 as a young man aged 20 for Canada. Then a family move South to the USA, Georgia I believe. No names, but her out cousins are still around, I know them well. The cottage at Whitehaa is long gone.

What made one farm so different from another, the “Boss” or the “Mistress”, each so important each in their own way? Their little empires should have been the Boss outdoors, the Mistress in the house, but it was not always so. There are stories now passing into the mists of time of the “Mistress” who knew everything going on outdoors, who reduced the all powerful ”Boss” to a shivering heap of humanity when she came round the corner. No-one was as observant as a farm worker - or his wife - they missed nothing. Probably gave origin to the phrase “Who wears the troosers in that hoos?”
Not too many of these proud matriarchs as far as I remember, but on the positive side many a farmer died too young and his widow took over, bringing up her family and running the farm as if he had never been there. Sometimes at a very young age too. Not an easy thing to do, but it was very well done by not a few women and I take off my bonnet to them. Oddly the young sons of that situation frequently did very well in later life, the responsibility thrust upon them at an early age doing them no harm whatsoever.

The old days at The Square of Whitehaa, and at other farms, was so much on it’s own. Transport to elsewhere was entirely on foot, or maybe the Long Cart was yoked for communal transport to the Island Picnic, bairns and all.
The 50 years of diaries of Wm Tait, of the Bay Farm in Stronsay until Nov. 28th Nov.1919 when he moved to Ingsay in Birsay, record “July 19 Sat 1919, General Holiday - Picnic on Rousam Links - Concert in School in evening - Bonfire at Hall 11 p.m.” and “Aug 05 Tues 1919 - Tarring carts a.m. – United Free Church Picnic p.m. - fair day.” and on Sat 15th 1899 “Golf Picnic in Rousam Links”, and Aug 7th, 1899 “ Mr and Mrs Sutherlands Picnic..” The Sutherlands lived their summer holidays in Mount Pleasant on the edge of the Rousam Links in Stronsay. And the Long Carts carried the folk. They had the advantage of always being clean, never used for neeps or for dung, great for carting hay or for a flitting. The Island obviously had it’s social side!!!

Perhaps the farm servant had a bicycle. Maybe a motor bike but if one then it would be owned by a young unmarried man with no family responsibilities. Either a bike or a bairn, the choice was his, though the bike might indeed lead to the bairn!!
. A car for a farm worker was quite unheard of, the first I remember was owned by Benny Leith, now gone, who had one at Greenland Mains when he worked there. A two seater, three wheeler, two at the front, one at the back, which was the driving wheel powered by a rear mounted engine about the size of a motor bikes. Open top, though I think there might have been a canvas cover lying in the shed. So near the ground you checked when you came out of it to see if the a*** of your troosers was still intact. To get a run in it was a great honour.
But in Stronsay walking was the name of the game, all children walking to school, some as far as five miles for the Ste’nsons o’ Burrogate at the end of the hill road at Rousam Head, and in all weathers. A very solid hour at a brisk step, no dallying on the way to school, but coming home was different. So too with any others visiting within the Island, or Church, or shopping, but shopping is another part of days gone away which we will take care of in due time.
There was an interaction between households, I remember no strife between individual houses at Whitehaa though there must have been some somewhere. Rather a helping hand you could count on if need arose. Doors were never locked, some sugar or tea would be borrowed if the owner was out, later to be replaced.

Some of the farms had servant dwellings actually in the Square, looking out on the middens at times. Sometimes the Grieve’s House took pride of place at the entrance to the Square, cutting off all visitors. A barking dog would keep good guard. Some cottages or mens’ houses were actually in the Square, on the ground floor with a grain loft above, or in the loft above the byres. There is still a fireplace I know of in the gable end of a building now gutted out as a store, hanging suspended way up the wall. In 1896 with my grandfather at the Bu’ of Rousam in Stronsay Willie Logie flit – moved - to the Loft. It must have been a better dwelling than the one he was already in. It is still there. Logie was the farm foreman. At Barrock Mains the surviving old smiddy still has a small room above it for the visiting blacksmith who would stay a day or two to go over all the horses. A farm kitchen often had a room above it for the servant girls, quite warm and cosy too. Very popular I was told.
There was another farm cottage of old, the Grieve’s House. Better than the rest, very often strategically built at the entrance to the Square. There it was, almost a guard house for no-one could pass without being seen. Or for that matter on farm business which the Grieve took care of. It always was one of our father’s tales that when he bought and came to Greenland Mains in 1944 he could not get into his own lofts without John Leith the Grieve letting him in with the only key. And it could not have been in better hands.

2010-03-22T14:22:00.000-07:00

WHITEHAA SQUARE 1935

2010-03-19T10:13:00.000-07:00

No 70. THE SQUARE.

2010-03-19T10:10:00.000-07:00

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 70. “ THE SQUARE.”

“The Square”, the “Fairm Toon”, was everything about the farm buildings, an all encompassing phrase pertaining to a farm of my early days, a very real square indeed. It was a self contained entity where every activity on the farm began and finished, the hub of the farm, the dwelling place of all the farm people. The Square of Whitehall included the farm house and the farm servants’ cottages, though separate from the main buildings. So the Square actually at the farm was the buildings, but the Square to outsiders was the whole entity, dwellings and all.
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Each farm was a small factory standing in the midst of its own farmland and in its own right, the “Fairm Toon” of Lewis Grassick Gibbon. Often enough the phrase was used as an all embracing postal and local address for all those who lived there, sometimes even a letter was so addressed. So much to tell.

“The Square” contained the barns, the lofts, the stable, the byres, the middens, the odd sheds, the sheep pens. There was the blacksmith shop with forge and anvil, spare horse shoes and smithy tools hanging on pegs on the wall. It was there for the convenience of the local blacksmith who would come to the farm for a day and shoe a bunch of horses. It saved a passel of time not having to make the long trek with the horses to the blacksmiths own forge. It was also handy for the occasional loose horseshoe being replaced by a knackey horseman, or one of the men shaping or straightening a bit of bent iron for some purpose.

As bairns we had a bit of fun lighting the old forge, pumping the old bellows, heating a bit of iron red hot and hammering it on the anvil into something or other. Even tried hot welding two bits of iron, just to see if we could do it. Not too good, there was still a magic in the blacksmiths hands.
We had a blacksmith shop at Greenland Mains used by John Innes, the blacksmith from Rattar. There was one at Bardnaheigh, though too late for us as we had no horses there. There was the joiner’s shed redolent with the smell of sawdust and new wood.. There would be a well for water, sometimes a long enough walk, some spring feeding it.
The steading was surrounded with farm roads and small stone-dyked parks and odd pens and walls. There was the Bull shed where father hopefully fed some young Pedigree Aberdeen Angus for sale in Kirkwall. The stone walled sheep fanks had a sheep dipper incorporated into and under and through the wall of the sucklers byre. There was the remains of a sheepy house, fallen into disuse.

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The working day began there, finished there. In summer the horse men took in their horses from their grass field to the stable in the morning to harness up and then left the stable to go to the field, coming back at dayset to unharness. In winter all the beasts were housed there, save the sheep who would be outdoors on some rough ground or a poor field. We were literally surrounded by horse, cattle, sheep, pigs, hens, ducks, geese, turkeys, dogs, cats, rats and mice.

If there was a blizzard of snow cutting us off from the outside world we could survive all on our own. The well filled meal girnel in the loft with oatmeal ,and beremeal, the stash of white and black puddings buried in the oat meal in the girnel and which kept well there, the potato shed with its well covered heaps of many varieties of tatties. The neep shed would have a well heaped up pile of turnips, taken in over the days before the storm as most farmers could smell a storm coming by a look at the moon or a sniff of the air in the early morning. Extra cart loads were taken in from the field, Yellows or Swedes, and dumped in handy places if the sheds were full.
The barrel of salt herring inside the back door, dried sillocks hanging in the cottage kitchens, eggs in the henhouse, not forgetting the odd fat clucking hen who had her neck pulled on her way to a good pot of Scotch Broth. The cured hams hanging on hooks from the kitchen ceilings, or stashed in the brine barrel. All that was needed for just carrying on carrying on!!

The Square applied to the people as well as to the buildings. The men were called the Whitehaa Men, farm people who were sometimes born there, lived there, died there. Not just the workers but their wives, their children, their grannies, their granddads, their dogs, their cats, even a canary or a budgie or two. They usually had some hens and a pig or two, even the milking goat of one worker I knew, tethered by a chain as she would eat through any rope tether to escape and create mayhem.

At times their houses were just part of the square itself, fitted in to a convenient or even an inconvenient, corner. Sometimes there was a byre below and a house above, warm, central heating from the cattle. Or more often the other way round, cottage below and grain loft above. These steading dwellings can still be seen on many farms today, now long gone from human occupancy and serving as a store. Maybe not so long gone at that for I still come across someone who remembers living in a house actually in “The Square”. The cottages were usually built to suit the farmer, if they looked out onto a farm midden that was of little or no consequence. Oddly, full circle, today these old steadings are sometimes being converted into very desirable and very highly priced modern residences. I know quite a few, and well done they are too.
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On Whitehall the Square began with the nucleus of the thrashing mill with its grain lofts and straw barn, taking up all of one side of the Square, two floors high, the threshing mill and the barn midway. The lean to engine shed for the Campbell oil-engine was tacked on at the back. The stackyard lay above that at Whitehall with the two adjoining stone built hen houses, one in the upper left corner, one in the lower.

Climbing the roofs of the barn was one of our boyhood ploys, see who could go fastest from one end to the other along the ridge. Totally frowned upon, and total hell if we were caught, which no doubt added to the charm. Only one of us, a friend David McLeod whose father was a prisoner of the Japanese from the Fall of Singapore in 1941 to August 1945, and survived, could and did walk upright along the top of the ridge of the barn at Greenland Mains. Fearless. No Health and Safety then of course, but I do not think many today would try to emulate him. There was also in our boyhood Stewart Hewison of Trenaby in Westray who stood on his head on the top stone of the gable end of Queen Mary Stewarts too close friend Bothwell’s now ruined Castle of Noltland. Both totally mad in the nicest sense.

The barn I have described previously, but at right angles to it were two of the byres. On the upper side of The Square were the three calfie byres, built across the roof line. Each byre held 12 small weaned Spring born calves, tied by the neck with chains called asks in Caithness, neck bands in Orkney, three double stalls either side. The asks were on sliders which allowed verticle head movement for each beast, high enough to pull straw out of the heck or rack, or maybe just to reach across for a titbit of turnip from in front of its partner.
Tying the cattle up for the winter was a pantomime. A lasso was made from a cart rope and several men were in the byre with the door closed to prevent any escape. Throw a loop over a neck, run the free end through the slider in the flagstone hallan and hang on, pull in the reluctant beast until the neck chain could be fastened. Job done.

At the lower opposite side was the yearlings byre, or yearalts byre as we called it, with the Long Loft above. Below that the feeders byre, a lean-to construction with the roof tucked just under the Long Loft roof eaves but quite high and spacious, plenty good ventilation.
At the fourth side of the square opposite the barn and next to the Big Hoos was the cartshed with a handy neep shed at either end to service the calfie byres above and the yearalts byre below.
In the centre of The Square was the cattle midden, cleaned out in summer.
An old photo has survived of The Square showing Billy the Horse with our cousin Thora Johnston from Stromness, our cousins Jean, Robert and Margaret Flett from Edinburgh, and myself. I do not know if it is printable.

We must not forget the social side of “The Square” either. Another day perhaps.

‘’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’

2010-03-06T01:04:00.000-08:00

No 71. Coaling Huilks in Stronsay

2010-03-06T01:01:00.001-08:00

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

No 71. THE COALING HULKS OF STRONSAY.

Lying at anchor below Whitehall Farm in the Bay of Franks were the coaling hulks waiting for their customers, the herring drifters of Buckie and Bamff, Fraserburgh and Aberdeen, Lerwick and Lowestoft. And other places but these were the main herring ports I knew. The hulks must have been anchored fore and aft, otherwise they would have needed too much sea room to swing on wind and tide in a shallow bay. A very old photo I have shows them all lined up in one direction, drifters swarming about them like bees at a honey pot.
Ships serving there as coaling hulks, though not necessarily all at the same time, were the Watchful, Hebe, Glenmore, Dorjoy and Riga, and especially the Orcadia (ii).
The last mentioned, the Orcadia (ii), had pride of place for me. She had served the North Isles routes in the ownership of Robertsons Orkney Steam Navigation Co. from building in 1868 to 1931. She was withdrawn in 1931 when the newly built Earl Sigurd arrived, and was sold on to W & J Leslie of Kirkwall, who used her for two months as a replacement for the shop-boat Cormorant, going around the various Islands. She then served as a coaling hulk in Stronsay before being finally towed South and broken up at Bo'ness in 1934. That was the ship that took our mother to Sanday in Orkney to teach school there before she married our father in 1928. She stayed in Sanday with her mother’s brother Wm Robertson from Stroma and his wife Lizzie, who I think farmed there. If not then they lived there anyway.
A wonderful but very old photo shows about 6 hulks coaling the drifters at the same time. One was a cement barge, though I wonder now if the Hebe was indeed that barge. Nice name anyway. There was certainly a wonderful photo of a ship lying across the outer end of the Stronsay pier which had been a sailing ship, but stripped of her yards and sails as if on her way to the coal hulk station. The concrete barge is now settled hard on the bottom for ever, breaking loose in a storm and being holed though concrete ships were incredibly strong. John Jefferis built some small concrete fishing boats at Scrabster after supervising the making of the concrete panels for PFR at Dounreay for Taylor Woodrow, PFR going critical in 1974. Unconventional but well made boats.
They were filled with coal in readiness for the season by colliers, usually from Newcastle, that came to Stronsay during May and June to transfer their cargoes of coal into the hulks ready for the fishing season in July. That in itself was a busy job with men going out in motorboats from the piers at the Harbour to the hulks, about a near mile over the water. Early morning to late evening, then coming back as black as only coalmen could be, totally covered head to foot in coal dust. Hard manual work too.

. We used as boys look for the registration letters on the bows of the drifters to tell us from whence they had come, keeping a tally to see who had got the most. It was a change from collecting cigarette cards from fag smokers. The last of the old sailing drifters had of course little need for coal save a few bags from Davie Chalmer’s coal yard at the head of the pier for their stoves which served both as cooker and cabin heater The small iron pipe in the stern of all the drifters showed if the stove was lit or not, a give away small plume of smoke.

These old timers were past their working days on the high seas but still capable of service in their own way as coaling hulks. Their anchorage station in the sheltered Bay of Franks was a hive of activity in the herring season. First the drifters came in to the various piers during the early mornings, both in Stronsay and half a mile across the Harbour in Papa Stronsay, to unload and sell their catch, then unload their herring onto waiting carts to get them as soon as possible fresh to the curing yards. The crews then eased their boats off the pier to make room for another boat to slip in between them and the pier, then the crew turned in to their tiny bunks in the equally tiny six bunk cabin at the stern of the drifter to get their supper and sleep, work done for an upside-down-day, working through the night, hauling herring in the early morning, and sleeping during at least part of the day.
Early afternoon they stirred, banked up their fires and, with black smoke spiralling from their funnels, streamed across the harbour to the coaling hulks to get their bunkers filled ready for their next night at sea. The numbers seemed enormous to us, as indeed they were. Old photographs in Wick Heritage Centre of drifters in Wick Harbour give some idea of the numbers. Though Wick and Ian Sutherland claim Wick as the Herring Capital of the North Sea, rightly so, Stronsay in its day was as large. Herring migrated South from shoaling in Shetland waters to off Stronsay and then moved further South to off Wick, further on again as Autumn progressed to off East Anglia. And the herring boats followed them.

Storms were always a peril, even in a sheltered bay, their anchors the only attachment for the hulks to stay in place and their engines long removed. There were incidents but dealt with as I do not remember any ships being driven onto the beach. We did look to the hulks during or after any storm to see if all was well, not that much could be done if they broke loose. The Bay of Franks must have been good holding ground.

With the final cessation of herring fishing in 1938 the steel hulks were either towed away for breaking up at Burntisland or Bo’ness, or were cut to pieces in Stronsay during the War for scrap iron, the remaining hulks being bought by Davie Chalmers and broken up at Newton’s Pier. I am told that some of them still exist as door lintels in Stronsay houses or sheds. Certainly if any use could have been made of parts of them Stronsay would not have seen them going to waste.

The concrete barge stays high in my memory. It was the object of one of our dafter escapades, and I think all the iron hulks had gone by then. Our father had gone in to Kirkwall so when the cats away the mice can play!!! We had a 14ft dinghy which stayed above the beach. The rowlocks were always taken safely away by our father out of our reach. No matter, someone !*!*! suggested that we should explore the barge. Jackie Stevenson, his brother Hecky Marshall, David, Norna, Isobel and I, set off for the shore. No rowlocks, no matter, we found bits of wood on the beach which we made fit into the proper holes. Into the water with the boat, oars tied to the sticks with binder twine, and off we set. Not far to go, the sea was kind. In respect to our late father he had long trained us how to behave in a boat, no standing, keep your allocated seats, balance the weight. Got to the barge, tied up with the boat rope and we explored.
Then someone saw a motorboat heading straight for us from the pier. Ominous. So into the dinghy, oars out and we headed for the shore. One of our bits of wood serving as rowlocks broke, we were adrift. The motorboat soon came up, a rope was tied to our little battle cruiser and we were towed in ignominy to the pier. There our mother was waiting for us. And none of us could swim!!!

2010-02-20T04:18:00.000-08:00

No 62. Full steam ahead for Islands visit.

2010-02-19T05:55:00.000-08:00

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.

Earl Sigurd leaving Stronsay.

Steamer day. David and I were on our way unaccompanied on the Earl Sigurd to Cleat in Westray for a holiday with our Uncle Bill and our slightly older cousins Jean and Grace Pottinger. The heavy ropes holding the Sigurd to the pier were let go, hauled onboard, coiled and snugged down in place, held there neatly with a whip rope. The wire ropes were wound onto their drums by a couple of men on a turn handle. The Sigurd eased away from the pier, water gurgling to fill the increasing space. The brass telegraph on the bridge double clanged as the Captain put it to Dead Slow Astern, a repeated double clang in acknowledgment from the depths of the engine room from the engineer. The propeller turned and began to draw the ship back and out from the pier, water flowing along the sides.
It was a Friday and the Earl Sigurd was doing its once-a-week Round-the-Isles trip from Kirkwall, calling first at Stronsay, then Sanday, a small boat coming out at Calf Sound in Eday, then Westray and back in to Kirkwall. A long day for the crew but a chance for a popular summer tour Round the Isles or going to visit friends on another island as sailings allowed. Passengers and mail and newspapers only, a quick turn round at each call, no cargo unless special parcels or spare parts or essentials like a case of Whisky for the Pub. The sailing routes varied.

Tuesday was also a sailing day for the Sigurd, not doing regular round the Islands sailings but more specials loading livestock specifically from one or other Island. She serviced North Ronaldsay, I think once a week, and we might see her funnel smoke in the far distance as she slipped round to the West of Sanday and out of sight to the North, a one Island all day run.

The two steamers serving the North Isles, the Earl Thorfinn and the smaller Earl Sigurd, were coal-burning, steam-driven, slow turning reciprocating engines. Looking down from the engine room door that day, we were met with the hot smell of steam, oil, grease, the sough and thump of the massive pistons flying unseen in their cylinders, the huge propeller shaft dimly seen revolving in the depths below us. The perpetual clatter of shovels as the firemen threw coal through the open firedoor and into the red glowing maw of the furnace to keep stream pressure up, or pulled down more coal from out of the bunker. The chief engineer took we boys down for a conducted tour, a bit of oily cotton waste in his massive fist giving a wipe in passing to an already spotless surface.

In Orkney folklore and in the Orkneyinga Saga Earl Thorfinn was the Viking Earl Thorfinn Sigurdson and Earl Sigurd was his father Earl Sigurd Hlodvirsson, who was killed at the Battle of the Ford of Clontarff just outside Dublin on 23rd April, 1014 A.D. Our Viking history was, and still is, dear to the Orkneyman. Our ships were so named.
The Earl Thorfinn was the larger and senior vessel and did the main part of the North Isles sailings. I think it came into service about 1928, sold in 1963 for breaking up. The Earl Sigurd followed into service about 1931, smaller but she did her fair share, and was finally broken up in 1969. They took over the North Isles service from the Orcadia (ii) which our mother knew well and in which she sailed to Sanday where she taught school, staying there with her mother’s brother Will Robertson, both came from Stroma. The Orcadia (ii), built for Robertsons of Orkney Steam Navigation Co. in 1868, was sold in 1931 to Leslies of Kirkwall, used for two months as a replacement for the travelling shop boat Cormorant going round the Islands, then sold on again to Davie Chalmers in Stronsay to serve as one of his coal hulks. .

Sailings were Earl Thorfinn on Saturday out from Kirkwall, calling at Eday, Stronsay, Sanday, in whatever order the tides dictated. Eday had the shallowest pier, Sanday next and Stronsay had the deepest. The ship sailed through Calf Sound between the spectacular Red Head on Eday and the Grey Head on the Calf, a freak of nature lying but a short distance apart and a notorious place for sea sickness. Finally to Pierowall in Westray where the Thorfinn lay over the weekend. Most of her crew came from Westray, almost her home port. Monday in to Kirkwall by various Islands, dictated by the tides for shallow piers. Tuesday the Thorfinn lay in Kirkwall taking on coal and doing other servicing, Wednesday out again eventually to Westray, and Thursday in to Kirkwall, Saturday back out again by the various Islands to Westray for the weekend.

Every now and again the Thorfinn would lie overnight at another Island, perhaps once a month in turn. That meant an early start from that Island and once I visited my brother David when he farmed Huip in Stronsay, played chess with him all night, and then down to Whitehall Village to catch the Thorfinn for a 5.30 am. sailing. No point in going to bed and missing the boat!! Slept all the way in to Kirkwall, waking up as the ship tied up alongside the pier.

Papa Stronsay was also serviced on rare occasion by the Sigurd which we could see just across the water lying at the Papa pier, a special sailing for livestock. Normally Papa Stronsay people crossed by small motor boat to Stronsay for connections, pick up the mail and papers, shopping. Papa Stronsay was a small island but very fertile, I think about 150 acres, tenanted by Jeemie Stout in our time in Stronsay. Eventually he was our successor in Whitehall as tenant. His family now own the farm, and recently also bought next door Clestrain.
The two steamers also did special runs such as the County Show when they each did a couple of Islands, getting people in to Kirkwall early for the day and out again at day’s end, a very early start in the mornings after lying at the respective harbours overnight. There were also special trip days for one or other island, again in and out. Two hours sailing direct from Stronsay, two and a half from Westray. Made for a long day, but these were summer sailings and the evenings in the North were long light. We went once with our father on a day trip for the Inter-island International Football Match between Shetland and Orkney. Shetland won.
From Whitehall we looked North to Sanday to catch the first distant black smudge of smoke telling us the Thorfinn was getting up steam ready for leaving Kettletoft Pier for the half hour crossing to Stronsay, a small black dot at first but steadily growing. Came in between Huip Ness and Papa Stronsay, skirting the guiding buoys and into the pier.
A gathering of men and a long narrow wooden gangway was quickly lifted off the pier and put in place, tied safely to the ship’s rails with ropes. Depending on the tide, sometimes the gangway sloped up on a high tide, sometimes down on an ebb. Again, on a very high tide, sometimes the gangway was fitted onto a lower deck. Different Islands had different piers with different heights. Total rise and fall on a spring tide could be as much as fifteen feet.
Passengers came ashore, some to Stronsay, some to head up the pier for a breakfast at Jock Stout’s the baker, or rather Aggie Stout his very capable wife. Good breakfasts too.
The steamer had various times at the pier, sometimes quite short, especially on the way out from Kirkwall, sometimes quite long if much cargo or many animals had to be loaded so plenty of time for a leisurely meal. Always a warning blast from the ship ten minutes before casting off.
We once had a breakfast at Stouts, passing Stronsay on our way to Westray after coming to Caithness, a breakfast shared with my cousin Grace from Cleat, John Tait her husband, and our respective families. We just made it down the pier. In fact the Thorfinn had already winched around the pier end ready for leaving but we got aboard. Sometimes it did that if the tide was on the ebb at Spring Tides just to be ready to get away without touching the sandy bottom. The gangway would be put up again for that final ten minute wait if taken round the pier end.
Gossip at the pier was normal, some friend or other on the Thorfinn or Sigurd going to another Island or in to Kirkwall coming down the gangway to have a yarn on the pier with an old friend, get the latest news, or just pass the time of day. It was a social part of Island life, a meeting place with sometimes a real need to meet the steamer, sometimes just an excuse for a yarn and a dram. Steamer day was steamer day, a social event as well as business. And the pub was open all day!!!

2010-02-05T04:56:00.000-08:00

No 65. Loading for Kirkwall.

2010-02-05T04:54:00.001-08:00

ABOVE ;; THE EARL THORFINN LEAVING STRONSAY.

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.

Monday sailing back in to Kirkwall for the Thorfinn, normally from Westray save when it had an overnight at other Island, maybe once a month in turn. If it did then the Sigurd did Westray as a special direct sailing on it’s own. The Thorfinn for example would be overnighting at Stronsay, then on to Sanday and Eday and in to Kirkwall. Early start as Monday was the usual day for cattle for cross-pier connection to be loaded on another ship for Aberdeen, usually the St Magnus but there were others, St Rognvald and St Ninian come to mind.
They sailed from Kirkwall about 6pm if I remember correctly to get in to Aberdeen in the early morning. There had been a service as far as Leith but that was discontinued in my memory. Some ships called at Wick too on their way South, carrying livestock from Sinclair’s Auction Mart and passengers. That sailing served many students going to Edinburgh University such as my three doctor uncles, as well as others from Caithness, some of them still around.

The Thorfinn getting in early to Kirkwall also fitted with the Auction Mart as it gave them good time to deal with incoming cattle or sheep, driving them up the pier and along the Back Road to the old Auction Mart site. with enough helpers to block off side roads and gardens!! That site is now the wonderful New Orkney Library and Archive, the Mart has been relocated out of town at Hatston. The Library and Archive is the very best one could wish for, mountains of new equipment, masses of stored information. Perhaps oil money helped to build such an excellent facility, if it did then it was spectacularly well spent. It is worth a visit just to see it!!

The loading of the ship was a matter of great judgement and skill in determining what went where, slings of this and that already made up and strategically set out on the pier in readiness for loading by a magic formula. Everything seemed to be in the right spot when needed, little words needing to be exchanged, long practice made perfect no doubt. The heavy wire rope from the ship with its latched lifting hook could stretch quite a ways so that items could be slid with some guidance along the pier before being lifted into the air and swung on board to disappear down through the hatch into the hold below. Gave real meaning to the phrase “Down the Hatch!!!” A shout from the depths relayed to the winch man helped to distribute the loads unseen by us from the bridge spectator point.

Most usual from Stronsay was the huge weekly consignment of boxes of eggs. Monday suited best so the Egg Grading Station in Kirkwall could get them graded and sent South. Glasgow was a favourite weekly destination for Dennison’s ship the Elwick Bay.
There might be occasional loading of furniture as someone left the Island, no containers to pack but bits and pieces off a cart or two. Maybe a large box or two and a couple of trunks but no special containers. When we came to Caithness in May 1944, though I was not there, we loaded some little furniture on the Thorfinn, a piano now at Barrock Mains, an Orkney straw backed chair made for our grand-father and grand-mother for their marriage in 1880. It is still in Greenland Mains House with brother Hamish, still almost as good as new though woodworm have been present in the straw back, nothing serious, just discernable. I never knew woodworm did other than look for wood but there it is, straw will do. Other than that most of the house furniture was sold at the sale in Nov.1944. Greenland Mains was already quite well furnished by John Scott’s sisters who left most of it for us, we had no need to move much.

We also took to Greenland Mains some pedigree Aberdeen Angus cows our father liked, some working Clydesdale horses including a big black home bred former stallion called Prince who I helped train. Now don’t get me wrong, I was not the trainer, but I did a few things to help. Peter Stevenson was the very capable trainer. I was only home on holidays but one training task at Easter was to yoke Prince into a heavy wooden beam or sleeper and pull it across the ploughed furrows. Nothing sharp to cause damage if he got a bit fractious. To help with a little extra weight, not much I admit, we stood on the sleeper while Peter held the reins and took care of the horse. Prince was easy to train, a big bonny horse, no longer a stallion thanks to the vet from Kirkwall but with the proud carriage and strong neck of his early years.
The other task I helped with in training Prince was to build cart loads of sheaves from the stooks in the field at harvest while again Peter controlled the horse. I must have been a bit conceited even then as I reckoned my loads were the best built.!!! Actually quite proud to be asked to help by my father, I was 14, the harvest was October 1943, it was my last in Stronsay. The memory of that harvest is with me still. I was home on Harvest Holidays from school in Inverness, a Wartime practice to help food production. Sometimes called “Tattie Holidays” though Stronsay was not a great tattie grower, but there were other harvest tasks to be done. Even town children were encouraged to go into the country to lend a hand, getting a bed on the farm they were working on. An adventure for many even if lodgings had to be found, and we looked forward to the break.
But to continue the loading. When all the smaller items had been loaded and safely stowed below in the hold, the hatch cover was put in place, the heavy waterproof tarpaulin stretched over all, the wooden wedges driven home into the cleats at the hatch sides to hold the cover against any incoming waves. Then they got ready for what I can best describe as the rodeo.
The pens for the cattle were under the bridge and a long ways back towards the passenger cabins, a door separating them but allowing access. The smell was of course that of the byre, but stronger. The pens had been washed down with a copious supply of pumped sea water, draining overboard into the sea. Tastier fish I was told!!
The cattle had been penned at the head of the pier in one of Davie Chalmers yards. All were haltered with home made halters, a job again for a wet day making them with home made rope in the Long Loft. The cattle would be haltered in their stalls in the byre before being let off the asks (neck chains) and driven down the road to the pier head in readiness. Usually the previous evening for most of the Island but an early start from Whitehall was our usual as we had only one mile to go.
When ready a loading pen was erected next to the ship with heavy movable timber partitions, three sided and the fourth side against the ship holding the heavy wooden cattle gangway which had been lifted off the pier by the winch and lowered into place. Sloping up or down according to the tide.
The cattle were then driven down the pier in a bunch, plenty helpers but no shouting, just gentle driving. There were no side rails on the pier, just a flat surface with bollards along either side for ship mooring. On occasion a beast would go over the edge, I saw one once but men were quickly into a boat. Get alongside the swimming steer, throw a noose over his head, catch the halter, row back to shore towing the miscreant. Then back along the pier to join his fellows with two men hanging on the halter and off South. Choice words I cannot repeat bestowed on him. Still, it did not happen often.
Actual loading meant catching a halter and pulling, the beasts being tied up in the pens onboard. Sometimes they just drove them on if they went easy but the halter was a standby.

That would conclude the loading, a blast on the ship’s siren to give ten minutes warning which time was not wasted as the crew tidied up and made ready for sea.

No 64. Unloading Ship. 23rd Jan. 2010

2010-01-22T09:09:00.000-08:00

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.

FOTO OF EARL THORFINN AT STRONSAY PIER.

No 64. UNLOADING SHIP. 23RD JAN.2010

Unloading ship was one of our adventures. Sometimes the Thorfinn was as much as two hours at a pier, both going out with unloading cargo for each island, about the same sometimes loading going in to “The Toon”. This was of course before the days of roll-on roll-off ferries with containers for everything. No fun at all now, just touch and go.

Our two hour entertainment was always at Kettletoft Pier at Sanday. Eday was a shorter time for a smaller Island. We did not see the unloading for that length of time in Stronsay as we had no need to be on the pier until nearer sailing time if we were going on the ship, though Stronsay as well as Sanday could be a two hour stop in it’s own right. Many times we were there for some of the time with our father, though never allowed to go down the one mile to the Village on our own. The pier was not really too safe. Peter Burr, originally from Tongue in Sutherlandshire and father of Peter Burr who used to live in Janetstown before finally moving to Tongue, our butcher in Stronsay and one of our general merchants, was drowned when he unfortunately reversed his lorry over the unguarded edge. His passenger, a Williamson whose first name I cannot recall, got out of the cab, surfaced and survived. A sad day.

But going to Westray we could be spectators for that two hours at Sanday, a larger island than Stronsay, more people, more cattle. That time gave us an excuse to go up the pier to the Post Office and visit the shop owned by the Sinclairs, our Uncle Bill in Westray’s in-laws. They served teas which we made use of if we had a long stopover. Good teas too with home baking. And they never took a penny from we boys, family like.
Unloading at the Islands was a hotch-potch of a great variety of goods. Heavy rope slings were greatly used and much of the cargo was stowed in the hold already in the slings ready for lifting out. A man at the hatch controlled everything, watching below to see if a lift was ready and signalling by hand to the winch man when to lift. No walky talkies then, just good team work.
Feeding stuffs loomed large as the egg industry was then going great guns in Orkney. Even during the War feed supplies were available but on ration, eggs were needed to feed the Nation. So we got our allotment. Mostly Bibbys and BOCM. Slings of empty egg boxes were lowered onto the pier, to be later filled and returned to Kirkwall. All eggs were free range production which was all we had before modern intensive methods came in Post-war, so called factory farming. Wooden henhouses were spread all over the landscape and some in gardens at the back of the Village, free ranging over father’s fields over the back garden walls but I guess he got paid in kind one way or the other.
At Drummond Park Hostel in Inverness during the War Years we often had scrambled eggs using dried egg powder. To farm boys used to our own fresh farm eggs it was not our first choice. The dried egg powder was shipped across the Atlantic from the USA at dreadful cost in men and ships. We should have been more grateful to get it, but fresh eggs from home was indeed Manna from Heaven. The Postal Service did wonders during the War, many a parcel of this and that from the farms was sent to friends in the towns and still arrived fresh enough, mostly!! Our School Hostel staff from Mr Frewin down were very kind to all us boys in dealing with gifts of food from home. He was also my Maths Master at Inverness Royal Academy..
Imported feed to the Islands such as Stronsay was essential to augment our own limited grain resources. Pigs also needed considerable imports. And cattle cake. The feed came in hessian bags weighing 11/2 cwts, about 75 kgs today. Now illegal to lift that weight under H&SE rules but a man who could not lift that bag on his own was not of much use. And many a woman could do just as well, sometimes better!!
Odd wooden crates were landed for various purposes. Bags of flour for our two bakers in the Village, Jock Stout and Swanneys. Slings of timber for the two joiners we had, Cheemie Morrison at Hillcrest who made that new cart for our father and Jock Mitchel in the Village. Sometimes a farmer got a load of timber for doing his own building work, as did our father for the Madhoos at Airy.
Iron for the two Island blacksmiths, one in the Village and one in the South End. Drums of 45 gallons of paraffin or petrol, paraffin for farmers’ tractors and petrol for Davie Chalmers at the top of the pier to pour into his tank with it’s hand cranked pump. Tar in 40 gallon barrels for various uses. There was one time when the roads were being tar sealed for the first time and a large number of tar barrels came to Stronsay. That must have been pre-war as the roads were done while I was still in the North School. The quarry over the road was going full blast, the rattle and thump of the stone crusher punctuating our day. The empty barrels were much in demand, being cut open, flattened, and used as one would use corrugated iron sheeting. Many a hen house or small shed was so made. A pretty adaptable people.

Boxes and boxes of groceries for various shops. Flour and sugar came in big bags, not today’s pretty pretty plastic wrapped minuscule packets. Various sacks of dried fruits, peas, beans, salt.. A scoop was a very necessary part of a shop’s fittings!! And a weighing machine. Large boxes of tissue wrapped apples and pears from California and from New Zealand for the shops.
Livestock came ashore, some in slings under the belly though most walked up or down a heavy wooden gangway depending on the height of the tide. It was slung into place by the ship’s derrick with men steadying it from swinging. A new horse, a cow for milking, a young bull for some farm in the Island. Young calves for some farm or other needing a calf to replace a casualty, or just to bucket rear if milk was plentiful in summer. No powdered calf milk in those days. Safely esconsed in a small sack with the neck securely tied with bindertwine but not too tight to throttle them, their legs in the bag safe from kicking. John T Flett of Quanterness, doyen of Orkney cattle dealers, was the source for many. Some were sent from the Auction Mart in Kirkwall. Young calves were quite plentiful as many a person then kept a milking cow for their own use and the week old new-born calf was sold.
Davie Miller was in charge of the pier, held the key to the store, did all the paper work. Married to a Caithness girl, their daughter Daveen was in my class and we vied for top place. I will give her best, she was usually top, but not always. The storeshed was enlarged in my memory, an extension being built on to one end, but never big enough.

And the passengers were always of interest, some for that particular Island, some passing by, some on business. Even while the Thorfinn was not yet alongside the pier, someone would see their friend on board and wave vigorously each way, a hanky often used as a flag. Seemed to be a matter of pride as to who would see whom first!! I do well remember, coming home for school holidays from Inverness, looking as we approached the pier to see if our father was waiting, though he definitely was not one of those waving a hanky!!

No 63. Papay Boatmen and their skills.

2010-01-09T01:13:00.000-08:00

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 63. ISLAND HARBOURS.
Or Mesmerised by the skill of the Papa boatmen.

The North Isles of Orkney had the harbours of Whitehall at Stronsay, Kettletoft at Sanday, Backaskail at Eday, Peirowall at Westray. The Island of Papa Westray had it’s pier, so too had Papa Stronsay, but their piers were more tidal, needing a high tide to get in. Normally only shipping livestock or unloading fertiliser or coal from an occasional Newcastle coal boat determined a pier call at either. The Island of Rousay had its pier. North Ronaldsay, Orkney’s farthest North Island, had its pier. North Ronaldsay was out on its own, lying a good bit to the North of Sanday, getting the Sigurd to do a call which was for them alone. From Whitehall we used to see the smoke of the Sigurd, small in the distance, slipping out of sight between the Calf of Eday and Sanday on it’s way North. Shapinsay had its Balfour Pier but was serviced by another locally owned ship. Denison’s Elwick Bay springs to mind but he had other ships over the years.
Papa Westray was one of our delights. The small amount of trade or passengers often dictated that a small boat put off to meet the Steamer lying off the pier. We used to watch mesmerised the skill of the Papa men, standing in the stern of their boat with hand on the tiller, swaying easily to the roll of the sea and the pitch of the waves. They would snap their small boat alongside the Thorfinn more easily than most motorists would park at the pavement. A rope flung to them fore and aft kept them alongside. .

Drifting gently but with the Thorfinn still under steerage way at dead slow, passengers and mail and parcels were quickly transferred over the side, two iron plates being temporarily hinged or swung back to give an easier and lower entry. A rope ladder helped.

Consummate seamen, if the wind was right as soon as they left the Thorfinn‘s side the big brown sail snapped up, the boat heeled to the breeze and rapidly left us behind, half way to the shore before we really got fully under way again.

Papa Westray was normally pronounced a quick “Pappae” or “Pappey”, inflection lifting at the end, more the old Norwegian or Viking pronunciation, as well it should be. Their accent was totally Nordic and peculiarly their own. Indeed each Island had its own particular accent, quite distinguishable between Islands then, and still there with the native born, but much mixed now with incomers from other places.

Eday had the same small boat service at Calf Sound, that stretch of water that separates the Calf of Eday from Eday itself. There was a small pier at Carrick House on that Sound. The Eday pier was shallow, a short right angle, and a bit awkward, the ship having to winch itself around the pier end to facilitate leaving straight out. That stop was dictated by tide, or just that the loading was small I cannot say, possibly a mixture. Speeded up the sailings if serviced at Calf Sound as going in to the Eday pier took time. We used to watch the sandy bottom being churned up by the Thorfinn’s propeller as we left, bits of seaweed turmoiling with churned up sand. The shallower Sigurd sometimes serviced Eday rather than the deeper draft Thorfinn. Indeed sailings were shared between the two ships according to tide and what cargo needed handling..
Calf Sound was also a magic place for us. The Sound went between the Red Head on Eday to the west side and the Grey Head on the Calf of Eday to the east side of the narrow seaway. It was our route from Stronsay to visit our Uncle Bill, father’s brother in the farm of Cleat in Westray. It was a notorious seaway as the wild Atlantic came through the Sound and it could be a rough sailing with many sea sick passengers if the tide was ebbing and a Westerly gale was blowing against it. Quite beautiful cliffs. Stone quarried from the Red Head is said to be in the fabric of St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall. As the Kirkwall Council Book refers, if you can follow the challenge of the Old English of the 1600s. :-

“Tolbuith of the samen, the Twentie ane day of November 1T viH. and nyntie one [1691]

The whilk day the Magistrats and councill being conveened anent the sowme of money which George Baikie of Greintoft in Eday, with his accomplices & associates, wes fined and amerciat upon the twelth of this instant for his unwarrantable, hostiall Intrusione in the Cathedral Kirk in Kirkwall, about five houres in the afternoone or yrbye, without Liberty or Licence granted either be the minister or Magistrats, And he being called day and daitte forsd, Judiciallie confest his unwarrantable Intrusione with his sds accomplices at the South Church door, And yt he had committed ane high and attrocious cryme in swa doeing, But also in deforceing of the officers and oyrs the burgesses who wes called to remove him and his accociats furth of the sds church at yt tyme of night, as the Provest and his subtione yrto more fullye bears. And efter consideratione had yrannent with his aboverine confessione, They fined and amerciat him in the sowme of Two Hundreth merks Scotts money. Yet notwthstanding, upon his earnest requeist and desyre to the sds Magistrats and Councill for causses knowen to ymselves, they componed the sds fyne for fyftie pounds Scotts moey Juduiciallie payed this day, togidder with thrie boats of whyte friestone for doors, windows with yr Lintalls and sells, to be taken out of the frie quarrel [quarry] in Eday, And brought upon boats to the shoare of Kirkwall free of all cost & expencess to the saids Magistrats but all upon the chairge and expenss of the sd George Baikie, ilk boatfull consisting of the number and quantitie of fourtie eight meills, And yt betwixt the daitte heirof and the first day of August next to come, And faillieing the delyverie of ilk ane of sds boats of stonns to the Thesaurer, to make payment of the sowme of Twentie merks Scotts money, And for the more sure payment of the sds stonnes frie of all expensses as sd is , William Traill, merd burges of Kirkwall, becomes Caur. Lykeways he binds and obleidges him, his aires, exers to cause delyver the saids thrie boats of stonnes at the shoare of Kirkwall at the quantitie befoir mentinat, or Liquidate pryce yrof as aforsd. In Testimonie qrof he hath subtt thir presents the sds Twentie one day of November 1T viH. and nyntie one yeires, It being alwayes heirby understood That the Magistrats is heirby obleidged to procure friedome and Libertie from These Interested in the said quarrel [quarry] for mineing and carrieing away the sds boats of stones.

Carrick House on Calf Sound was the scene of the capture of the Wick born pirate John Gow by Patrick Fea of Clestrain in Stronsay, who also held Carrick. Gow, born in Wick about 1698, had gone as a small boy with his father and family to grow up in the busy Orkney shipping harbour of Hamnavoe, now Stromness. Going early to sea, Gow in August 1724 joined the ship Caroline at Amsterdam under Capt Ferneau, a Frenchman, serving as Second Mate and Gunner. After lying idle for two months in Santa Cruz, Gow, with most of the crew, mutinied on 3rd November, 1724 and seized the ship. Renamed Revenge, they turned to piracy,

He was Capt Cleveland, the hero if that is the right word, of Sir Walter Scott’s book “The Pirate”. In January 1725 the Revenge, once again renamed The George, sailed into Hamnavoe, now Stromness, Gow calling himself Mr Smith.

Gow’s ship, after raiding the Hall of Clestrain near Stromness on 10th February, 1725, three days later, trying to get through Calf Sound to visit, or raid, Gow’s alleged old friend Patrick Fea in Carrick House, ran aground on The Calf of Eday. A strategy by Fea of inviting some of the crew ashore to Carrick House and then seizing them allowed them all to be captured. The Revenge was re-floated and taken to lie at anchor in Linga Sound just below Clestrain in Stronsay, well sheltered by our gull’s egg Island of the Holm of Midgarth. So the pirate Gow was part of our Stronsay folklore as well.
Gow was taken to London where he and seven of his piratical crew, were hanged at Execution Dock on the 11th June, 1725. Fea, after a struggle with officialdom, got a small reward for the capture and possibly the later sale of Gow’s ship which was taken to Leith, though it took him a long time for him to get the money.
. So our modern sailings through Calf Sound to Westray were through historic waters.

No 60 SHEEP SHEARING pt 2. 25.12.2009

2009-12-24T11:15:00.000-08:00

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.

SHEARING THE EWES PART TWO.

Shearing sheep was a skilled task. Not everyone was good at it. No matter, someone had to catch the sheep, someone had to look after marking them with hot tar with a marking iron, called a “buist” in Caithness, but if we had a name specific to it in Stronsay I cannot remember other than just a marking iron. Ours for Whitehall was a capital WH joined together, the last leg of the W being the first leg of the H. I cannot print it, but it made a good mark and was also a mark used to clip the hair on the plate of the left hip of cattle being shipped out to Aberdeen, using a nice sharp curved scissors to do so which I still have, a memento of the past!! Someone had to do this, someone had to do that.
Wool bags had to be tied up in place on the upraised shafts of an upended cart for filling. Woolbags had to be stitched when full, woolbags had to be carried to the lower neep shed. Sheep had to be separated from their lambs and driven into the catching pen, dogs barking and snapping or nipping at their heels the while. Much shouting and whistling, but eventually into the catching pen they went. Even the predictable very smart old dodger who had seen it all before!! The modern sheep fanks with wonderful pens and gates and fittings was still much in the future.

Then catch your sheep. Big Half-bred ewes bought as ewe lambs out of the Island of Eday, and a two man job to haul them from the pen over the grass to each shearer as needed. Often also a two man job to upend them, one man holding and twisting the head, the other reaching under the ewe’s belly to grip the far-off hind leg and a quick heave to turn it over. As if the Caithness Cheviot was not big enough, these Eday born Half -bred ewes were even more massive. Get the ewe balanced on its bum and start clipping. Open at the throat, down the belly and into the left side, clipping towards the backbone. And so on and on into the fleece. keeping on going round in that direction with the sheep going one way and the fleece the other. It left a better fleece for wrapping with no breaks.
That is still the way modern sheep shearing goes, once called the Bowen technique after New Zealander Godfrey Bowen who pioneered modern sheep shearing though his record has been long surpassed.

On January 6, 1953 Godfrey broke the world record for shearing sheep: 456 full-wool sheep in nine hours. New Zealand was still living high on the sheep’s back, and this feat turned him into an overnight celebrity. He went on to teach his system around the World, Edinburgh Highland Show and Moscow among other venues.

My brother David, now in Western Australia in Pemberton growing grapes, was fortunate in being there watching that day in New Zealand when Godfrey Bowen clipped his historic record. David, then a member of Halkirk YFC, was on a Young Farmers trip to New Zealand though he had to pay his own fare at that time. Great trip, I was quite jealous!! We had both applied for the trip but David was the lucky one. ( see GODFREY BOWEN on the internet, all sheep shearers should see it.)

Caithness hand shearing when we came here was anathema to our father. He maintained they did it all the wrong way round, beginning just behind the right ear and taking small bites until the fleece was opened up. Then open the shears for a full bite, shears snipping away with a sharp click, click, click, working from just over the back bone round the right side to the front. Then change over to do the other side. Some shearers fastened a small cork into their shears so they would not quite fully close, and they reckoned the sheep were just that much more settled. A skilled shearer

This Caithness change-over from right side to left side was a risky manoeuvre in most cases. The ewe, sensing a possible chance to escape, kicked and struggled, the fleece sometimes breaking down the back rendering it just that much more difficult to later properly roll it up. Allow a hind leg to kick and it got entangled in the fleece, chunks of wool going every-which-away, at its worst total disintegration. Someone would quickly step over and help restore as best he could the sheep and the broken fleece to their proper position, almost. At times the ewe would seize its chance, a quick twist, get to its feet and take off. The greatest episode I ever saw on that was at Knockdee at the 1949 clipping when we were temporarily tenants of Stemster. The shearing stance was in a field to the right side of the sloping road up to Will Gunn’s Knockdee shepherd’s house. One of the Fraser boys of the other Knockdee, I forget which of them, was last seen taking off down the slope well seated on a half clipped Cheviot ewe and holding on like Lester Piggot. On the credit side he did not let go, and the ewe was eventually taken back from the hedge at the bottom of the field to finish her disrobement. Took us quite a time to get over laughing.
Do not think he was the only one to do so, it happened many a time to a lot of people on a lot of other farms. Worth seeing, provided it was not your sheep!! The principle was not to let go, just hang on, help would arrive, eventually!! A big Cheviot ewe could take some handling. Still do, but todays shearers are very well trained indeed.
The Bowen technique is now standard and universal World wide. Sheep shearing owes a great deal to him, and to his brother Ivan, who was at least his equal, sharing the top spots in many shearing competitions.

Having shorn the sheep, and called for a buist in Caithness, mark in Stronsay, the ewe would be put into another pen and a fresh sheep brought to the shearer, usually held ready by the catchers. No time to waste, though many a shearer dodged at times by saying he had to sharpen his shears, whether needed or not. Stretched his back at the same time.
His new clipped fleece would be gathered up by a gatherer, often women or boys and girls helping for the day, or sometimes the shearer himself would sweep up his fleece and deposit it on the wool table. Properly done, this entailed a sweeping throw that spread the fleece out to perfection for the rollers, new shorn side underneath. Then a quick skirting and trimming, rubbishy bits under the table, dags or dirty bits torn off, but do not take too much of the fleece with you. One folding and winding the trimmed fleece from the tail end, the other, because two rolling were usually needed, winding a band out of the wool of the neck ready to finally tie the fleece. Well rolled fleeces were an art form.

When shearing was in full flow with a lot of good shearers going full tilt it was no easy task to keep up with the rolling. Unrolled fleeces piled up around the table. Rolled fleeces piled up against the dyke while a full wool bag was taken down and an empty one tied in place. Six inch nails spiked through the tops held full ones together until they could be stitched. Half yoking was well received. End of day meant nothing if the ewes had not been finished. “Clip on, boys, we’re nearly done”. And eventually they were.
Shorn sheep went back to their lambs and out to the field. Lambs looked for their mothers with much bleating, this new clean mama could not be theirs. But after half an hour all was quiet, lambs suckled correctly, sheep spread over the field.
All over for another year.

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No 59. Sheep shearing pt1.

2009-12-11T06:51:00.001-08:00

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.

SHEARING THE EWES PART ONE.

Shearing the ewes at Whitehall was a good day, full of adventure. Summer was with us, the sun was shining, the ewes fleeces were dry. Early morning father and the shepherd had been gathering in the ewes, lambs bleating and mothers calling for their little ones as the flock was herded into the yard. Sometimes they were taken in to the yard the evening before and held overnight in readiness for an early start. Or in a small paddock next the steading. Or in the stackyard.
Extra hands were gathering from here and there, some from neighbouring farms for whom the compliment would be returned in due course, perhaps some helpers from the village. We were on summer holidays from school so had a day when we could help, or think we could help. A small coal brazier fire was lit to hold the tar bucket and heat the sticky tar to make it more liquid for marking the ewes after shearing. Hot tar was also used if any sheep got a cut from the shears, being liberally spread on the open wound. Must have stung a bit but it kept the flies away and I never knew of a wound going wrong afterwards. Used for wounded seamen at the Battle of Travalgar on 21st October, 1805, a stump of a leg or of an arm shot off being dipped straight into the boiling scalding tar. First aid of a kind, brutal, but it worked, sometimes.!!!
. The shearing stance was on the green space between the high garden wall round the tennis lawn and the tar roofed wooden shed which later did service as a car garage but had been our gig shed previous to the Morris Ten car purchase in 1935. Other parts of the long black wooden shed were stores for this and that and also the padlocked coal shed at the far end. Shearing of the ewes meant much food being prepared and taken out to the very hungry shearers sitting on the green grass in the sunshine, or on a newly packed wool bag. The usual two hour lunch break was dispensed with, time on a good day not be lost. A good picnic with much humour and back chat among friends.

Odd gates and wooden flakes were tied to the spokes of carts deployed across the entrance to the green to act as barriers to contain the sheep. One cart was upended with the shafts high in the air. To this was attached two ropes one to either slider to hold the hessian wool bags of Stewart Bros., Constitution Street, Leith, now vanished into the British Wool Marketing Board and converted into a restaurant. The bags were held at a convenient height for filling, just swinging off the ground at the bottom. The trick was to put a small round beach pebble into each corner of the top of the bag folded over the stone and make a half loop clove hitch around it with the loose end free. Done properly, a sharp tug on the free end undid the loop, do it wrong such as crossing over the rope and all **** broke loose as unsuccessful attempts were made to get it to let go. With fleeces piling up for packing some unkind words were often flung at whoever had tied the bag in place. Tended not to make the same error again !!! But I am ahead of myself with the packing of the wool bags.
This was before modern machine clipping came in, though Greenland Mains had a Lister 4 gang clipper assembly put in by the Dunnet family long ago, at least pre 1933 when they sold the farm to John Scott from Fearn near Tain, where the Scotts are still farming. The Greenland Mains outfit had a Lister engine in the loft driving by a belt through a hatch in the loft floor to a shaft suspended below in the shearing shed with four of the old three-inch wide handpieces. I learned my machine shearing on it.
The shears we had filled your hand, sprung to open the blades as you relaxed your grip. Properly sprung and set, they did not open too far. Some shearers fixed a cork between the handles of the blades so they could not totally close and make a clicking sound, scared the sheep. Worked well too. For sharpening they could be sprung over the top so to speak, allowing each of the blades to be sharpened singly on an oiled sharpening stone, usually at about an angle of 45’. Some men were absolute artists at the art of getting just the right edge, so much that they were much in demand from less practiced hands. One man I knew had a small sharpening stone in his hip pocket, giving a quick touch to his blades between every sheep, the work of an instant while the catcher was taking his next sheep to him.
You can still get these shears for gardening, smaller versions, and any Agricultural Show has them as keen young men - and old - snip away imagined odd bits of wool off an already totally smooth show sheep. But we had no other at Whitehall though in the loft was an old hand cranked Lister clipping machine with a three inch clipper but it needed one man to turn the handle while the other sheared the sheep, and I never saw our father bothering. Waste of time and a good man he reckoned.
There would be a wooden shed door or two taken off its hinges set on a couple of empty barrels to use as tables for sharpening shears or for the tea basket at half yoking time. Or as a temporary bar for bottles of home brewed ale and a bucket of cold water with a dipper for thirsty teetotallers, draped with a wet tea towel to keep it cool and the flies off. Another similar table did service for rolling the fleeces, waist high and set so you could get right round it.
That task was usually done by women who were just that much better and quicker than the men at doing these jobs. Properly and tightly done, the fleece could then be thrown to a man deep down in the wool bag, just his arms sticking up over the edge at first asking for a fleece, gradually building the fleeces under his feet one each way to fill the sides until, bag full, he climbed out and stuck in two sharp spikes to hold the top edges together until finally sewn. Six inch nails were sometimes used but we had two treasured spikes used only for that job and kept in a chest which also held the well oiled sheep shears for the rest of the year. And a heavy sail needle for sewing the lip, curved upwards at the end. A Stewart Bros. label was tied to the final bit of string and inserted just below the opening, a double check on who the bag came from, though each bag had it’s own individual number.
Sometimes the fleeces were just put on a tarpaulin set against the dyke and packed later when time allowed, it all depended on how many helpers you had.
In those days before modern sheep dips, and now pour-on or injection anthelmintics, we had plagues of parasites such as sheep keds. A pretty monstrous big black louse, they could transfer to a shearer and give him a noxious bite. Or crawl under a shirt. Bloodsuckers they were, and a sheep infested with them must have been very uncomfortable. Neither did it take long for keds to appear on the lambs also. The introduction of DDT saw them off. We did not have ticks in Stronsay, not seeing any until we came to Caithness. Sheep lice were another pest. Maggot fly strike we did not have in Stronsay save one year when a warm Southerly wind must have carried them from Caithness!!

No 29. DINNER TIME

2009-11-27T07:01:00.001-08:00

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 29. DINNER TIME. Pb 27.11.2009

Today I believe that meals taken as a family are now few and far between. No doubt Christmas will be celebrated round the table, maybe birthdays, but when we were young meals were not a case of snatching something out of the fridge on the way to watch the Tele. We had neither. If we had I have no doubt such practice would not have been allowed by our mother. Eating in the kitchen was the province of the bothy boys and the servant girls as they were called, and for occasional workers such as harvest hands.
At Whitehall our meals were always in the dining room, even on school days, proper sit down meals at proper times. Whatever ploy we had on outdoors, teatime was teatime. Or dinner as we called the midday meal which no one now recognizes save maybe as lunch.
Big solid dining table, horse hair padded chairs, massive sideboard, big mirror on the wall behind it, with a pair of ornate brass candlesticks. A standard oil lamp in the corner. Our in her eighties grandmother, whom we called Ma, ate with us as the dining room was also her day room with a good coal fire going. Above the fire was an ornate mantlepiece with World War 1 odds and ends, a British pomegranate hand grenade, heavy, some brass shell and cartridge cases, empty of course. A few small photos of her two doctor sons in uniform from WW1. Two deep armchairs either side, one for her and one for any visitor. A green-glass-bowl oil wick lamp sat on a small table beside her chair.

Meal times were meal times. Hands washed, hair combed, though we boys hair was short enough with but a fringe in front, a dossan we called it, and into the dining room. Many a boy was gripped by the dossan by an irate schoolmaster in those days. Not allowed now I fear. Did not do us any harm. Rather like a Red Indian getting ready for a scalping, little more indeed than a scalp lock.

We usually had three “girls” of various ages at Whitehall. Such were the times that it was normal for most houses to have some household staff, however great or small they were. A girl would leave school at 14 years old in my early days and go into service as it was called. There was no other work to be had in a small island though many would work at home, absorbed into the work of the farms and crofts. And when they married no change in that either.

Some work might be got in Kirkwall, getting into a shop or as an apprentice to a dressmaker, some girls had an aunt in the Toon and would go there to try to get a job. Sometimes it was as a servant girl in some house. Many others of course went in from Stronsay to Kirkwall to the Grammar School to get their Highers and in due course go on to University or to Murray House in Edinburgh to train as a teacher. Some bursaries helped with poorer families, and there was also a competitive Bursary Competition.

Going into service was the norm for many girls as soon as they left school and until such time as they got married. They got a bed, they got their food, good company, hard work, precious little money. Today we would have been accused of being filthy rich to be able to have such a thing, but it was just normal practice in those days, even for poor tenant farmers such as ourselves. Few houses did not have some indoor help.

The dining table was set by one of the “girls”. White linen tablecloth, napkins in their rings, our initials on some of them. Still got mine, along with my silver christening mug and the gold half sovereign I got as a present from Mrs Chalmers in the Village when I was born!!! Actually found both when moving out of Isauld House and clearing out so very much after over 53 years in that house. Scary.

Water jug and chrystal tumblers, the water cold from a bucket just drawn from a well down the road which tasted so much better than the piped supply. That piped supply was from the water supply for the Village, drawn from the Ayre of the Mires next the sea, well named. It was fed uphill by a red painted windmill, not todays huge three bladed turbines but the old small multi bladed ones you will still see spinning away in old photographs of the Australian Outback. It turned as the wind dictated, kept facing the right way by a large steering vane at the back, pumping water up the hill to the Reservoir. The Reservoir was covered with an also red painted corrugated iron roof, so too the sides where we used to take a stick and run along making a dreadful clatter. Once we did it while someone was inside doing some maintenance. Not popular but forgiven. He said he had done the same when he was young, made us laugh after scaring us speechless. Did not last, the speechless part!! !
.
The day to day work of the Reservoir which fed Whitehall Village by gravity was looked after by our father on his way to the Village. If the levels were down he went to the windmill at the Ayre of the Myres and set it going, then on to the Village, stopping the windmill on his way home. Sometimes he got a man to do that for him. It did not pump a huge amount ot water but working steadily with even a small breeze it did the job. When the herring season was on a lot of water was needed, running almost constantly. The herring steam drifters needed a daily top up and a pipe down each of the two piers gave them the needed supply. A full time job for someone to look after the water at the Harbour and get payment from the drifters.

After Grace said by our father, dinner. Soup, often cock-a-leekie as we had plenty old fat hens. Or potato soup. Real potato soup that your spoon would stand up in!! Then the meat course with father carving the joint, or the hen, or whatever, ostentatiously sharpening the carving knife with the steel which you can still see your butcher doing, but I have not seen one used in a house for a long time. Showing off a bit I guess, but the table was always set with the sharpening steel sitting right beside the carving knife. Vegetables in big tureens with lids in the middle of the table, boiled tatties, whole with early tatties but mashed later in the year, cabbage, neeps. All home grown of course. Gravy, lots of it.

Pudding. I remember rice pudding with raisins or bread pudding with currants. Bread pudding was easy, the baker usually had some loaves past their best but still useful, so father took a few throw-away ones home from the village from time to time, not believing in waste. Made good bread and butter puddings.
Curds and whey. Tapioca. Macaroni but with sugar and sometimes raisins, never with cheese. Stewed rhubarb with some tapioca in it and sweet new cream. A big jug of fresh milk. None of your pasteurized attenuated modern watered down or thinned out rubbish, just a good jug of fresh milk straight from the cow with sometimes a layer of cream settling on the surface. Clean up your plates, no excuses. And everything carried through from the kitchen by one of the girls.

We were always on edge to leave the table when finished but not allowed. I fear I have no memory of helping to clear the table, or carrying anything through to the kitchen, but I do remember sometimes helping to dry the dishes for one or other of the girls at washing up time. Sometimes!!!!!

No 27. Farmyard Aromas pb 13.11.2009

2009-11-13T15:25:00.001-08:00

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 27. FARMYARD AROMAS or THE FLAVOUR OF FARMING.

The very smells of farming long ago seem to have vanished, or at least changed. An odd subject perhaps but so many smells are now different. Sitting in a sound proof tractor cab with at best the smell of diesel even the workers are insulated from the smells of yesterday, some of them still around. They are missing a lot.
We cannot pass the very first I remember, the days when the horsemen were carting dung from the farm-yard middens to either build into field middens to rot down further - now called composting - or to haul off the carts into small heaps in lines across the fields to eventually spread with graips and hard work. That is still the smell most people associate with farming. Many city-to-country dwellers do their best to stop the practice anywhere near their lovely retreats. And some win, particularly regarding pig and poultry slurry. Can’t really blame them either come to think on it. It was important then, and still is, to know from where the wind is blowing.

The wind had much to do with savouring the smell of farmyard dung, now called organic fertilizer and very much in favour with the organic farming brigade. The smell would carry a long way, so you knew what your neighbour was doing. There were three different middens at Whitehall, the horse midden, the cattle middens, the pig midden, each with its own aroma, if I can use that word. And each with it’s very own delightful odour, quite impossible to convey in writing. The hen houses did not have a midden as such but still were cleaned out from time to time. Even in the farm house with doors and windows closed we knew which midden was being carted to the land, to add it’s organic flavour to the soil.
The horse midden was, if I can use the word, sweeter, much straw incorporated into it as the horses were straw bedded every night. Some horses would not lie down unless well bedded, a very occasional one would not lie down in the stable stalls at all, sleeping all night standing. We had one at Whitehall but a good horse all the same and he did lie down out in the grass field when off duty. There was always a bit of loose grain in the stable midden so rats made it their first choice. On a frosty morning steam rose high, even if not being carted, always quite hot compared to the cattle middens.
The cattle middens were sharper in smell, much less straw, much more of you know what! They were usually kept quite tidy and sometimes the men just spent a morning squaring off the heap, dressing the midden it was called. Possibly for the benefit of visitors so you got the reputation of keeping a tidy farm. Looked good anyway. Middens were carted out from the steading ones to be remade out in the fields to rot or to compost a bit more, but also to be handily ready for later in the farming year when turnips were being sown and work was pressing. They were even turned over with forks in the field and remade, using up a day when nothing much else was doing. Even a goodly way off from the farm steading the smell could still drift homewards if the wind was right. Did that at Isauld once on the Links Field and it did help the process of rotting down. Quite mad.

The pig midden was also quite another smell, but thankfully it was much smaller. Not that that made much difference if the wind was wrong.

Then the hen-house, another smell altogether. Usually it was just shoveled off the hen house floor into a cart standing outside with a patient horse, but sometimes it was heaped outside the door to await a suitable time for removal. Not so large in quantity but still needing doing. Shell sand was usually put down in a thick layer on the new-cleaned floor, kept the hen droppings the sweeter as the lime content partly dissolved the ammonia in the droppings. While still clean the hens would eat some for themselves, scratching around, grit for their gizzards. There would be a heap of shell sand outside the hen house anyway. Free range then, now very fashionable but there was no other system.

Dung was a very precious fertilizer, almost the only one available in bygone days other than the sea weed we had easy access to in Stronsay. And that sea weed could really smell too. Just park your car with the windows open on a good day in the lay-by just past Gills Ferry Terminal towards Groats and you will, if the wind is from the North and on-shore, get the drift, if that is the right word!! Well rotted, we called it “yiper”, which word also described the very wet sludgy dung out of the byre or midden.
Wrack (sea weed) off the beaches is still much in use in Jersey in the Channel Isles for their Jersey Royal early potatoes, the word lingering on from the old Vikings that took over Normandy, cousins of the Orkneymen. The word is still with us in Rackwick in Hoy and Rackwick in Westray. To keep their beaches clean in Jersey we saw on one visit tractors with trailers being filled with sea weed by Council loaders, free of charge if you wanted it, and also keeping the beaches sweet for visitors. Probably still doing it.

In the fields we could get the smell of new ploughed earth, sharp. Nearer sowing time the drier smell of just harrowed ground. The smell of early morning air outside the back door when it was ready for sowing, a lift in the wind good enough to fill your lungs. That was often accompanied with the sea gulls flying by and saying “Get up, get up, it’s time to get the seed in the ground”. They knew.

Growing crops had their peculiar smells, changing as the seasons grew. When the ears of grain came out the smell changed, and a field of bere or barley and a field of oats had quite different aromas. Oats were sweeter. As the season wore on and the crop ripened even that smell changed, a blind man could tell you when the crop was ready for cutting.
In the stackyard a stack of oats and a stack of bere had different scents, quite recognizable. Thrashed straw in the barn, again bere straw and oat straw were different. And a heating stack in the yard was often detected by the smell, sometimes pulling out a sheaf and confirming the ominous sweetish aroma of incipient heating. It had a noxious smell when threshed, but it had to be done.

So too potatoes growing in the field with many different varieties and the smells of each, wildly different at times according to variety. Quite pleasant. And turnips, yellow turnips and swede turnips being quite different. Cabbages too, with different kinds. And marrow stem kale which our father grew for feeding lambs in Autumn. All had different aromas.
Hay I have mentioned before, but still worth another sniff. Clover rich, curly doddies we called the flower heads, a wondrously sweet smell when new cut, indeed we still can use the phrase “as sweet as new cut hay”. How many today have ever enjoyed it, indeed we ourselves no longer keep the grass growing long enough to mature to that stage with seed heads. How can we get clover honey if we do not let the grass grow long enough? Flowering clover looked just right, red and white both, and bumble bees in their thousands as busy as only bees can be, a chorus of humming surrounding them and us. Thankfully today there is a trend to sow more clover-rich pastures with less fertilizer used so our honey may still be safe.

.

No 27. Farmyard Aromas. pb 13.11.2009

2009-11-13T15:21:00.000-08:00

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 27. THE FLAVOUR OF FARMING.

The very smells of farming long ago seem to have vanished, or at least changed. An odd subject perhaps but so many smells are now different. Sitting in a sound proof tractor cab with at best the smell of diesel even the workers are insulated from the smells of yesterday, some of them still around. They are missing a lot.
We cannot pass the very first I remember, the days when the horsemen were carting dung from the farm-yard middens to either build into field middens to rot down further - now called composting - or to haul off the carts into small heaps in lines across the fields to eventually spread with graips and hard work. That is still the smell most people associate with farming. Many city-to-country dwellers do their best to stop the practice anywhere near their lovely retreats. And some win, particularly regarding pig and poultry slurry. Can’t really blame them either come to think on it. It was important then, and still is, to know from where the wind is blowing.

The wind had much to do with savouring the smell of farmyard dung, now called organic fertilizer and very much in favour with the organic farming brigade. The smell would carry a long way, so you knew what your neighbour was doing. There were three different middens at Whitehall, the horse midden, the cattle middens, the pig midden, each with its own aroma, if I can use that word. And each with it’s very own delightful odour, quite impossible to convey in writing. The hen houses did not have a midden as such but still were cleaned out from time to time. Even in the farm house with doors and windows closed we knew which midden was being carted to the land, to add it’s organic flavour to the soil.
The horse midden was, if I can use the word, sweeter, much straw incorporated into it as the horses were straw bedded every night. Some horses would not lie down unless well bedded, a very occasional one would not lie down in the stable stalls at all, sleeping all night standing. We had one at Whitehall but a good horse all the same and he did lie down out in the grass field when off duty. There was always a bit of loose grain in the stable midden so rats made it their first choice. On a frosty morning steam rose high, even if not being carted, always quite hot compared to the cattle middens.
The cattle middens were sharper in smell, much less straw, much more of you know what! They were usually kept quite tidy and sometimes the men just spent a morning squaring off the heap, dressing the midden it was called. Possibly for the benefit of visitors so you got the reputation of keeping a tidy farm. Looked good anyway. Middens were carted out from the steading ones to be remade out in the fields to rot or to compost a bit more, but also to be handily ready for later in the farming year when turnips were being sown and work was pressing. They were even turned over with forks in the field and remade, using up a day when nothing much else was doing. Even a goodly way off from the farm steading the smell could still drift homewards if the wind was right. Did that at Isauld once on the Links Field and it did help the process of rotting down. Quite mad.

The pig midden was also quite another smell, but thankfully it was much smaller. Not that that made much difference if the wind was wrong.

Then the hen-house, another smell altogether. Usually it was just shoveled off the hen house floor into a cart standing outside with a patient horse, but sometimes it was heaped outside the door to await a suitable time for removal. Not so large in quantity but still needing doing. Shell sand was usually put down in a thick layer on the new-cleaned floor, kept the hen droppings the sweeter as the lime content partly dissolved the ammonia in the droppings. While still clean the hens would eat some for themselves, scratching around, grit for their gizzards. There would be a heap of shell sand outside the hen house anyway. Free range then, now very fashionable but there was no other system.

Dung was a very precious fertilizer, almost the only one available in bygone days other than the sea weed we had easy access to in Stronsay. And that sea weed could really smell too. Just park your car with the windows open on a good day in the lay-by just past Gills Ferry Terminal towards Groats and you will, if the wind is from the North and on-shore, get the drift, if that is the right word!! Well rotted, we called it “yiper”, which word also described the very wet sludgy dung out of the byre or midden.
Wrack (sea weed) off the beaches is still much in use in Jersey in the Channel Isles for their Jersey Royal early potatoes, the word lingering on from the old Vikings that took over Normandy, cousins of the Orkneymen. The word is still with us in Rackwick in Hoy and Rackwick in Westray. To keep their beaches clean in Jersey we saw on one visit tractors with trailers being filled with sea weed by Council loaders, free of charge if you wanted it, and also keeping the beaches sweet for visitors. Probably still doing it.

In the fields we could get the smell of new ploughed earth, sharp. Nearer sowing time the drier smell of just harrowed ground. The smell of early morning air outside the back door when it was ready for sowing, a lift in the wind good enough to fill your lungs. That was often accompanied with the sea gulls flying by and saying “Get up, get up, it’s time to get the seed in the ground”. They knew.

Growing crops had their peculiar smells, changing as the seasons grew. When the ears of grain came out the smell changed, and a field of bere or barley and a field of oats had quite different aromas. Oats were sweeter. As the season wore on and the crop ripened even that smell changed, a blind man could tell you when the crop was ready for cutting.
In the stackyard a stack of oats and a stack of bere had different scents, quite recognizable. Thrashed straw in the barn, again bere straw and oat straw were different. And a heating stack in the yard was often detected by the smell, sometimes pulling out a sheaf and confirming the ominous sweetish aroma of incipient heating. It had a noxious smell when threshed, but it had to be done.

So too potatoes growing in the field with many different varieties and the smells of each, wildly different at times according to variety. Quite pleasant. And turnips, yellow turnips and swede turnips being quite different. Cabbages too, with different kinds. And marrow stem kale which our father grew for feeding lambs in Autumn. All had different aromas.
Hay I have mentioned before, but still worth another sniff. Clover rich, curly doddies we called the flower heads, a wondrously sweet smell when new cut, indeed we still can use the phrase “as sweet as new cut hay”. How many today have ever enjoyed it, indeed we ourselves no longer keep the grass growing long enough to mature to that stage with seed heads. How can we get clover honey if we do not let the grass grow long enough? Flowering clover looked just right, red and white both, and bumble bees in their thousands as busy as only bees can be, a chorus of humming surrounding them and us. Thankfully today there is a trend to sow more clover-rich pastures with less fertilizer used so our honey may still be safe.
Inside the steading there were the smells of the byres and the stable, each quite different. In summer the cows came in from the grass to be milked and again a different smell, quite sharp, very distinctive. Dare I mention the sickly smell of calf scour, still with us but not feared so much as long time ago.
Can I finish with saying the above is but a sample of the Flavour of Farming?

.

No 58. Tackety Boots, pb 30.10.2009

2009-10-30T06:46:00.001-07:00

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 58. Tackety Boots.

It was in an article back in May 2008 that I touched on the subject of “Tackety Boots”. Well worth another look. Of all the articles of clothing worn by the men in my early days, Tackety Boots was the most worthy of mention. And the most important. Every day and all day the farm men walked at their work, be it in the field with the horses or in the buildings looking after their cattle or the shepherd walking his sheep. A well fitting pair of tackety boots was an absolute necessity, there was no room for “nearlies” about it. Worn they may be, have seen their best days as many a pair had, but functional as only an old friend can be.
Every village had it’s shoemaker. In Castletown after we came to Caithness in 1944 it was John Gunn, in Stronsay it was, among others, Peter Lennie, but I do not know if Peter was a proper shoemaker as such, more of a very good man at repairs. A neat old man when I knew him, he was certainly a good carter for our father during the herring season and a carter in his own right for the whole Island. A warm house along the beach just west from Norton’s Pier, Maggie with the kettle always singing gently at the back of the fire, ready for an instant cup of tea. One of our father’s very regular stops.

I remember father getting a pair made for him by John Gunn after we came to Caithness. Took many days to make in between repairs of a more pressing nature for others.

The niceties of boot making are not in my memory except now and again watching some aspect of the shoemakers art. It all looked so easy, but a well made and well fitted pair was an exquisite bit of work. Left foot and right foot could vary a bit, the shoemaker carefully measuring each foot for a new customer. In most cases he just remembered.
Made of the best usually imported horse hide, thick and tough. Take a piece of leather, cut the separate parts out to a pattern, a few iron sprigs and tacks, toe and heel plates and a length of strong linen waxed twine. To make a pair of boots out of that was a miracle in itself. Slightly thinner tanned leather for the uppers, thicker leather for the soles and heels. Metal eyes for the long leather strip laces to run through. A thin leather loop tab at the top of the heel to facilitate pulling them on in the morning!! Every shoemaker had his own idea of the pattern of hobnails to be kept on the soles, out of sight no doubt but often identifiable as his hallmark. A final polish in black.

The boots today might well look odd, but do not believe your eyes. The curved soles, rising to the turned up toes. The uppers came well up the ankle giving good protection and support. The leather tongue was well sewn in, good enough to be watertight, quite important when walking through wet grass or puddles or pouring rain. Indeed the whole boot was watertight. They were definitely NOT town boots.

Simple tools, sharp knife, patterns, a cobblers last of which he would have many sizes, an awl to drill the holes, a tap hammer, a strong needle to pass the thread, indeed two at a time sewing double, which is one thread each way. And that wonderful smell of new leather always around which today’s plastic cannot copy. . A pair would last for so long, looked after and treasured by the men.
The new boots would be admired for a time, then the process of looking after them for many years ahead. A tin of waterproof dubbin, warm the boots at the fire and rub in a layer both on the uppers and the soles. Hard work too, especially on the seams. The long leather laces would be dubbined and run through the hand. Leave a few days to absorb the dubbin, then another coat. Sometimes a gentle warming with a blow lamp turned well down, a near singeing perhaps, just enough to warm the leather. Helped the dubbin to soak in. Sometimes warm a spoon at the fire, handle held in a bit of rag, and smooth the back of the spoon on the leather for a final polish. An Army trick too. The new boots would be put on by the worker for the evening, going nowhere but getting them gently broken in, getting to know each other. Sometimes a gentle joke or two about wearing them in bed. Maybe they did !!!

Most if not every house had a shoe-last in the shed, taken into the kitchen in front of the fire to work on a pair of boots. I can never forget seeing Sincy Shearer our Whitehall foreman with the shoe last stood on the floor and supported between his knees, a tackety boot on it, his specks on his nose, a few hobnails or tacks kept handily ready between his lips, the tap tap as he hammered them home. Why the name “hobnails” I do not know, it must go back in history a long time. Clover leaf head and just so long that they did not penetrate the soles. Spare heel and toe plates as well.

Keeping Tackety Boots healthy was an every day task. Running repairs normally were to check on the toe and heel plates to see if they were firmly nailed on, any loose or missing nails being instantly replaced from the precious tack tin. A lost toe or heel plate had to be replaced right away, or a worn one as soon as possible.
The clover leaf headed tacks or hob nails set in their regulation pattern along the soles and heels of the boots were likeways taken care of. The boots really walked on iron, the men walking behind the horses shod also with their own iron horseshoes. When one thinks on it, leather however good could not stand up to the constant walking of farm work. Hence tackety boots.
Consider that the horsemen walked mile after long mile every day all year round following their horses. To plough an acre was a good days work with a pair of horses and a 7 inch wide furrow plough. That meant 15 miles of walking for one acre. Allow for going out to the field and home again twice in the day, going round the ends between bouts, and you are pretty near to twenty miles, Wick to Thurso in a straight line. EVERY DAY SAVE SUNDAY. All on tackety boots.

Holding the stilts of the plough and keeping the line of a straight furrow, looking after your horses though a well trained pair were pretty good themselves at keeping the furrow, and you will recognise why there were very few over-weight ploughmen in old photographs. I remember none at all.
Or the shepherd herding his sheep, the cattleman walking up and down the byres. No farm work was done sitting on ones **** as now we do. Boots were the foundation of their day. Tackety boots.

Looking after boots, new or old, was very important. Last thing at night after work was to clean them, wash if need be at the tap or sink or pond using a wisp of straw or a bit of an old sack, dry well at the fire but not too near. On a fine evening set them out on the window ledge or at the back door to dry. I remember one tragedy when a pair were set just too close to the fire, did not do the leather much good. Then a rub with dubbin, especially into the sewn seams. Black boot polish was sometimes used for that final shine. Dubbin was a khaki coloured wax like thick vaseline but could be bought black dyed already.
Tackety boots were every day and all day wear for farm work. Normally the men would have a good pair of lighter boots for Sunday and social events. The tackety boots may have looked odd with their upward curved toes but don’t you believe they were clumsy. Stronsay went to neighbouring Sanday for a football match, the complement (COMPLIMENT ) returned in due course. Tackety Boots did the job just as well as the super brands you see over-advertised today. Trousers tucked into socks, shirt sleeves rolled up, trousers held in place by suspender braces and an Army Surplus belt from the Army and Navy Stores. The men were as good as you could get, some very pretty players indeed. Sanday usually won.

Long years later after I went to Lower Dounreay and looking at old records, I found that the farms of Lower Dounreay and Upper Dounreay had enough men on each farm pre First World War to each form a team, perhaps not eleven men but enough. They played one farm against the other, needle matches. Tackety boots at their best no doubt!!

THE VIKING BATTLE OF RAUDABJORG, 1045 A.D.

2009-10-28T22:48:00.001-07:00

The Battle of Raudabjorg, 1045 A.D.,
Between Earl Thorfinn the Mighty
and his nephew Earl Rognavald Brusison.

“The Battle of Raudabjorg”, an article by Dan Mackay, was featured in the Caithness Courier of 12th August 2009. This was of particular interest to me as Castlehill Heritage Centre have been engaged since June 2008 in their Viking Heritage Project. This relates particularly to the Dunnet Area, with six weeks of field work undertaken beginning in July of that year and ending in August. Much digging was done, many samples and cores taken by a group of enthusiastic amateur archaeologist volunteers. This work was done over the Links of Dunnet by kind permission of George Campbell of Thurdistoft and Hamish Pottinger of Greenland Mains, and of Jimmy Swanson just North of the Dunnet Forest. We still await the final analysis of the samples, which can take some time.
My own contribution towards this project was to look again for clues in the Orkneyinga Saga. This had been required school reading in Stronsay with my headmaster John Drever, and on which we had to do a Bursary Competition. There have been many translations of the Saga, written originally allegedly in Iceland circa 1200 AD, translations in Latin by Torfeus in Norway, by Rev. Alexander Pope, Minister of Reay, who translated and transcribed the Latin of Torfeus. A signed copy of Pope’s work is in the Archives in Wick Library, inscribed 1774 by Pope to his friend Thomas Pennant. Other translators were Anderson in the late 1800s and Professor Pallson, Penguin Classics 1993 edition. There have been others. The late Jack Saxon in 1974 had a wide ranging article on the Battle of Raudabjorg in Caithness Field Club transactions, still attainable through Caithness.Org, and well argued.
What Dan Mackay and all the others overlooked was the furious tidal vicissitudes of the Pentland Firth. That same Pentland Firth was the same waters crossed by one of my double great great grandfathers, James Tait, eventually tenant of Inkstack from 28th May 1843 till his death in 1854. He and three of his sons, William of Quanterness, John of Campston and James of Inkstack, crossed the Pentland Firth many times with cattle bought in Orkney. One well documented trip was with 240 cattle bought in the North Isles and carried in 18 North Isles boats at 12 cattle per boat, by sail and by oars when needed. They set off from Carness near and North of Kirkwall, rounded Mull Head in Deerness, came into Scapa Flow at St Marys in Holm only to find the weather had turned nasty for the Pentland Firth crossing. So they went into the shelter of Longhope, the old Viking harbour of refuge called Asmundasvagr, and there they waited a week for better weather. Setting off again, the weather once more turned nasty. Nine boats carried on and got through, nine turned back and waited another week before a successful crossing. The cattle were then driven, first to Grotistoft in the Hill of Barrock, then, after shoeing their cloven hooves, the long walk or trek to Carlisle to Mr Thomas Morton of Brough on the Solway Firth. Took nearly four weeks droving, hard work for hard men.
Morton, classed in the Census of 1841 as a husbandman, was in Alterwall in Lyth on 15th April 1815 for the christening of Janet, daughter of James Tait and Elizabeth Nicolson then living there. James Tait was Morton’s local agent in the North for buying cattle, in this instance from Orkney. Morton being in Alterwall for the christening was fortuitous, his trip North was to see James Tait as to buying cattle that coming season, taking money North to pay for the beasts, cash on the nail when delivered by local boats to Carness.
So too with Earl Rognavald in his attempt in 1045 A.D. to defeat his uncle Earl Thorfinn the Mighty. Castlehill Heritage hope to publish later in the year a fuller version of research and views, but space requires this to be reasonably brief. Suffice that they are all out of step with “Oor Jock”, i.e. - myself. They are looking in all the silliest places for the location of the Battle, a classic example of “Hunt the Thimble”. The only place the Battle of Raudabjorg could have taken place was out of the ferocious tides of the Pentland Firth and on the quiet sea under Dwarwick Head in Dunnet Bay. It took place just off the Red Broch of Dunnet, (O.N. Raudabjorg), still there in attenuated form 120 metres to the East of the Salmon Bothy, with a triangulation point in its centre from the first Ordnance Survey of 1873. It was built with red stone taken off the beach, fallen from the red cliffs of Dwarwick Head and driven along the grey bedrock of the shore to lie conveniently below the Broch site. Hence the name Raudabjorg – Red Broch - a Norse name for a structure built by the Picts a thousand years before the Vikings arrived in Caithness.
The Old Norse did not call a cliff “bjorg”. Witness the Orkneyinga Saga the broch called Moseybjorg in Shetland, the Broch of Mousa. We do not need to conjecture that it was off Ratter, off the Kirk o’ Tang, off the mythical Roberry Head of Pallson in South Walls in Hoy which does not even exist. Look at the Map of Hoy if you doubt me. It was quite impossible for Viking Longships to sail against the wind, or to buck the violent opposing tides of the Pentland Firth, slender wooden craft driven by sail and if need be by oars
Grappled side to side, sails down and stored out of the way, oars useless, the ships could only fight in sheltered waters such as a sea loch like Loch Vatn in Ireland, or the Menai Straights between Anglesey and Wales, or a Norwegian Fyord such as the Battle of Solvidor.
Perhaps more interesting in the time of the Battle of Raudabjorg was the Norse influence over all of Britain. Raudabjorg was a local sea Battle between Earl Thorfinn Sigurdson the Mighty and his nephew Earl Rognavald, son of his brother Brusi.
A few years later in 1066 A.D. the Norse and Danes under Harold Hardrada invaded England by way of the Orkneys and landed at Riccall near York with a force probably numbering about 10,000 men. They were badly defeated at the Battle of Stamford Bridge on 25th September 1066 by King Harold Godwinson of England. After that Battle two of Thorfinn’s sons, Earls Paul and Erland, were allowed to return to Orkney with the surviving Vikings and the attenuated remnants of the Viking Fleet.
Harold Godwinson immediately marched South to oppose William, Duke of Normandy, a direct descendant of Hrolf the Ganger of Norway, renamed Rollo, Duke of Normandy, after having Normandy ceded to him by the French Monarch. Hrolf was the oldest brother of the bastard youngest brother Torf Einar who conquered Orkney, and is reputed to have taught the Islanders to cut peats, or turf. Believe the peat story as you wish.
They met at the Battle of Hastings, too well known to require mention.
It has been suggested that if Harold had first met Duke William at Hastings before his Army was decimated at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, Harold would have defeated William. It was a close call anyway. Then a subsequent defeat of Harold at Stamford Bridge might well have ended in the Throne of England being held by a Viking Earl from Orkney. Another suggestion is that the two armies knew of each others attack on England, that the cunning Duke William allowed Stamford Bridge to take place first, giving him the main chance which he took.
So who in the tangled web of History is to tell that the Battle of Raudabjorg, fought just under the red rock shelter of Dwarwick Head, did not have some influence in the Monarchy of England.

No 57. Summer Days.

2009-10-28T11:56:00.001-07:00

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.

As we sink through Autumn into Winter I think of that old song “Summer Days are here again”. How is it that so many people tell us how good the summers were when they were young? The sun always shone, the larks sang, the water was warm. And so it was, because our memories seem to blot out the storms and the cold days, well, almost.
Summer brought out the flies, birds nesting, rabbits doing what rabbits do best. Bluebottles buzzing around the stone dykes, a spider’s web catching one and a different buzzing, higher pitched, as if a bluebottle suffered from terror, which I am sure it did. As well it might with a hungry spider coming. We watched with childhood fascination the process of nature, this small spider fastening onto the big bluebottle that soon stopped his struggles, anaesthetized and spun into a web cocoon of silk to later become a spider’s dinner. In a few days we came back to the spider’s web to see the shriveled shell of our bluebottle, its substance sucked out. We did better than that. We caught a bluebottle against a windowpane in the house and took it to the spider, cruelly popping it onto the web and watching to see the tiny hidden spider appear in response to the fly’s struggles, a message telegraphed along the slender filaments to its hidden nest. This David and Goliath struggle interested us greatly, and just sometimes the Bluebottle managed to break free, but not often. Smaller flies of course were caught too, but the Bluebottle was our delight.
The Cabbage White Butterfly featured in our Biology. Cursed by all gardeners and by farmers trying to grow cabbages in the field in the vegetable rows, the Cabbage White was Stronsay’s all too prolific butterfly. We saw a Red Admiral now and again but were not too well placed for the multiplicity of butterflies found further south.
At home we would find a chrysalis hidden in an outside corner of a wooden window frame, well camouflaged in mottled grey-green, safely cocooned and attached by slender but strong threads of silk against all the buffetings of winter storms. Gently prise it from its attachment and put it in a jam jar with a lid on it. Then wait for Spring, vaguely seeing the slow metamorphosis of the caterpillar into a butterfly through the thin skin of the chrysalis, a frequent if not every day look to see how it was getting on.
This was done at School too, our teacher asking for anyone who found a chrysalis to take it with us. Not too many to reach the number she wanted, but several to put in jam jars and watch with care. As summer approached we watched with great attention to see the first sign of the chrysalis splitting along the back and the wet new butterfly emerge stage by stage. Wings at first hardly discernable, lying flat along the slim body, but slowly they stretched and filled and became the hallmark white wings of the Cabbage White. Then we let it fly away, no doubt to find a cabbage to start all over again. Presumably it had to find a mate, and often we saw a couple locked rather too close together, mighty suspicious.
Our lesson with the Butterfly was not yet over. Now and again a chrysalis did not produce a butterfly. Instead it produced a small tiny creature leaving the empty shell. The Ichneumon Fly had beaten us. This predatory fly, or wasp as it is sometimes called, lays its eggs in a suitable caterpillar before it turns into a chrysalis, carrying the seeds of its own destruction. So over the winter the fly grub slowly eats its way through its host, the original oven-ready meal. Such is nature.
Next on our list of home made Biology was to find a rabbit’s nest. Not the proverbial burrow but the short shallow burrow a female rabbit makes to have her young, solitary and away from the warren. Not easy to find, the entrance covered over and well hidden by the mother when she leaves the nest to eat. Inside at arms length by about three feet was her nest, lined with downy fur and soft as soft is. Nestled in that would be about six or seven warm little rabbits. If we found one soon enough their eyes would not even be open. The mother rabbit - doe if you wish - did not stay long with the young, just enough time to suckle them and them off again with the nest once more safely camouflaged. There was no need to stay to keep the little ones warm, the soft fur-lined nest took care of that. We seldom ever found a nest with the doe inside, indeed I cannot recall even one. Later as the young rabbits grew the nest burrow was no longer filled in and the little ones ventured outside their home, but quick as a flash to get back in at the approach of anything.
There was the joy of turning over a flat stone, to see the forkytails and the earwigs and the cockroaches hidden there. The forkytails would small-jump their way out of sight. I think the earwigs name and reputation made us fear they would get into our ears and burrow into our tiny brains. An old wives tale, but we believed it. Evil looking things.
Centipedes too. We never were able to verify the leg count. They too could move fast, an odd scurrying twisting gait. There were other little denizens but the above were the main ones. There were small clumps of whitish eggs, what they were I do not know. Occasionally we found an earthworm sheltered there. Had a competition to find the largest one.
Birds were in their majesty. Blackbirds singing, a thrush in wonderful song in a white rose bush which grew in the garden, music I can still in memory hear, the mavis of Robert Burns. ( and his wonderful song ):-

I have heard the mavis singing,
His love song to the morn,
I have seen the dew drop clinging,
To the rose just newly born.
But a sweeter song has cheer'd me,
At the ev'ning's gentle close,
And I've seen an eye still brighter,
Than the dew drop on the rose.
'Twas thy voice, my gentle Mary,
And thine artless winning smile,
That made this world an Eden,
Bonnie Mary of Argyll.
( Karen - if above lines included might stop here )

Tho' thy voice may lose its sweetness,
And thine eye its brightness too,
Tho' thy step may lack its fleetness,
And thy hair its sunny hue.
Still to me wilt thou be dearer,
Than all the world shall own,
I have loved thee for thy beauty,
But not for that alone.
I have watched thy heart, dear Mary,
And its goodness was the wile,
That has made thee mine for ever,
Bonnie Mary of Argyll.

So many of our birds today seem so greatly reduced in numbers. Except last summer. Sharon and I went to my native Stronsay and up to Rousam Head, farmed by ourselves from 1893 to 1913. On the heather covered moor there were three wind turbines, erected quite some years ago. The area had been reseeded years ago under a Government scheme so the heather was now cleared in places, replaced with grass clumps, circular patches of white clover in wonderful scented blossom, some bare earth. The day was warm, the sky was blue, no wind, just like old times. On the ground were many small coveys of young lapwings, tiny mottled scurrying chicks herded by their mother. Lapwings have not more than four each, but some had gathered together and several mothers had a clutch of chicks shared. So many in one place took us quite by surprise. And above us sang so many larks, a heavenly chorus. The acoustics were superb. It was an effort of will for us to leave that magic spot.

We went down to the old farmhouse of the Bu’ where our father had spent his youth and into the kitchen. Sat over coffee with Ian Stevenson at the old kitchen table where a long time ago our Uncle John, while still a medical student, in an emergency, successfully took out the appendix of his brother our Uncle Bill. We talked with Ian of the larks and the tee-icks up on Rousam Head. He told us they were so plentiful because all the predatory birds, blackbacks, hoodie crows, ravens, skuas, hawks, peregrine falcons, shy away from the slowly moving turbine blades and underneath them was a haven for these tiny birds who flourished in the safety. I have read of the same phenonomen elsewhere, and wondered.

Photograph below of Stronsay Hame Guard, 1942.

2009-10-02T08:46:00.000-07:00

2009-10-02T08:10:00.000-07:00

No 42. Wartime, or Dad's Army.

2009-10-02T08:02:00.000-07:00

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.

ALL OUR YESTERDAYS is a phrase which rings in my ears. Someone recently mentioned the War – 1939 to 1945 – an American oddly enough in Forss House one evening - and he asked how we then lived, what was rationing like, did we go hungry. Hauled me back in time a good bit but made me think of those far off days for most of which we were in Stronsay. Then from May 1944 in Caithness. Allowing for a child not remembering the first few years of life, there are few now alive other than pensioners, and not all of them either, who has memory of those perilous days.
On Stronsay, a quiet backwater in so many ways, we had visible enough signs of War. First I remember was being issued with identity cards and gas masks at every house just before War was declared. We bairns had to take them with us to school and be instructed how to put them on properly. Smell of new grey rubber and French chalk and making rude noises by blowing too fiercely. For a time we were obliged to carry them but that drill did not last too long.
Near the Central School in the middle of the island and on our way to school a Communications Wireless Station had been erected, webs of masts and wires and insulators, with a building for the generator and working space for the operators. The station was in line of sight from Sanday to the North with its Radar Station and the Mainland to the South, making a link between them. When we passed there was usually the song of the wind sighing and soughing through the wires and an electrical crackle and fizzle and pop as well. When the Radar Station was erected on Sanday to our North the four huge masts were seen well enough from Stronsay. A young man from Stronsay fell to his death there while working on their erection. Another Stronsay lad was sent down the coalmines as a Bevin Boy, as they called them, and lost his life there. I remember his sad funereal. These things hit a small island hard.
The LDV (Local Defense Volunteers) were formed in 1940, then renamed The Home Guard. We called them “Dad’s Army” long before T.V. pinched our title!! Our father [ Dad ] was the Sergeant. He had First World War experience in the Seaforths but never went to France, or I guess we would not be here now. At the outbreak of War in August 1914 he, like so many others, was in the Territorial Army and was mobilized at the very beginning. He never did speak much about that time in his life, too many good friends never came home. He spent the time he was in the Army hauling defence guns up the sheer cliffs of the Barrel of Butter, a monstrously steep rock in Scapa Flow, put in some time at Fort George, was sent out to Stronsay to mount guard with two other Terriers on Rousam Head in a small watch hut with a good coal burning stove. There he enjoyed himself as he had farmed Rousam with his father David until 1913, so naturally he knew everyone locally.
On one occasion he was skiving off and sitting in the farm house at the Bu’ of Rousam with his feet under the table when someone rushed in and told him his Sergeant had come stealthily and quietly out to Stronsay by a small motor boat and was marching up to Rousam Head to check up on things. Arriving at the watch hut the Sergeant found Private Pottinger missing. Back down to the Bu’ to find the miscreant, didn’t really think father had fallen over the cliff. But father had dodged out the back door, crossed the “Peedie Loch“ next the steading by the causeway, got back up to the watch hut in the Sergeant’s absence by a hill track. When the Sergeant came back from his abortive search father was marching up and down the cliffs with his rifle on his shoulder. When charged with “Desertion of his Post in Time of War” he said he had been further along the cliffs as he had heard something suspicious and thought it might have been the German Army and the Kaiser invading. And that was that.

In 1940 the LDV were at first unkindly called “Look, Duck and Vanish”, which actually could have been excellent advice. They only had armbands and pitch forks with which to drill but as time went on uniforms arrived and a consignment of Canadian .300 rifles with bayonets arrived in wooden boxes totally filled with grease. Everyone was issued with his rifle and bayonet and I remember father cleaning his to perfection in the kitchen. He then went through the drill to perfection for our benefit - slope arms, present arms, port arms, atten-shun, stand at ease, fix bayonettes, lunge, parry, all the other mysterious things soldiers did with a rifle. We had never thought our farmer father could be so smart, but he was.

One should not in fairness dismiss the Home Guard as in Dad’s Army shown on T.V.. In it were many men who had been on the Western Front and survived right through that Hell, a bit older now twenty two years on from 1918 but still hard and fit men in their forties working on the land or in the fishing. These occupations were exempt from War Service unless a man wanted to go, few did. So the War passed us by and farming carried on.

In the middle of the Island just below the Wireless Station was the rifle range with a target just above the beach, bullets going safely through into the water beyond. I think it was a useful relic from at least World War 1, possibly from much earlier. The Boer War comes to mind, perhaps even the Crimean. Still totally usable, the Home Guard did their rifle shooting practice there. Went a few times with father to watch, and fired a shot once from a rifle under father’s very careful supervision. Not too bad a kick either if you held it tight to your shoulder. A Home Guard with a white and a red flag kept score from a pit safely under the target, signaling success or otherwise with numbers 1 to 10 held up above the parapet on sticks. I had a lucky 10, Bull’s Eye, beginners luck I guess. .
On Burgh Head facing to the East and to Germany the Home Guard had a lookout hut which was manned by rota. I remember father going off in his uniform and his three stripes to do his nightly stint, but with a goodly number of men available the rota was not too onerous. The old photograph of the Stronsay Home Guard shows 42 men, some I knew, some I remember only the face. Some are still alive today. Ralph Maxwell is one, third from left in front row, now a retired farmer near Turriff. Just recently turned 90 and gone off on a cruise to celebrate. Hardy.
The Home Guard drilled in the Territorial Hall in the centre of the Island, they must have done some exercises too but we did not see them. Rousam Head was a heathery wilderness and some exercises were done there. Night ones too. It was all taken very seriously, justly so after Dunkirk.

In the village the few herring drifters who might have called ceased, the declining herring fishing nearly all finished anyway before the War. Stronsay was used as a night port for trawlers who went to sea in daytime to fish but had by order to come in to harbour and safety during the night. A policeman, Yorston, was stationed full time in Stronsay during the War, and the trawler men gave him some custom at times. I guess anyone who went to sea with all the risks of War was entitled to get seriously drunk when ashore. Sadly, not all the trawlers survived. Best story I was told was the time Yorston was coming into his own house while the trawler men were having a barny outside. His wife thought he was an intruder and belted him solidly over the head with a frying pan. True or false I do not know, I think it was, and it makes a good story anyway.
Another episode was a Norwegian fishing boat coming South from Lerwick in Shetland having escaped the Germans. Not the only one by any means but this one I remember well. We went to the Village to see it. The boat was very full of escapees and also leaking very badly with very little freeboard left. Her pumps were unable to cope and they just made it. The Earl Sigurd came out to Stronsay from Kirkwall with the fire brigade with pumps and kept her floating. She was then beached on the high tide at the back of the pier and repairs sufficient to take her in to Kirkwall were made. We went down to the Village to see all the excitement, could not understand a word they said. Odd. But Jimmie Fiddler our Postmaster had married Bertha, a Norwegian girl, and no problem at all. Other Norwegian boats came in from time to time but none so near destruction as that one. Stronsay was the nearest Island to Norway and the best old Viking landfall anyway - the Island of the Strands [beaches] Island, therefore Stronjsey. Unfortunately there were also Norwegian boats that did not survive the perils of the sea or the Germans, but we only knew of them when enquiries were made by other escapees as to whether they had arrived. The empty silence told its own sad story.

Hatching Chickens, and Geese,

2009-09-21T23:53:00.000-07:00

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 55. COUNTING THE CHICKENS – AND THE GEESE.

Today we hear so much about the mythical “Family Farm”, with visions of contented cows being milked by sonsy maidens, patiently the time chewing a bit of clover leaf, maybe a four-leafed one. The hens are surrounding the auld wife as she dells oot scattered handfu’s o’ oats with one hand from a bucket held under the oxter of her other arm. The pet lamb tugs at the teat on a bottle of milk held by the wee lass. At the back door the auld broon and white collie dog lies curled contentedly waiting for the boss to come awa oot and they will tak a turn up the hill tae hae a luk at the sheep.

The horse looks over the fence. The old sow hangs over her pen gate with front legs gracefully holding her up as she takes a look around. If she hears the clatter of a pail she gives great encouragement to hurry up, she is always hungry. The ducks are having a swim on the pond, the mother goose waddles along with her goslings following. A rabbit chews his way through the lettuce in the kitchen garden.
Well, I saw it all a Long Time Ago. We seemed to have a bit of everything around Whitehall, and our father was a bit of a magician at handling all the different birds and animals we had. And he seemed to have plenty time to do so, no mad rushing from pillar to post as today, finish one job and rush on to the next. The pace of life was a bit more sane than now. We indeed had all these old fashioned farmyard creatures.
There was always something to be seen on most farms, some activity of farming life, hens scratching around, the cock chasing his amorata of the moment. The grey geese in the Front Park flapping their wings in a useless attempt to fly, honking the while. It was a bit of fun for them. They could indeed manage to run and lift a few yards off the ground, especially going down a slope into the wind, but they were just not designed to be air-born or for the space age.
Turkeys do not seem to be too much in my memory, we had a few but kept well away from them as the turkey cock could be a mad loon at times. They could fly up into a stack in the corn yard but usually did not take such exercise. They were of the old grey bronze variety, a bit old fashioned now but a good bird in its day.
Breeding, or rather hatching, all these different birds was an art form. Father had a crazy knack of setting a hen in the most unlikely places, an aumry in the stable, an empty stall in the byre in summer, a corner just about anywhere. I think he got a great deal of fun out of taking a visitor around and stopping here and there to have a look at some clucker. Sometimes he would get a setting from a neighbour who would exchange a dozen eggs. “Try this ones, Tom, this new breed are great layers”. I think he could have set a hen on eggs on top of a telephone pole, except we had no telephone.
His victims were readily available, the hen house provided him with a steady supply of clucking hens, a nuisance in the henhouse as they would monopolise the nests and make the active layers drop their eggs on the floor instead of in a clean newly-strawed nest. Never one to see anyone idle, man or beast, he would make the clucker work for her living by hatching whatever eggs came to hand. That meant that she could be sitting on hen eggs, duck eggs, goose eggs, or rarely turkey eggs.
The geese would make a nest out in a corner of the field, or in a small hutch or barrel handily left for them. One of our small-boy tasks was to find a nest in some out-of-the-way spot where the goose thought she was safe from prying eyes. It was interesting to catch the goose on her way to lay an egg, she was as cunning as could be, and would only sneak to her nest if she thought we were not around. A goose could lay a dozen eggs or more before she began sitting. Father would steal the eggs, for a time, not more than four from any one goose at one every two days as she layed them. He did not wish to discourage her so most were left in the nest, a goose could count, and she would keep on laying until she had enough to sit on. A goose egg is a bit monstrous compared to a hen egg, four goose eggs made a good setting for a hen to cover adequately. A fresh goose egg made a real breakfast but could choke a horse, and only a odd cracked one made its way to the table, fried with the yolk broken, never boiled. Tasty too.

The stolen (borrowed!!) goose eggs were very carefully kept in a soft lined box, and when father had his four eggs and a clucking hen appeared he would find a suitable site and set the hen. It might take a day or two for her to settle down and usually a loose lid was put on top of the box for a few days. Occasionally a hen would not co-operate but another clucker would easily be found to keep the eggs warm.
Wooden egg boxes belonging to Orkney Egg Producers. Ltd., which held 240 eggs in two sides made good boxes, one hen each side. Four goose eggs made a good setting, a hen could cover them adequately. Father made use of feed boxes in the stable stalls, an odd barrel, a corner of the cow byre, indeed any byre, but this was a summer time job so the cattle were out and the byres were empty.
One task was to lift the hen off her eggs to give her a bit of feed and a drink. This was especially needed when sitting on geese eggs as hen eggs took three weeks to hatch but duck and geese eggs took four, so a sitting hen could get quite thin if not fed a bit.

It was not out-with Father’s province to have her sit on Mallard eggs, the old Stock Duck of the Vikings and still called so in places. Domesticated, the Mallard was the ancestor of our farmyard Khaki Campbell duck, so someone long years ago pinched a few Mallard eggs as well as our father. Probably a Campbell!!
The Mallard and the farm yard duck could indeed interbreed, but very rarely. The wild duck eggs were filched from a nearby small lochan down at Old St Peter’s Kirkyard on the shore where Father had spotted a mallard duck trying her best to remain invisible. It was also quite possible for a mallard to make a nest half way up an un-thrashed stack of oats still in the stackyard in summer, but any stack left over would always be built on a raised steathe to stop entry by vermin which in summer time would have riddled an unthrashed stack to utter destruction.
Father would take only enough Mallard eggs for a setting, not more than five, leaving most of the wild duck eggs for nature to take its course. It is worthy of note that Mallard ducks, wild birds as they are, still come in about a farm and even across the road from where I sit in the farmhouse of Isauld they sneak into the feed shed to see of they can find a bit of loose grain. Totally not domesticated, they still have an affinity with man which is quite wonderful, and are the only wild duck I know that comes into such close contact with ourselves. In winter they would be quite happy in the stackyard gleaning a bit of loose grain from a thrashed stack steadle. I do not know what makes the Mallard behave so, but it is a fact. They are without doubt the most beautiful of all the ducks, absolutely my favourite. They also pair up for life so are seen usually in their pairs, only bunching up a bit in winter and not too much then.
This setting and hatching of eggs was a favourite ploy of our father, he was good at it, got a great deal of fun out of it, and it never left him even to the end of his days at Greenland Mains in 1958.

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The Stone Stairs.

2009-09-04T09:06:00.001-07:00

No 56. THE STONE STAIRS.

The Stone Stairs.

I found this old photo yesterday of the roup or sale of Isauld in November 1955 among many treasures while clearing out some of the House of Isauld in preparation for Sharon and my moving to Ivy Cottage at Greenland, hopefully completed before you read this. Old treasures turn up in the most surprising places, but after 53 years in this house there is much to find. Must not get too sentimental about it but heart-stopping at times. This photo is of the Farm Roup of Isauld in early November 1955 when Mrs Macdonald was retiring and my late wife Nettie and I were taking over the farm on a tenancy from the U.K.A.E.A., some small recompense for having to sell and leave the very good House of Lower Dounreay at the point of a gun. Nettie and I and our son Tom moved into Isauld House in May 1956.
I wrote some time ago of our farm sale in November 1944 at Whitehall in Stronsay and mentioned the Stone Stairs, but had no foto of that though I was there. Stays in my memory. We were at Greenland Mains by that time but I was determined to go to the sale. A pound or two from mother and off I set walking to get to Scrabster for the St Ola, only 12 miles. Got to West Greenland road end and Dan Gunn fortuitously came down his road in his Hillman car on his way to Thurso. Picked me up and kindly drove me to Scrabster. I had time enough to wait thanks to his lift, so spent the time looking at the many fishing boats tied up in the old harbour, now so few.. Passport control, or identity card anyway, then the old St Ola to Stromness, bus to Kirkwall, up to Buttquoy unannounced but Charlie Tait made me very welcome and a bed for the night. Very early next morning down to the Kirkwall Pier and the Earl Sigurd which father had chartered for the day to take his hopeful buyers out to Stronsay for the sale. And it was full.

As at Isauld in the foto, and large in that day, was the sale of the bits and pieces from the top of the Stone Stairs. That stone stairs at any farm sale is familiar to all those who have been to a farm roup and the best possible platform you could get for the auctioneer from where he could see and take all bids. Odds and ends kept appearing as if out of Aladdin’s Cave, an endless stream taking hours to clear before moving on to the cattle and the sheep and the implements laid out in tidy lines in the nearest field
The photo is of the late Ben Sinclair of Alexander Sinclair, Auctioneers, Wick and Thurso, a firm who completed their Century in business before retiring and selling to Aberdeen Marts. Their Wick Mart is now a car park for the Council, their Thurso Mart is now Tesco’s Store.
Ben is in full flow, taking bids from where he could find them, even a bidder sitting on a cloud if need be!!! . At the top of the stairs is Geordie Allen (late), who worked at Isauld for Mrs Macdonald and stayed on to work for us at Isauld until he retired in his 70s to live in Thurso, continuing his art of the very best drystone dyke building as a part time occupation on Scrabster Farm for John Henderson. He had previously been on Lower Dounreay with Jack Davidson but the Wartime trauma of very good farm being turned into a never used Airfield for the Admiralty meant a reduction in farm staff so he moved next door to Mrs Macdonald on Isauld. Jack was killed in Sicilly in 1943, a Major in the Highland Division. I believe on his last leave he hardly went out as his farm was being bulldozed to oblivion.

The white capped man I cannot presently recall but some reader will. Below him is Uistain Macdonald holding a parcel of hessian four bushel bags on his shoulder.
On the left of the photo leaning on his horn handled shepherd’s crook is the late John Morris, at the time of the sale living at Borlum in Reay but latterly at Olrig House. Above him is David Sinclair though I thought it could have been the late Donald Coghill of Stemser. I will take a rain check on that one, probably David Sinclair is correct as he stayed at Isauld and worked spare time for Mrs Macdonald. His main job was as an auctioneer with Hamilton’s Auction Marts in Thurso.
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The lady whose head appears at bottom left of the photo should be Carrie Sinclair of Sinclairs Marts, keeping the Roup Roll as each item was sold, what it was, how much it made, whom to. The real hero, however, is the Stone Stairs.

Stone Stairs were such an important part of old farming, found on almost all farms. They had an advantage in that they took up no floor space inside the building. One at the end of the loft give good head room for entry in the centre. of the gable end. ((( as at Stainland.))) This with low buildings and low roofed lofts was a serious concern, side stairs needed quite a fancy door for entry and would usually intrude into the roof, needing a dormer type roofed opening for entry.
The stairs gave good loading for carts, one could lower sacks of grain to a suitable step and onto the cart. To fill the Loft bags of grain or any other commodity would be swung between two men from a cart onto the usual platform at the head of the stairs as in the Isauld photo and then taken on a spanker through the door and into the loft. The “Spanker” was a small two handled two wheeled shallow lower lipped sack barrow still used to day for many tasks, but not for taking bags of anything into a farm loft. Wool bags at sheep shearing time at Isauld were put into the loft at the Stone Stairs and again very handy for loading onto the wool lorry.
Another practice, and very much more usual, was to get a sack of grain balanced on ones shoulders, if barley two cwts or 100 kgs, if oats 1.5 cwts or 75 kgs, and walk or rather climb up the stone stairs and into the loft. Serious work, needing balance and know-how more than strength. Really yesterday’s version of today’s fork-lift truck.
A stone stairs often had a small compartment underneath which did service as a dog kennel. At Isauld it had a tiny pane of cemented-in glass and a wooden door tin lined to stop a dog eating his way out. One poor dog I had suffered a massive infestation of ticks, a left over from the days when Mrs Macdonald also had the hill farms of Brubster and Achvarasdal, and her dogs would have a day on the Hill now and then to help John Mackay her shepherd. The result was taking home to Isauld a severe infestation of these loathsome parasites.
It was in my first year at Isauld, I had never seen ticks before. But a good bath for the dog in sheep dip, the dreaded DDT but what a boon it was then, and a good copious soaking under the stairs with more. Threw in a lot of Jeyes Fluid for good measure, the place sure stank for a few days!! I never saw another tick. Anyone who has walked a Hill with a gun dog will know what I had to contend with, and it is still a serious menace for Lymes Disease in humans. Not to be trifled with either.
Now demolished after an unfortunate fire in August 1997, the Isauld Stone Stairs is no more. Funny enough, I still miss it!! ,

THE JOYS OF LAMBING.

2009-08-21T22:27:00.000-07:00

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.

Lest one thinks all our farming in Stronsay was with cattle and horses, let’s look at sheep. Cattle were the main livestock on 450 acre Whitehall Farm but 200 ewes lived easy with us, living mostly on grass and following the cattle around the fields. Only in winter on the grazings of Gryce Ness behind the Village did they get a cartload or two of yellow turnips a day later on in the winter, getting grain – oats - in feed boxes about two weeks before lambing began. Additionally they got some bought in supplements at lambing time, a feed mixture to help bring on their milk. Fish meal was one, bought pre-war from the herring gut fish-meal factory on the Island until the herring fishing finally finished about 1938, and mighty smelly stuff it was too. Still, the ewes ate it mixed with grain, along with the bought in feed. The gut factory struggled on with imported offal for some years more after the War and the demise of the Stronsay herring fishing but it was a losing battle. It was just about a mile from Whitehall Farmhouse and with an easterly wind we knew it was working. Phew!! I remember the tall iron chimney stack, not tall by modern standards but we thought it was.
Gryce Ness was almost always clear of snow, low lying behind the Village, a narrow projecting neck of land with the sea on either side. It was also Fresson’s landing strip for his De Haviland Rapide Air Service, so the sheep had to be temporarily off the field when he was due to come in on his twice daily service.
The ewes were big Half-breds bought as ewe lambs out of the neighbouring Island of Eday, a cross between Border Leicester rams and Cheviot ewes. With very much less dense stocking rates than in Caithness, in Stronsay the sheep were used more to tidy up fields of grass after the cattle had been over them. When we came to Caithness our father was appalled at how the Caithness farms were totally subservient to sheep with the cattle following to tidy up a field. .
Huge Oxford rams were used by father, black-brown faces and broad white-wooled backs, wide enough and flat enough to lie on or ride stride-legs on some of the quieter ones. Peaceful for most of the year, when the breeding season approached in November they became seriously aggressive, and we used to watch them in the Front Park. They would back off from each other and then charge head-to-head with a ferocious clatter. Broke one’s neck once, fatal.
Lambing was of course our special joy, little bundles of white wool to carry to the field, mamma walking behind and treading on our heels with motherly protective thoughts. Could give you a good butt on your bum with her head at times in her anxious desire to protect her lambs. They were easy mothers and no way as temperamental as the Caithness North Country Cheviots we later came to know. We did not lamb nearly so early as in Caithness at Greenland Mains. Late April and early May was good enough, the grass growing well by then in a practically frost free Island.
The ewes came into the sheltered stackyard at nighttime and Wullie Peace, one of the two cattlemen along with his pipe-smoking father Jock, was night shift man. Wullie smoked fags, Gold Flake usually. He had a small red paraffin-oil lantern to show him the way, latterly getting a Tilley Lantern which was a big improvement. Most houses used the Tilley but our mother did not like their constant though soft hiss, so we made do with Alladin Mantle Lamps.
The straw barn was Wullie’s haven, taking newly-lambed ewes into its shelter if the weather was stormy though the stack yard was well sheltered with stone dykes around the outside. The steading lay all of one side, and some stacks not yet used added to the shelter. That straw barn was the cause of one tale against Wullie. Father came out early one morning and asked Wullie “Whit like, Wullie?” “Weel, a good night, Boss. I got three fours, two triplets and ten singles.” “Wullie, thoo’s been soond asleep again in the straw barn, were thoo no? “ “Maybe I dropped off chuist for a few minads”. The total mix up was all too apparent, it took some little time to sort it out. I would not guarantee that all the mothers got their own lambs but at least every mother had some.
The propensity of well-wintered ewes, with plenty milk in their udders, to steal another ewe’s newborn lambs and then have her own, was and still is an over-riding maternal instinct. It had beaten Wullie while he snoozed. In some slight defense of Wullie, he was also one of the cattlemen, his father the other, and had his full day to do with his cattle after being allowed some morning sleep. He might get some help if the horsemen were not too busy. There is no doubt at all that a good barn with freshly threshed sweet straw to lie down on would be mighty dangerous, even “Chuist for a few minads”.
Twins were usual with us, often triplets, and heavy they were for small boys to carry. Usually they were up and walking so an easy gentle driving to the field, two or three ewes with their lambs at a time. Sometimes carry one on a bit, then back for the other, dog-legging the ewe and her lambs towards the field.
All sorts of small pens or corners were used for the newly lambed ewes, some stalls in one of the byres made use of with a wooden flake across it. Did not take long for the ewe to mother up to her own lambs, their coats dry from lambing and suckling established. The ewes were milky and some needed a bit of help to get the lamb going, though when it did get the idea there would be no stopping them, their tails wagging furiously. Then get them outdoors as soon as possible.
Ewes with single lambs got no such luxury. There was no mothering problems with one lamb unless the ewe had been stealing, so straight to the field.
It always amazed us how quickly a lamb grew, in a few days they looked at least twice their birth weight, and probably were.
During the day the ewes were in the Front Park and fed there. We would be given the task of walking round to see what was doing. Usually a ewe went off to a corner on her own, private like, and lambed in her own sweet time. These Half-bred ewes were big and easy lambers, needing very little help, unlike the Caithness North Country Cheviots we later came to know. Only if we saw anything wrong did we call our father. And with us came old Spot our favourite dog, a big shaggy-coated cattle dog of which we see all to few today. I do think he knew more about lambing than we did, and would nose a lamb gently on its way when needed. A very canny dog indeed.
One other part of lambing was the pet lamb. Here and there a ewe had too many and no other ewe would accept the wanderer.Or a ewe might die in these days before our wonderful usually successful drugs and her orphans had to be looked after. So these became our pets, bottles of milk warmed, a teat fitted, then out we went to a pen on the tennis lawn, no longer used for proper tennis as such but still there. The lambs came arunning and would nearly knock us down in their frantic desire to get to the bottle, boxing each other out of the way. Took quite a time to feed them all, back to the kitchen for more bottles until satiated.. Furious activity, sucking a bottle dry in seconds.
Today we have no time for such luxuries, feeding orphan lambs out of a bucket with many teats around the bottom, a pail of warm milk tipped in. Then weaned as soon as possible onto dry feed and water. The magic of lambing must still be there, but the many helpers we had are no longer available. And so the countryside empties. They call it progress

Pigs again, feeding ones.

2009-08-07T03:31:00.000-07:00

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.

Pigs on our farms Long Time Ago was not just getting them born. After confinement in the farrowing shed for a few days they went with their mother to a larger pen in another building, following in a small herd at her heels with motherly grunts to call them along. Pretty good at following, too. even out in a field. One of the miracles we watched was how even two or three sows together with their litters in the Front Park had their own little following with no mix-ups. Nature is wonderful. Plenty room for little piglets to carry on, which they did. The field had a simple lean-to shed for shelter.
The sows loved nosing into the soil, what they picked up I do not know, but it must have been organic I suppose. They were also in season allowed onto the potato patch after tattie lifting, great scavengers after the odd potato missed, or the small ones not lifted. Waste not indeed.

The little ones stayed with their mothers till six weeks old and then weaning time. Seems a short time with mother against the weaning times of calves at six months and lambs at four months, but that was the practice. Today it is even less time suckling but we have more concentrated specialised feeds available to take the little pigs off their mother. They had feed available in a creep away from mother anyway so were already used to eating from a trough, skimmed milk from separating milk for cream for butter making was usually available from the dairy, a most useful feed for very young pigs. A bit slurpy but they needed no telling. Or whey from cheese making.

Earlier weaning means the sow back again to the boar and speeds up the breeding cycle, though not by all that much. Still, the pig business now is so competitive that every effort to keep afloat is taken. Not always successful.
In summer we had various byres and odd corners available with the cattle outdoors. Into one or other of these nooks and crannies father would fit a sow with her litter. Odd boxes were made use of for feeding troughs, easily moved out when need arose for cattle coming in at Autumn-time. We did not have all that many sows and I cannot remember just how many sows were on Whitehall, but not more than ten, probably less. They were an extra to our normal farming with cattle and sheep.

Pigs were fattened to much greater weights than today, a ten score carcase being sought if not more, ten score being 200 lbs or 90 kilos. The phrase “a good fat pig” lingers on, today anathema to the dietary fanatics. Probably rightly so with so much less exercise being taken or hard physical work being done.

There was, however, the momentous wartime adventure when the Swedish vessel Borkum was sunk, or rather beached on Westray. While being escorted into Kirkwall by a Royal Navy vessel for search as a possible blockade runner during the War, the Borkum struck a mine rather than being struck by a torpedo, though who knows exactly which. The wheat laden ship made it to beaching. The wheat was deemed unusable for human use, some of it was scorched from a small fire on board and salvaging it for human use was deemed impossible. But the wheat was made available for farmers in Orkney to feed livestock, especially pigs.
Father converted a byre at his other farm of Airy to feed a large number of pigs. Jeemie Moad did the work, nothing permanent but using all kinds of scrap and bits of wood unearthed from here and there to make usable pens. Where he got all the young pigs from I do not know, certainly he imported many through Kirkwall Auction Mart and from John T. Flett, doyen of Orkney cattle dealers, as well as buying up any piglets available on the Island.
The grain was filled into stout 2 cwt hessian bags in the holds of the Borkum by men with shovels, very dusty work, hoisted out and lowered into small boats alongside and taken to the pier of Westray. Then by the Earl Thorfinn to land on Stronsay Peir, taken the four miles to Airy by horse and cart. Today it is illegal to work with such weights. But that was when men were men, and women were proud of them, and so on !!! Apart from the Strongest Man Competitions, or at Halkirk Highland Games, you will never again see a man hoist such a weight single handed onto a cart with it’s patient horse waiting. No sweat either!!.
The bags then had to be carried on a man’s shoulders up the stone outside stairs into the loft for bruising with the six inch bruiser fed laboriously with a square wooden box scoop about a bushel in size. Held about 56 lbs (25 kilos) of wheat per scoop if well filled. Wheat was heavier than either oats or bere, our Stronsay barley. Technically oats weighed in at standard quality 42 lbs per bushel, barley 56 lbs, wheat 60 lbs, but in practice these standards were rarely attained save on an exceptionally good harvest with copious sunshine. Usually grain was quite a bit below with variant quality, some farms seriously below. Once in my own early days at Lower Dounreay I sent a load of feeding oats, so called, back to the Sutherland farm it had come from as it was so low a bushel weight a good sneeze would blow it away.
A good measure then was to see how much of the standard grain sack filled with oats to weigh 1.5 cwts would be left to tie in the neck. Plenty left to tie, good bushel weight, grasping to get enough to tie indicated rubbishy grain. In the days when most farms were let to tenants it was normal to see the advertisement state the average bushel weight that particular farm expected. No claim if not achieved but still a good honest guide to incoming offerers. In the USA they still talk of bushels per acre but all grain now is in bulk so it is an out-dated measure. There is a bushel measure in Mary Ann’s Cottage in Dunnet, round and with the Imperial Crown Mark stamped on it denoting it is a true measure.
In Whitehall and again in my earlier days at Greenland Mains, we measured grain with the old official bushel measure, filling it with a grain scoop, rolling the excess off with a round wooden roller, Crazy looking back, but there was no other a way if it was to be sold by the bushel. Usually sold by weight.
Bruising the Borkum wheat was slow and backbreaking work, with the quantity for that once only venture it was a daily task save on Sundays. The old Campbell oil engine thumped away downstairs driving the bruiser with a six inch wide endless belt up through the floor. The belt for the threshing mill was eight inches wide but it was a heavier task, the six inch one saved it from wear on the lighter task of driving the bruiser.
So the wheat was converted into pigmeat for the good of a Wartime hungry population, the pigs shipped on the Thorfinn in to Kirkwall for slaughter by Hornes and converted into bacon. Or sold fresh to the Navy. There was a ready market for the pigs in the thousands of Armed Forces stationed in Orkney so some good came out of the sinking of the Borkum.
It is a great pity that the bacon we today have to eat is not cured in the old manner, no water and salt and preservatives injected into it, no sale by date to indicate that it has a short shelf life and wont keep very long. One supply of bacon I know of was killed on 26th June, arrived in a Thurso butcher’s shop on the 30th June, and had a sell-by date of 7th July. Horne would have turned in his grave if he knew. Perhaps he does.

Pigs at Whitehaa No 1.

2009-07-24T12:10:00.000-07:00

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.

I must take a look at the farm again which is what I started this series on, though a day on the Midgarth Holm for gulls eggs or some other ploy of days gone away comes up as chance may dictate.
Much as I have written on cows and horses and hens there were other denizens of the farm, pigs among others. No farm animal was so well spread around Stronsay, not just on the farms but everywhere. Ubiquitous animals, there would more often than not be one at every household, sometimes more. The Villagers would each have one in a pigsty in their back garden, the cottages where lived an elderly widow would have one, the farm men would all have one. They were the ultimate waste disposal system, recycling on a grand scale, usefully consuming all the food scraps which today go to land fill sites, to rot and smell as nature intended, even if hidden under overfill. Nothing edible was wasted. The small tatties, the unused sprouting ones from last year’s crop once the new tatties came on, any burnt toast or porridge, mouldy bread, soured milk, everything could be used for the pig. And from the dairy came whey from cheese-making, or any milk or butter that had gone off, though these could usually be made good use of in the kitchen for baking. The refrigeration of today was not available. Not a problem with a pig to help out.

Just across the road from the farm house at Whitehaa was the small shed at the end of the cart-sheds building and just at the entrance to the Square, though other places held pigs in turn. There it was that our father had his farrowing sow unit, farrowing being the time of producing her young piglets. A warm tight small building, no window, just the light from the open door. an ideal quiet farrowing shed with no disturbance. When the time came and the sow was showing signs of being almost ready, the expectant mother was removed from the other sows and the boar in another old building with an outside run, a part also used for holding young Aberdeen Angus bulls for sale in Kirkwall at the Bull Sale in Sprng.
The pigsty over the road was easy to keep an eye on what was happening. A bed of dry straw, not too much in case of the ever present risk of overlaying and smothering, sometimes just chaff on a bare floor. Sows were very good mothers, usually, and best left quietly on their own to get on with producing up to sixteen piglets, though that number was high and a round dozen was regarded as being good. We bairns were warned not to even peek in to see what was doing, nor shout too much, any disturbance of a farrowing sow could have serious results. But we could hear from outside the door the quiet snuffling and squeaking from the rapidly increasing number of piglets as the sow got on with her unseen task.
The classic disaster was the sow eating her own as they appeared, a bad habit but not unknown. The farrowing crate was designed and used to prevent the sow becoming cannibalistic, keeping the sow restrained between horizontal bars so she could not turn round to get at her young. Sounds crazy that an animal could do such a thing but it did happen. Sometimes a farrowing crate was borrowed from a neighbour, sometimes owned by the farm though our father did not have one. And he did on occasion find a small piglet missing, but never to my memory an entire litter, though such did happen. The classic tale of that was our Chief Constable from Edinburgh, I think it was Edinburgh anyway, on his restful visit to his cousin Donald in Tannach. Apart from sorting his host’s tatties into big, middle and small which I already told you about, he also offered to look after the sow who was farrowing.
On Donald’s belated return from Wick, and after his cousin telling him of the impossibility of decisions, decisions, decisions on the tatties, thev went to see the sow and how she had got on. Wullie, the Chief, later Sir William, proudly showed Donald the beautiful one little piglet suckling contentedly. Donald was shocked and speechless, unusual for him. The Chief went blithely on to tell Donald what a clever little piglet it was. While he was watching the little piglet had appeared from the appropriate end of the sow, who then swallowed him whole, and he just kept on appearing again and again. Donald finally got his breath back and asked how many times that had happened. “Eleven times, Donald.” “ Weel, I thocht she wid hiv hid the roond dizen. Ah wiss right. Come on awa in tae the hoos and we’ll hae a wee dram. Better still, wee’ll hae a d*** good dram”. Such is farming.

These little piglets grew at an alarming rate, in a few days looking twice their size at birth. They soon got friendly, tearing about the pen, chasing each other, taking a bite at each other’s tails, friendly like, then on a sudden all descending together on their mother to suckle in a long line of contented piglets, snuggled close to their reclining mother. Each little piglet seemed to have it’s own particular teat, a soon established pecking order. And in some way unknown to man there was usually one small titchy piglet called appropriately the “runt”. And it would survive too, as runts tend to do.
After the successful farrowing, perhaps next day, we were allowed to look over the half door at them, a never ending visual comedy. Every day they were bigger, small mobile mushrooms. They soon learned to eat at their mother’s trough, small amounts at first but appetites soon grew. Sometimes father had a part of the pen gated off so the small piglets had their own nest and feeding area apart from their mother who could not get through the bars of the gate while the little ones did. All too soon they were moved on to another shed, leaving the farrowing pen to be cleaned out, freshly bedded with clean straw or chaff, and got ready for the next mother.

The sows we had in those days were the now outdated Large White, though here and there in the Island there would be a black sow, or a Wessex Saddleback, or anything else that had taken the fancy of a farmer on a chance day at the Mart in Kirkwall. Some would have a sow but no boar. So tie a long thin rope to it’s front leg and off a walk to the nearest farm with a boar. Or just drive the amorous sow in front of you along the road. Pigs have great memories and are very intelligent, so after the first walk to the boar and on subsequent occasions thereafter, the sow could be let loose and she would find her own way. Love is a great thing. The farthest I ever took one was from Greenland Mains to Greenvale in Dunnet where the late Bill Mackenzie kept a boar, a distance of about 4 miles. After a half day dalliance with the boar the sow would be let loose and she would walk home by herself. Traffic was not so much then!!!
Today pig farming is a such a specialised business, wonderfully efficient, computerised to the extent that Rose Farms in North Carolina, USA, which I visited, worked out that it was more efficient to take grain in huge rail wagons from grain growing Kansas to North Carolina if just for the warmer climate. Even the cost of keeping a pig unit warm during the winter was a factor in their calculations.

. But some of the fun of our early days has vanished, save here and there someone takes up the good life and re-discovers the joys of real farming, even with pigs.

The Men o' the Bothy.

2009-07-03T23:38:00.000-07:00

RAIN ON MY WINDOW.

THE BOTHY MEN.

They have left a huge legacy of Bothy Ballads and song, particularly in the North East as I prefer to call Aberdeenshire and it’s neighbouring counties. This I cannot emulate, nor is there any point. But still I can recall what I can of those Bothy days at Whitehall in Stronsay, days when our father had single men in the Bothy, sometimes more, sometimes less. They were of course unmarried men and boys who made up part of the farm staff, married men each having a cottage on the farm. An occasional married man from another Island was sometimes housed there, harvest hands particularly. The Bothy was lower down the farm road from the farmhouse, had previously been a farm cottage in it’s own right and by our time had been turned into the Bothy. Flagstone floors in the ground floor rooms, sparsely if adequately furnished with basic needs such as a simple wooden table in the middle of the kitchen with a bit of wax-cloth on top, sturdy wooden chairs around it. A couple of battered old horse-hair stuffed armchairs sat either side of the fire, hand me downs from the farmhouse.

An open fire with iron firebars and a swee, which was a black iron swiveling bar which held the well smoked black kettle on a chain above the coals when needed, higher or lower as need be. Or swung off to the side to keep it warm on the back of the fire. A pot or two to boil some potatoes or make some soup.
There were the usual fire irons of poker and tongs and shovel, an old thick woollen sock hung on a nail at the right hand side of the wooden mantle-piece to use to lift the hot kettle or a pot off the fire. Saved burnt fingers. The fire was usually kept going overnight by slocking it with ashes and still alive come morning. A quick poke, some fresh coal, fill the kettle and leave it on the fire to boil while the men went to the stable to breakfast their horses, then back to the Bothy for their morning cup of strong sweet tea out of a well-smoked big brown porcelain tea pot. Toast or whatever else was available, a bit of oatcake or some bere bannock..
They had other basic utensils such as a frying pan and a flat iron gridle, some bothy boys were actually quite good cooks and they were always hungry as manual workers in the great outdoors usually are, if there are any left nowadays. So sometimes one or other would try his hand at some delicacy of his own invention. A good going fire could toast a slice of bread on a long fork, though I have seen a slice just laid on top of the glowing coals, smoked toast and not really as bad as it sounds. Just scrape off the burnt bits. The smell of toast was always hanging in the air, it was an easy thing to make and cut from a half loaf of baker’s bread bought from Swanney’s travelling van from the village. Butter was plentiful, usually from the farm dairy. A jar of jam always. Jam jars full of dripping, sometimes got from the farm house kitchen, usually from a roast shoulder of fat old ewe mutton, sometimes used for frying, sometimes just spread straight on a slice of bread. Mutton was really fat in those days, today one cannot get tasty mutton from the butcher at all, having to make do with tasteless fat-free immature lamb. Horrible.
I remember rows of jam jars being filled with dripping in the farm kitchen, sometimes it was just rendered down fat. Kept for ages. Even had some posted down to Inverness during the War to Drummond Park our school hostel.

A brander iron, and for the uninitiated that is an iron grid on a long iron handle on which a piece of anything could be laid and held over the fire to toast or roast. Quite often some fresh caught fish would be cleaned, split, coated in oatmeal and done over the hot coals, eaten at once of course with the fingers and at its absolutely best. Caithes in Orkney, cuddins in Caithness - a favourite, caught on an evening out on the sea in a small boat with a bamboo rod we called a wand and white goose feather flies hiding the three barbed hooks. And the tea pot, constantly in use.
Crocks from the farm house, often the remains of an old tea service or other broken sets of plates or such but good enough for the Bothy. A cupboard held such things as sugar in a jam jar with a lid on it salt, butter, milk, bread, a biscuit tin. Mice were usually their companions, so store food out of their reach..

Cups without saucers, maybe just a few odd saucers and sometimes we recognised a cup or two from a Farm house tea set that had been broken, spoiling the set for our mother but good enough for the bothy boys!!. Nestle’s Condensed Milk in a can with a hole punched in the top. Sweet stuff it was too. Our mother never allowed it in the Farm House so we begged a spoonful if we could. Stolen fruit is tastier I am told, and I cannot argue that one.
Their substantial breakfast was at eleven o’clock, taken in the farmhouse kitchen. And dinner at 6 p.m. Again we children liked to be in the kitchen when the men were there, just to feel a bit grown up and to listen quietly to their banter.

They usually had homes in other parts of the Island though one or two came out-with Stronsay, but they varied over the years. Though the distance to their own home could be quite short, never-the-less with no cars the men lived on the place anyway, though an occasional one came from nearby by bike. When the herring fishing was in full swing there might be an extra man in the bothy, but short-term while the fishing lasted as usually there was plenty of accommodation for herring workers in the Village.

The Bothy Men. Smells of red Lifeboy soap, soap suds, sweat, shitty rubber or tackety boots, working clothes. Fag smoke, Woodbines or Gold Flake or Players or Capstan for the hardy. Or roll your own. Not many pipe smokers in the Bothy, I remember none at all, more for the older married men. Usually grey ashes beneath the fire, fag ends among them. I never remember the ashes ever being totally cleaned out but they must have had a doing sometimes. Black well smoked wooden mantelpiece above the fire, odds and ends on it, a tinny alarm clock with a loud enough tick, strident if it went off. Sometimes it did. A cord slung across the mantelpiece, sometimes holding newly washed socks or a shirt hanging to dry. or a semmit or Long Johns.

There was a table in the window with a white enamelled basin, used for anything and everything such as washing plates, peeling potatoes, or for shaving with a small mirror hung at the side of the window or sometimes set on the window ledge. I think the morning wash and shave was standard, I cannot remember any of the Bothy men ever appearing for work unshaven. And always the smell of Lifeboy soap.

Either side of the stairs in the attic were two bedrooms, two beds in each, a couple of old wardrobes and a small table or two. Nothing on the wooden floors except a sheep skin rug or two, or maybe a bit of linoleum. Tin chanty pots under each bed for No 1s., No 2s were out the door and round the back to a small lean-to shed equipped with a thunderbox and a tin bucket and some torn newspaper spiked on a nail. Quite functional really if a bit drafty, one did not linger. We had a proper bathroom with hot water in the farm house but such luxuries were not for the men!!

The downstairs room opposite the kitchen was often the garage for a motorbike in various stages of repair, or disrepair. It had been the “ben room” of the former farm cottage, flagstone floored. There was a collection of motor bike parts and one whole machine, who owned it I cannot remember. Smells of oil and petrol. And push bikes, usually well kept and treasured, but again some bits and pieces of old time-served favourites. Spanners and oil cans and rags lying around.
A lean-to shed at the end of the bothy held their coal and firewood, and much else besides. A glory hole.

I remember some of them having a “boxy”, or melodeon, or accordion, call it what you will, sometimes a key board, sometimes button. Sometimes a fiddle. The most men I remember living there was four one harvest, but normally not more than two.

Latterly there were no bothy men, we children took over the bothy as our retreat, lighting the fire, making a memorable pot of leek soup with vegies pinched from the kitchen garden and other ingredients pinched from the farm kitchen. Tasted superb, better than anything our mother ever made!! There it was we smoked a fag begged from Wullie Peace the cattleman, or devised our many childrens games. It was ours.

No 43. Horses tied by the neck.

2009-06-22T22:40:00.000-07:00

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 48. HORSES TIED BY THE NECK.

In the stable each horse had its own stall, strong straight-grained pitch pine wooden board partitions we called trevasses between each one. A square outer end post with bevelled edges, pitch pine again, was fixed up right up to the rafter cross beams for strength. On these posts a wooden peg or two held the bridle, the leather and stuffing collar to fit snugly onto the horse’s shoulders, and the shiny steel hems to fit over the collar with the hooks for pulling.. The saddle, the backband - self explanatory - and the britchen to hang over the backside, hung on their respective pegs on the back wall, a man’s reach high. Too high for we boys. On the side of that trevasse post there was sometimes a metal plate on which to knock the back of the grooming brush to get the dust out of it. Saved the wood. These trevasses were higher at the end next the head wall, curving nicely in parellel to match the back and the high arch of the horse’s neck and keep each horse from reaching over to bite the next. Probably kept them more composed not seeing each other, though they could and did often talk to one another.

At the head of each stall was a small crib barrier enclosing the manger and enough space to hold a huge armful of fresh straw, or sometimes a small armful of good sweet hay, not musty or mouldy. Any such was given to the cattle who were less fussy and may have had better lungs. At least they were less valuable. And in the left-hand corner of each a glazed earthenware feed box container to hold grain or the occasional swede turnip or any other titbit. For the horses could be spoiled rotten by their horseman, even pinching some oats from the locked loft to give them, to which father rightly turned a blind eye. At Greenland Mains there was actually a small wooden funnel from the grain loft to the stable below through which oats could be dropped to a bin in a corner of the stable, or a slide on the end of the funnel allowed controlled access to feed for the horsemen, very handy.
The stalls were reasonably wide to allow good access without being crushed, though one horse I knew had the knack of coming sideways to crush the horseman, or give him a good friendly squeeze anyway. And she was a mare too, funny thing. That extra width gave easy access up either side for grooming and cleaning the horse, though again there was one horse who just did not want to move to the left. Had to be persuaded a bit. With often very muddy conditions, particularly when carting turnips out of wet fields in winter or ploughing, horses legs could get quite muddy. Feed them, go home for your own dinner, and then back to the stable in the evening when the mud had dried a bit and was more easily brushed off. Took quite some brushing time too.
The horses were tied by a halter and a rope which slid and moved through a ring in the front of the manger with a heavy round wooden weight on the end which kept the halter rope from getting tangled as the horse raised or lowered its head. There was also a loose box at the end of the stable which usually held a foal or two, or a young horse not yet fully trained.
From that loose box I remember our father putting a rope to the halter which one particular young foal had on at all times and leading it out for a walk-around, taking it down to the horse pond for a drink of water, getting it accustomed to man and all his moods, a great beginning to the eventual training of a horse, a true horseman’s gift. That particular foal when it came to real trainng was so easy to deal with, it practically trained itself. In those days the horse had such a huge part to play in farming, the motive power of the whole industry, so special it is impossible for most people today to even imagine their importance. I always remember as a boy looking at photographs of huge teams of horses, or even mules, in North America pulling the massive ploughs and even binders and combine harvesters which, though capable of cutting and threshing the prairie wheat crops, were not yet self propelled and were pulled by these multi-horse teams. These photos are still wonderful to see, the teams are long gone.

The Men o' Whitehaa No 2.

2009-06-05T07:52:00.000-07:00

"The Men O' Whitehaa." No 2.
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.
THE MINIMUM WAGE.
So we come to the last of the long look back to yesterday, back to the "Men of the Bu'," the "Men of Hobbister", the "Men of Whitehaa", the period leading into the War of 1939 – 1945. Comes 1938, war on the horizon, men in the "Terriers", the year my father bought his very first tractor from J. and W. Tait, a Massey Harris Pacemaker, his cousin Charlie Tait, a tractor which started on petrol, and then ran on paraffin when hot enough. At the time he said a war was coming, and so it did. That first tractor was the beginning of the eventual total elimination of the horse from our farming.
The minimum wage appears in the Wages Book for the very first time, when minimum wage actually started I do not know, but assume in 1938. We have heard the phrase many a time since. Wages had remained pretty static from 1919 to 1938. The intervening years had been without great incident. Jamie Moodie bought a half barrel of herring in 1927 for £1/5/-, a 4 bushel sack [224lbs or 100 kgs ] of bere at 10/-.. and a half boll [70lbs ] of bere meal at 10/- in 1928. In March 1928 Wm Marwick bought 2 cwts of bere and drying for £1.4.6d. So too did Sincy Shearer and Sunlocks Miller. Jamie Moodie again had 4cwts. As Whitehaa had no drying kiln this had to be dried at The Stronsay Meal Mill. I can only guess that the men were getting beremeal ground for themselves as malt would first be sprouted in a sweet bed in the loft and then taken to “The Mill” for drying and grinding for brewing.
Wool ran around 1/- a lb., used greatly by the mens’ wives for home spinning and knitting. Coal was around 3 tons a half year but varied with a carry over from one year to another. No peats on Whitehall, Rothiesholm Head and its peat banks was too far away and coal was conveniently handy in the Village. John Hutchison had a doctor's bill for 4/- paid by the farm in 1922, and deducted from his wages. Hard times indeed. Insurance was by the old weekly stamped card, with Sunlocks Miller having two weeks unstamped in 1923 as he was off work. Sunlocks bought two young weaned pigs for £1, we called them grices. Potatoes were sold by the barrel, I guess about one cwt but perhaps nearer a boll of 140 lbs. The 1925 harvest had the entries of extra workers Geo Taylor, £6.12.6d, Sam Reid ditto, Andrew W'mson £6.3/-, Jamie Reid £5.12/-., Mary Tulloch £8.9/-., Jas Miller £6. Maggie Hutchison had £5.14/-. Most of these lived in the Village, would have worked there in the herring season, farm casual work if they could get it when the herring moved South. They spoke of “lifting the harvest”, which was just that with so much bending to gather and tie the sheaves after the reaper, or even the scythe, and lift them into a stook. Or lifting the sheaves after the binder. Good for the waist I would think.
Then In November 1938 the first entry of the Minimum Wage. Sincy Shearer had £27/15/- in the half year, as did Peter and Gillies Stevenson from Burragate in Rousam. Ned Norquoy had £26.5/10d, younger then and not yet on the full rate. He came with us to Greenland Mains in 1944, moved latterly to Greenvale with John Mackenzie. Gillies Stevenson had £2.10/- extra as cattleman in 1939. James Norquoy had ”Harvest” in 1938 less rent £11/16/-, and 4 weeks as cattleman at 34/6d a week. He appears in 1939 as full time cattleman, minimum wage, 34/6d a week. Looks like he worked in 1938 as a harvest hand, then stayed on as a full time employee.
By the writing our mother was doing the books by May 1939, the Minimum Rate was £44.17/- for the half year at 34/6d a week. The earlier £27.15 of Nov. 1938 was with the perquisites entered as extra, while by May 1939 she had changed to applying the minimum on the top line, and then subtracting the perquisites, same result. In May of 1939 Sinclair Shearer, World War 1 veteran, in his last half year before his retirement, had Minimum Wage of £44.17/- for the half year. From that was deducted:- Rent: £3., Meal 10/-, Milk £2/12/9.5d, Coal £1/4/11d., 6 st oats 5/6d., Insurance £1/1/8d., Unemployment 8/8d., by Cash, £20/00/00d., leaving a balance due of £29/3/6.5d. To that had been added an extra £2.12/-, in all a top line of £47.9/-, and a balance after deductions of £18/5/5d. paid.
Jamie Norquoy had 2 cwt potatoes at 5/- the cwt., milk at £5/5/7d, indicating that milk was to be paid for at the quantity required. He had Swanney's account deducted at £5.9..111/2d, credit charged to him but paid and deducted by my father from his wages. Peter Stevenson had coal supplied at 591/2d cwts, no apparent charge so that was a perquisite supplied free. In May 1940 he had a deduction of £19./9/4d. for full cost, appears to have been a standard rate for a presumed specified supply of extras such as a certain predetermined amount of milk, coal and potatoes.
War came in September, 1939, as our father predicted, and so too the dreaded Income Tax, though only charged against unmarried John Peace jnr, his married cattleman father John paying nothing. John's brother Willie, also unmarried, had Income Tax. £5 from each of them. May 1941 saw the Minimum going up to 52/- a week, a fleece of wool of 6lbs bought by John Peace snr was 8/-, 1/4d a lb. Whether that was the fleece that we saw Mrs Peace spinning into wool, to then knit stockings or jerseys for her men I do not know, but we watched her skill many a time at the spinning wheel, though her knitting fingers were too fast for our eyes to follow. She bought some white wool, some black, the resulting blended double-twist thread giving a traditional grey-speckled gansy. Quite attractive too. Or thick socks but they needed a fair bit of darning, the soft wool did not wear too well in tackety boots.
Meal was no longer the three bolls in the half year but was bought as required out of the loft meal kist. Bakers bread was available from Swanneys and Jock Stout in the Village. Half loafs, cookies, plain or with currants sometimes, sticky buns, rolls. Whit extravagance, boy!! The flour scones, bere bannocks and oatcakes of so many homes were being supplemented with "fancies", if you can remember that old term, from "the van", travelling shops on wheels. Peter Stevenson had 2 gallons paraffin oil at 1/4d per gallon, approx 6p today.
So to May 1942, the last entry of the Wages Book, 1942, though our farming went on. Peter Stevenson had 7 weeks at 52/-, 19 weeks at 65/-, a total for the half a year of £79/19/-. He was the foreman but did not appear to receive any more pay on that account. Willie Peace, John Peace jnr., John Peace snr., all at the same rate of 65/-. Willie Peace had Income Tax at £10/7/6d. John his younger brother Income Tax at £9/10/-. with no reason I know of for the difference.
Tom Anderson appears at 39/-.a week, looks a fair rate for a young lad against the rates for the older men on full wage. He went to school with me, a year or two older, but we had the distinction of being together belted by Mr John Drever, Headmaster. I was in Class 4, Tom in Class 5. There was a follow on to that incident, well earned because we sniggered while lining up after playtime. When Mr Drever looked for the strap he was, temporarily, unable to find it. A pile of jotters on his desk were sent sailing skywards in his exasperation. Unfortunately, there was a large circular ventilator opening in the ceiling, half of the jotters sailed through, and did not come down again. He found the belt.
Many years later the school was being refurbished, and I asked Tommy Rendall, who had been on that job, if Mr Drever's room had been re-roofed. It had. When I asked him if a pile of jotters had been found in the roof space, all he could say was "How the H*** did you know about that? All I could say was “I was there!!” Incidentally, Tom Anderson’s Insurance was 2d a week, his N.H. also 2d. And his was the very last entry in the book in May 1942..

Over the 36 years of the Wages Book until it finished 28th May 1942 pay had moved from £9 in the half year at the B'of Rothiesholm in 1906 to £79 at Whitehaa for the half year to 28th May, made up of 7 weeks at 52/-, and 19 weeks at 65/-. which was for Peter Stevenson. A full half year at 65/- would have been £84/10/00d.
Perquisites had risen. Holidays with pay came in, not a lot. Time off sick was un-payed. Maybe a half-day as maternity leave, or a funereal. Stronsay favoured Sunday funereals, fitted in between morning and evening services at the Church. The men were clean and dressed anyway, practical. Did not take time off work!! Houses were being improved somewhat on the larger farms. Usual first step was a small add-on kitchen at the back of the house, mostly built by the men themselves with some help from knacky neighbours, with material being supplied by the farmer, sometimes no more than timber and asbestos sheets. An equally small front-door porch which did good service in many ways apart from keeping out some drafts, uses such as the men’s outdoor boots and clothes, a spare bucket or two, a bag of feed for the chooks.. Most men could keep a pig for themselves, and a few hens. Somewhere in the book I could analyse prices by deduction but that is a more general look at farming. There are not too many left who can correct my errors, but of The Men O’ Whitehaa there are still a few around.

THE MEN O' WHITEHAA NO 1.

2009-05-16T00:34:00.001-07:00

RAIN ON MY WINDOW.
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.

The Men o’ Whitehaa No1. revised 2nd March 2009.

We left Hobbister for Whitehall in Stronsay on 18th Nov. 1919. The War was over. The Hobbister wages book closed with final entries for the last 6 month half year at Hobbister up to November, 1919, of £30 for Peter Guthrie and Kemp, £26 for David Swanney, There was £10/10/- for James Scobie, a halfling or lad, £10 for Maggie Miller. All that is left for me of Hobbister is the thought that Highland Park, my favourite Malt Whisky, is still made with peats cut on the Hobbister Hill where our family cut theirs so very long ago. Though the family were in Hobbister but a short six years, it was a time of great significance for the family other than mere farming. From there the final scattering of my grand-parents family into the outer World as so very many Scottish families scatter on growing up. Some had already gone before Hobbister. John, their first born, went to New Zealand as a surgeon in Gisborne and then to Invercargill following a spell in South Africa, Bill to farm on the prairie in Alberta in Canada, to return later through Red Hill in Rothienorman in Aberdeenshire to finally farm Cleat in Westray in Orkney. David in his early days of the practice of Medicine after graduating in 1911 from Edinburgh, the hell of two World Wars in the R.A.M.C. still ahead of him. Nan got married in 1916 but stayed at Hobbister while her husband George Flett was in France in the Artillery. Jeannie had married Pat Johnston, a tailor in Stromness, only to die in childbirth. Their only daughter Thora was with us in Stromness till 2005, aged 90. Steven the youngest brother off to Edinburgh to study Medicine. Only our father Tom was still at home farming, which takes us to Whitehaa in Stronsay.

The first entry for Whitehaa was the six months to 28th May 1920, wages dropping from
the explosive last half year in Hobbister. First entry was £20 for Jamie Shearer, cattleman at Whitehaa in 28th May 1920. He remained in the Book until his last pay day in Nov. 1936 when he retired to live in the Village, still appearing at Whitehaa at times to see that his cattle were being looked after as well as he had done. I remember him well, still quite fit, stocky build, blue well-washed dungaree trousers and a thick hand-knitted pepper-and-salt gansey his usual uniform.
There was £18.5.1d for Sinclair Shearer, foreman as I knew him, back from the Great War in one piece with his medals, a smallish, neat, hard man, overshadowed by his wife Mary. Sunlocks Miller at £16.15.1d Jamie Miller at £20, Jamie Miller jun. at £12, Pat Shearer at £15. This would have been Ould Pat, as good a man with wood and a chisel as you could find. He made a creepie [ small stool] and a bairn's chair for us, showed me how to make a bow and arrow. As an old man and retired he would be found many a day in the workshop on the farm, repairing this or that. He gave my father as sharp a knife as ever I saw, kept by him for many a long year and much used for castrating calves or piglets, a very necessary farm task but not discussed round the dining table!!! .
The staff continued with Andrew Shearer, £20; John Hutchison, £16. Mary Tulloch, £12, Mary Shearer, £12. Both worked in the "Big Hoos" and also milked the cows. Mary Shearer died suddenly of her heart. And that completes the first payday on 28th May 1920, following November 1919 when they returned to Stronsay. Sinclair Shearer, "Sincy", had previously been with the family at the Bu' of Rothiesholm at £8 in the half year to May of 1913, a young lad then before going to War..
The handwriting changed in the Book in May 1920, an indication that my father's hand was taking over from his father, as sons tend to do. There was a story that my father said to his aging father that there was only room for one boss at Whitehaa, and it was going to be him!! I have tried, unsuccessfully sometimes, to remember that!! As my grandfather was 68 at the time of entry to Whitehall in Nov.1919, fair enough. That was the farm staff of Whitehaa, a good 450 acre farm, wages still paid on the half year basis. I have no accurate memory of how much crop was grown, or what stock of cows and ewes were carried. Certainly horse power held sway.
But now into the reckoning came an increase in worker's perquisites, either due as part of their wages or purchased from the farm. Jamie Shearer bought 2 stone of oil cake, he had bought a calf at £2.10/- from the farm, and was presumably rearing it for himself. The oil cake cost 7/- for the 2 stone - 14 lbs the stone. Forget about kgs. He could also have had his own milking cow. He had 15cwts of coal, easily got in Stronsay with the herring fishing going full bore. Davie Chalmers the Stronsay coal merchant had his coal-yard at the head of the pier and his coaling ships or hulks for the herring drifters lay at anchor below Whitehall in the Bay of Franks. Oats were being bought by the men, a sign of hens being kept. Coal at 2/6d the cwt., oats at 12/9d the bushel of 42lbs. Insurance was still at 8/8d for the half year. Sunlocks Miller had 10cwts coal. With a name like Sunlocks it must be stated that there was not a blacker haired man in all of Stronsay, jet black. And when I remember him later, no longer working for our father but with a small farm of his own in the South End, a lover of a right smart horse in the gig. And a real cracker of a horse at that. We would watch from the House on steamer day to see his gig going home across the Ayre o’ the Myres, and from nearly a mile distance we would recognise the beautiful spanking gait of Sunlock’s horse. Wildly beautiful.
James Miller had 14cwt 2 st. of coal on Nov. 28th, again 15cwts coal on Feb. 1st., also at 2/6d. Peter Shearer 14cwt 6st. coal. This provision of coal went on for many years, not part of the wages but supplied by the farm and charged for. Coal was a big thing, my memory takes me to the horses and carts getting coal direct off the coal boat at Whitehall Pier, weighed on the Weigh Bridge at the head of the pier, and the bridge is still there. Even further, it takes me to Greenland Mains where we went even in my day the ten long miles into Thurso with horses and carts to get our coal supply off the railway wagons, a job I did myself one time on holiday from school. A definite bath needed thereafter!!
On Nov. 10th 1920 Andrew Shearer had a barrel of coal as well as the more normal weight measure. Barrels as a measure had been used for centuries, were going into disuse but still crop up for bulk measure at times for coal, peats, potatoes and oats. Andrew also had 5 lbs of wool, James Miller had 14lbs, James Shearer 5lbs., all at 6/3d a lb. Their wives must have spun and knitted. From distant memory 3 tons coal rings a bell with me. I am guessing when I state that the men got three tons supplied by the farm per half year as part of thier wages, extra being charged for by the farmer. There was an obvious requirement for cash in hand with small advances being paid here and there. Most of the men purchased oats, in my memory they all had hens, most kept a pig, usefully fed on house scraps, killed and cured for themselves. A whole pig was a bit much for one household but the system was much of sharing, perhaps half a pig to some one else who in due time returned the compliment. They made good use of the farm dairy to do their butchering, plenty room and good solid flagstone shelves.

The "girls" at £12 each would have been dairy milkers as well as the house work they did, butter to churn, cheese to make, homebrew to bottle, and drink!!. The seasonal summer herring fishing workers needed a large amount of milk, and the farms of Hunton, Clestrain, Whitehaa, possibly others I know not of, kept milking cows for that summer trade. And when the herring moved south to shoal off Wick and the fishing boats and the workers followed, then the milk was made into all the products one can think of. Girls who worked in the "Big Hoos" did not get much wages, surviving on room and board and a little cash. .
So much for the first six months at Whitehaa. There is much to study and perhaps to guess at in the Wages Book, I cannot ask for corrections from those who knew better, now all gone. I try my best, hoping it is enough.
We move on to 1920, James Moodie starts on 18th August but was paid previously on June 28th and July 10th. He must have worked for my father during the herring season, and then became a full time employee on the farm on 18th August when the season had closed? That is my guess.
Time moves on a bit, and entries appear for coal "ex store", which was from Chalmers coal yard in the Village. Conversely, it could have been out of the tarred roof coal-shed store on the farm. It was vastly more convenient to cart coal straight from the coal boat rather than load into a cart by hand off the storeyard floor, and I remember just that operation. Whitehaa was a mile from the pier-head, and providing carts to carry direct from the coal boat was easy enough, though a very black and dusty job.
The year 1920 saw a blip in Wages, James Shearer went up to £30, as did James Moodie, Sinclair Shearer to £30, Sunlocks Miller to £28. This did not last long as farming went into one of it's periodic slumps, and by 1922 £30 had dropped back to £26 in the half year, and then to £24, levelling off by 1926 at around £22 for Sinclair Shearer. Each man made his own bargain, variable, reflecting whether foreman, horseman or cattleman. The date of 1938 is the first I came across the phrase "Minimum Wage", no doubt a milestone in farm worker's welfare and reward, if that is the correct word. And that can later be our concluding part of this "Men O' Whitehaa", with the "Minimum Wage" for the next article.

Sharon at Michaels wedding.

2009-05-11T11:13:00.000-07:00

No 47. Cattle tied by the neck.

2009-05-01T12:21:00.001-07:00

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 48. CATTLE TIED BY THE NECK.

When I wrote of our father building the “Madhoos” at Airy as the first loose cattle housing in Stronsay, and as I come in from a steading of cattle housed on slatted floors and straw-bedded courts at Isauld, I think back to early days in Whitehall and how the livestock were winter housed. Everything, but everything, was tied by the neck, both horses and cattle. Even Old Spot the farm dog was on his chain for the night, though he was trustworthy enough. I do not remember the numbers of cattle each byre held, nor how many cows, nor how many feeders. But I do remember the byres and the steading, the various connecting doors, and the dung middens which were works of art, not a heap of s*** as so many today would call it. Sides well dressed, tidy and straight, corners squared off, all time consuming work but therer was no T.V. then. The midden plank was placed just so though it had to be frequently moved on or over as more barrow loads came out and the midden grew large over the winter. Usually a long wide midden plank or two as a high road, often found on the beach off some wreck, and some smaller shorter planks leading off to a side, shifted on as need be, with a turn-corner to be very carefully negotiated with the dung barrow.
But the cattle is what we are looking at. At the upper end of the steading was the sookers [sucklers] byre, the cows and their calves, the big Aberdeen Angus bull in a single large stall at the end next the chaff house and the barn. I will at this space of time take a wild guess and say we had 24 cows in that byre and a few milkers in the feeders byre. They were all tied by the neck two to a stall by a chain we called a neck chain but in Caithness called by the Gaelic name of “ask”. The divisions between each pair we called beel stones but again the Caithness name is “Hallans”. A solid four-inch thick flagstone perhaps five feet high and about six feet long from the head wall, well set into the floor, about 18 inches deep at a guess, though I took some out of one byre at Isauld and put them in another so I should know. Anyway they were solidly fixed into the ground. The floor itself was also of flagstones, possibly imported from Caithness. I remember Jeemie Moad at Airy making on the farm some beel stones for a new byre out of concrete and re-inforcing steel, a common enough practice later in both my Counties. In front of the cows was a feed stall, a 9 inch high stone kerb about 18inches out from the wall and always with a stone centre divider. It helped the cows to get a good bite at a neep (turnip) and to give each a fair share with her partner. Their neck chain was just so long that a cow could not reach in front of her partner to steal a tit-bit, though some would try, tongue reaching out to lick a leaf nearer.
The ask was on a ring on a near verticle slider to allow room to move up and down for a cow to reach the heck or rack above their heads in which were the straw windlins, or perhaps some loose hay if lucky. Heck is an old Norwegian word still used there, so “The Vikings were here”, both in Orkney and in Caithness. Old Norse also had “Halla” for flagstone, still do. On the chain was a swivel and one of the cattleman’s duties was to see that it was well oiled, otherwise it could lock and inconvenience the cow with a twisted ask. . Three large rings spaced along the chain allowed adjustment for a larger or smaller neck, or even a knot could be tied on the chain for smaller cattle. Very important too was for the cattleman to check regularly that the chain was not too tight and cutting into the top of the neck of a beast. I must admit I have seen it, and it could be a really stinking mess if undetected for too long. Cattle did grow during the winter and a chain that fitted tight at tying up time would usually have to be adjusted later.
Behind the cow was a small step downwards into the oddle, in Caithness the strand. This helped to keep the cows all the drier by draining away liquid. And dung. That step varied wildly in height according to what or whose byre you were in. Along the oddle a practiced cattleman could push amazing heaps of dung towards the door with a byre scraper
Behind the cows on the opposite wall the calves were tied, each with a neck rope, usually directly behind their mother so they could speak to each other. Again the neck-loop in the rope had to be just so, a knot in the rope preventing it becoming a hanging noose. The calves were suckled either two or three times a day, the rope tucked in around the neck to keep it out of the muck on the floor, but that could be quite a struggle with a growing calf anxious to get to mamma. Sometimes they won, their rope trailing in the dirt.
Calves were usually born at Whitehall in early Spring from February onwards, though there would be an occasional cow that broke the rules and had an autumn calf. A long winter of suckling lay ahead of it. Later at Greenland Mains father had enough room in some byres to have a cow with her calf tied beside her in the stall, allowing the cow to move diagonally across and the calf to suckle without being loosened. Quite handy but needed spare stalls.

The next byres in order were the calfie byres, three of them at the top of the square and lying across the building, three stalls each side of a central passage. They had small stalls and each byre held twelve weaned calves, about six months old when they came in at Autumn time. Getting them tied in their stalls was a pantomime, a rope with a loop, a lasso, and try to throw it over the calf’s head. Father was pretty good at it, but that skill was not universal. Then the rope through the slider, a couple of men on the other end, and the calf was pulled into place, the chain fastened around it’s neck, and the calf was there for the winter. Hallans were smaller, hecks were lower, stalls were narrower, fit for purpose. There were no water bowls at all, any water, if needed, had to be carried in buckets, usually to cows that were milking for the house and needed more liquid. But that tremendous crop called turnips [neeps] filled all water requirements, being a succulent with a water content of nearly 90%, swede turnips being solider and more nutritious than yellows, but later maturing and keeping well for Spring use. A full basket each cattle beast in two split feeds morning and afternoon provided all the water needed, baskets filled according to the size of cattle of course. Yellows for the cows and younger cattle to be grazed next summer, swedes usually for the feeders or the milking cows. And big feeders would get more than a basket, indeed fed to appetite by very knowledgable cattlemen.
The yearling byre was on the low side of the Square, the Long Loft above it so it was the warmest byre, larger stalls than the calfies but otherwise the same pattern. Below it was the feeders byre with the largest stalls, the ones next the farm house for the milking cows. A corn kist half way along, partitioned in two, a larger side for bruised oats, a smaller side for precious linseed oilcake. It had a lock with a fastening pin in case any beast got inadvertently loose in the night, opened the lid and killed itself by gorging. Beside the kist the wooden feed boxes were stacked, oblong ones and round ones. The oblong ones were better for carrying than the round, the cattleman taking two in each hand with his fingers gripping two boxes over the top, and one in each oxter, the armpit for those among us who do not know that old word. Six in all at a time. Needed a strong grip. I could only manage four. .
It was a long winter for the cattle all tied by the neck.

2009-05-01T09:59:00.000-07:00

No 49. Maas Eggs on Midgarth Holm .

2009-04-17T23:47:00.001-07:00

No 49. MAAS EGGS on the HOLM.

Maas Eggs. Month of May and the early days of that month. There was one weekend which was high on our boyhood calendar when we had our annual trip to the Midgarth Holm, called Linga Holm and now owned by the R.S.P.B.. Early in the month the gulls in all their varied kinds turned their gull minds to thoughts of love and nest building. Almost human they were. So with mounting excitement we packed a picnic lunch and gathered pails for the trip. The Holm of Midgarth belonged to and was farmed by Dod and Alex.Tait, brothers of our father’s mother. About 150 acres, or thereby, as lawyers describe any property they are selling to obviate and prevent any claims on mis-measurement. Half a mile off shore from Midgarth, low lying, with low cliffs on the south side, rocky banks or shingly beaches on the rest. The fertile Holm had been lived on in days gone by with empty houses still there in our day, though I do not know what has happened to them since. Our father’s first cousin John Tait, Professor of the Physiology Dept., McGill University, Montreal, Canada, having come home to visit his native Orkney in 1939, was caught there by the outbreak of War in Sept. of that year. The sinking of the passenger ship Athenia with heavy loss of life on the very first day of War on 3rd September, 1939, was no encouragement to hasten back to Canada. He lived on the Holm like a hermit in summer in one of the houses, communing with Nature, the winters of his maroonment he spent in the warm house of Lower Midgarth. Not till 1944 did he brave the U-boat infested North Atlantic crossing back to Montreal in Canada, where he died at his home on the 21st October of that year. He taught us how to shoot with a .22 rifle, a good trainer; as well he should have been as he served as a doctor throughout the First World War. He was also a wonderful guide to all the birds and beasties around us, a profound zoologist and ornithologist. He smoked a pipe with an infernal and pungent mixture of herbs, never to be forgotten. Where or how he got it I do not know, perhaps he made it himself from the abundant vegetation around, on which he really was a Professor. We thought he knew everything.
The Midgarth men had a beautiful former German powered launch, possibly off the Hindenberg, wonderfully built with the finest of timbers, teak and mahogany. All the launches survived the Scuttling of the German Grand Fleet in 1919 as the crews left their sinking ships, or most of them anyway as a few were shot. Most of the boats found their way to many an Orkneyman’s boat noust. The Taits also had a big flat bottomed boat for taking sheep and Shetland ponies off the Holm, towed across by the Hindenberg. On the Midgarth shore they had a large corrugated iron boat shed for winter storage of the boats. Smelt of tar and petrol and oil and linseed and tarry ropes and wood shavings and sea weed and all things magical to we boys. Dod and Alec would have farm work to do on the Holm but we were on holiday, maybe we helped to chase some sheep into pens or some ponies but otherwise the day was ours for Maas Eggs.
. We were always sternly warned of the dangers of falling overboard on the crossing, told to sit there and don’t move, not a lot anyway. But on the way over through the clear pale green water we could see the shallow underwater scene, fish, scuttling crabs moving sideways as crabs do, a blue lobster or two, many varied and wonderful seaweeds, patches of sand and rocks, seals on occasion underneath us or popping their heads up to have a look at us, then splashing down out of sight. Sometimes Dod would drift the boat for a few minutes to let us have a better look. Getting to the Holm, the flat boat was tied next to the small stone jetty ready for loading some livestock, and the Hindenberg beside it. Usually Dod and Alec had some farm men or neighbours to help them, and they had good old fashioned sturdy dogs too, real bowferts.
Father took us off around the shore of the Holm, always going clockwise with the sun, superstitious maybe but an inviolate rule. The beaches were usually of small shingle, good nesting for black and white oyster catchers which we called skeldros with their piping cry, sitting tight on their eggs later but we there early enough to see their new laid eggs in their scrapes. Above the beach we would find dunters - eider ducks - with their nest hugely covered in fluffy down and thus seen a mile away, which still gives us eiderdowns on our beds, but who now knows the origin. Though all too easy to see the nests, we did not take the dunters’ blueish eggs, nor the skeldro. A full dunters clutch could be a dozen eggs or more, prolific layers.
Different parts of the Holm were favoured by different species. Terns favoured a small reedy loch, clouding over it, diving furiously on our heads close enough to part our hair and feel the wind of their passing, yelling the while. A few curlews favoured that spot too. Kittiwakes clamored as we came near, they clamor anyway. Various gulls, herring gulls large and small kinds, black-backed gulls, also large and small, but not too many of these, black-headed gulls. On the cliffs on the South side of the Holm a few very visible crows nests, hugely made with seaweed and small tangles off the beach, easily seen but impossible to climb to. They were infinitely crafty in that regard. Still, we saw them, and could sometimes get above them on the cliff edge to see their eggs
There were in those far off days just a few fulmars, called locally by the old Viking name “mallimac” for evil gull. Do not get too close, they could spit-vomit desperately smelly oil with great accuracy and any clothes hit by them were best left on the Holm, quite impossible to wash away the smell. Father once had a favourite hat targeted; it is still lying on the sea under Rothiesholm Head!!!. We did not take their eggs!!.
So we filled part anyway of our pails with wonderfully mottled gulls eggs, herring gulls the favourite. Thin shelled so take care with them, easily broken. Sometimes we put a layer of dried grass between layers of eggs to cushion them a bit, we had a long way to go home. There our mother fried them lightly and quickly in butter, breaking the yolks to let them run as they were quite strong tasted but when spread thinly we loved them. Certainly a different taste from hen eggs, the white better tasting, a bit oily and fishy, sharpish. I do not think we would have liked them every day, though of that we had no risk. Some people hard-boiled them but again that was too strong for our tastes.
There were other places in Stronsay to get gulls eggs, Rothiesholm Head or Burgh Head among others. Sometimes we had to wait on top of the cliff while our father went down for some eggs, but it was not cliff climbing as such, rather a more gentle slope but take care anyway, the sea was below. He had lived in Rothiesholm Farm anyway so knew every place there worth visiting for gulls eggs. We were allowed to gather eggs on easy places above and back from the cliffs where some gulls would lay among the scrubby heather or on bare patches of ground, possibly beside a small pond or lochan here or there. There were some places we were allowed to go on our own, safe, especially around the beach and shore below Whitehall Farm or down on The Ness, no cliffs but less gulls.
But Midgarth Holm was our favourite, the sea and the sky and the wind, the space, the flavour of Robinson Crusoe about it, and we could let our vivid imaginations run wild.

IVY COTTAGE

2009-04-17T23:45:00.000-07:00

IVY COTTAGE at Lochend at Greenland // looking at it with view to purchase though not finished deal yet // big change for me if we do buy it //

ivy cottage

2009-04-15T12:45:00.000-07:00

Ivy Cottage

2009-04-15T12:09:00.000-07:00

No 50. The Spoot Ebb.

2009-04-03T05:35:00.000-07:00

RAIN ON MY WINDOW.
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. A long time ago, but yesterday too.
Morris Pottinger

Spoots. A Spoot Ebb. Spring Tides. Sharp dry sowing days on the land. Month of March and the tides just right. St Catharine’s Bay in Stronsay was and perhaps still is the very best bay in Scotland for spoots, flat sand going far out with a good ebb tide, the sea not coming in on the flood too fast but don’t dawdle. Spoots are a sea shell known by the knowledgeable as razor-shells, a bi-valve meaning two sides, about 12 inches long, a bit over an inch wide, slightly less through, looks like a slightly bent ruler. Or better, each individual half like the old fashioned cut throat razor our father used, hence the name. You will still find the open shells washed up on most sandy beaches in Stronsay, very attractively banded in browns and pale ivory colours, single sides mostly as what you will find are remains. They are, however, no longer there in the numbers we formerly knew.
Mostly the men had their land work to do, or other jobs, and only in the evenings of a March Spring tide did they go to the spoots. And some were crack hands. Robbie Miller o' Hunton was by far the best I remember, effortlessly filling his two buckets while others struggled to fill one. Not that our father was a slouch at the spoots, but some people had the magic touch. Robbie did. We boys could go when we liked during the day if the tide was right, though evenings always seemed to have the best results. A Spring Tide went far out on the ebb leaving a flat sandy beach, facing west and south, a bay sheltered from the cold north and east by the Island itself. So we wanted to be at St Catharine’s when the tide was still going out on the ebb, which gave us about three hours maximum, quite enough next the cold sea.
About two miles to walk from Whitehaa. We normally met up with Jackie Stevenson and Hecky Marshall from Yernesetter, same ages as David and I and our buddies. Rubber boots essential, thick warm gansey and a good scarf, an old coat, balaclavas on our heads. Because it would be very cold later when the flood tide turned back to the land and evening came on. A tin pail and a gully, which was a long-bladed sharp slightly curved knife mainly used by butchers in their trade, and also on the farms for the same purpose.
Spoots were incredibly succulent when cooked properly, which was a very short time in a butter-laden very hot frying pan. If too long in the pan they turned to leather. They were first put in a metal pail and boiling water poured over the closed shells. In about a minute the shell opened and the inside was stripped out with a thick thumb along the inside of the shell. The bits we were after were called the flute, a long white fleshy end which extended down into the sand and anchored the spoot in place. The other end which was the head and mouth and stomach was just below the surface. When it was covered with sea water the mouth was just level with the surface and the spoot fed itself with whatever the sea brought to its stationary position, sucking in nutrient rich water and expelling it again. If one went ever so quietly into the shallow water and looked down one could see some of them just showing, but they were super-supersensitive to vibrating footsteps, be it human or a marauding gull, and would vanish downwards under the sand in an instant. When the tide went out the spoot pulled itself just below the surface to safety from marauding gulls, or men, waited there till the next tide. Which is where we came in.
The drill was to walk slowly backwards, pail in one hand, gully in the other, with a keen eye to see the tell-tale mark in the sand where the spoot was just pulling itself down. Sometimes merely a small dimple in the sand. Sometimes it gave a little “spoot” of a water which gave it the name, an upward spit as it began to pull itself down. That was the key, which way was it going, spoot one way, razor shell going the other, judge the angle. Rather like hunting submarines. Absolutely no time to think, a quick stoop, a slice with the gully through the sand in the calculated direction, try to catch the side of the spoot. Not too much power or one could slice right through the shell. The method was to catch the spoot on the shell with the gully knife and hold it from descending further out of reach, while with the other hand scrape away the sand till the shell was seen, then grip it and carefully and gently draw it upwards. Too quick or strong a pull and the desired fleshy flute could be left behind under the sand, still get-at-able but much more hand digging.
The sands would at times be well covered with men and boys each on his favoured spot. About a good mile of sandy beach so plenty of room, but the spoots would be more numerous in certain spots. There were also scallops and cockles and other delicacies but only by chance would we find them, the real quarry was the spoot.
Carrying our bucket home was a heavy task with many a rest along the way, and always a bit of competition to see who had been most successful.
The beach also provided us with a harvest other than spoots but more on the rocks of the shore. There were wilks in quantity, easy to fill a bucket. In days gone by my friends the MacPhees came to Isauld to ask if they could go down to the shore for wilks, a mighty heavy load to carry a full bag on your back up to the road. They made a part of their slender living with hard cold work. There are no wilks on the rocks today. There were limpets, the emblem of Stronsay whose people are nicknamed “Lempets” to this day. Always memorable on leaving Kirkwall on the Earl Thorfinn after the County Show, the Kirkwall people lining the pier to farewell us home and yelling “Lempits, Lempits” after us as we left the land. To which we shouted back “Stirlings, Strirlings” in contempt for these city dwellers, a name no doubt well earned by the propensity of roosting shitty starlings to sleep in the city. The lempit clung tenaciously to the rocks, not easy to gather at all, and we usually knocked them off with a hand held stone or a tackety boot, washed the lempit there and then in a pool of sea water and ate the fleshy foot by which it clung to the rocks. I do not remember anyone taking them home to cook but they were much used as bait in lobster pots, and also for baiting a hook to fish for sillocks or any other passing fish off the pier or off a suitable sea-rock. Also for chewing to bits and seeding the water with a spray of chewed lempit to draw sillocks into the hooped circle of the net. Lempits were quite plentiful in days gone by, and they could grow to quite a size if left alone. They were also plentiful under the water but not accessible to ourselves.
There were mussels, blue and beautiful clusters of them gleaming from a distance, easily gathered, now more of a fish-farmed delicacy. I like them stewed in a delicate white wine sauce. As boys we were not too wild about these sea-shore delicacies but now and again they found their way to the table. I think our father liked to provide a taste of Stronsay for his visiting doctor brothers, John and David from New Zealand (2), Steven from England (1) and his sister Nan from Edinburgh, to remind them of the salty taste of their Island roots, washed down of course with copious jugs of Home-brew. And we had to gather them.

No 22. Hens and their eggs.

2009-03-20T06:45:00.001-07:00

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.
CHICKEN AND THE EGGS.
Until I wrote of hatching the chickens I did not realize there was so much to our poultry farming yesterday. So we come to the pullets beginning to lay, and the whole keeping of hens when we were young. The hen houses were made of wood, sometimes made on the farm by a handy worker, simply constructed but strong. They were built on a base of two heavy wooden runner beams which kept the floor about 6 inches above the ground. On one side was a nest box sometimes fitted with a lid opened from outside which made egg collecting easier, and that side usually had one window as well. Inside they would have pole perches called backs, easily taken out for cleaning. Feeding these hen houses was often outdoors with small wooden boxes if the weather was fine, but if the weather was unkind there would be a bunker in the henhouse filled with oats and with a feeding tray. Water was in shallow tubs, or in galvanized cylindrical containers with shallow trough rims round the bottom. A small heap of shell sand was always handy, it provided lime for stronger egg shells and grit for aiding digestion in the hen’s gizzard, it’s meal mill. Shell sand was also put on the floor when the house was cleaned out, made it easier to clean next time, straw being reserved for the nest boxes to encourage the hens to lay in them and not on the floor. Mostly it worked well.
The houses were mobile and could be skidded along the ground by a handy horse, or even from field to field on the under frame beams. There were some henhouses mounted on wheels, though we did not have any. This moving had two advantages, one was to move the henhouse onto fresh ground and pastures new, organic, the other was to eliminate the rats that seemed to home in under the houses almost as soon as they were shifted. Rats were in their heaven with henhouses, feed supplied, breakfast eggs available. To see how rats could move an egg from inside the henhouse to below it was incredible, but they did. Legend had a story that one rat would lie on its back and hold the egg to its stomach with its paws, while another rat pulled it by its tail with egg attached. We looked for this phenomenon many times, never caught one in the act, but were assured that it really was so. Certainly the evidence of empty eggshells below the hen houses was compelling. This moving of the houses also gave us a rat hunt armed with sticks but we had to be careful too. Rats were totally vicious and I once saw a rubber boot – not mine - torn completely through by a rat someone had partly stood on, though it missed his foot. They would turn viciously on one too so rat catching could be quite excitingly scary. The most amazing thing I ever saw in that regard was down at the old quarry at a corner of Barfea Field half way to the Village which was partly full of water, the quarry that built the Village. A rat escaped over the edge, falling into the water, and we thought it would drown. Not so, the water was clear and we watched it actually run across the bottom, not swimming at all, to emerge at the other side where it was suitably dispatched. It was at that quarry that we saw Wullie Peace many times put his hand into a rat hole after an escapee and dispatch it. He was fearless, but he gave us the shivers.
The henhouses were kept in various places around the farm, down at that old quarry, at the shore where they had access to the beach and shell sand, also carted from there by the horsemen to all the other hen houses. Some houses were kept in a field called Blackha next the steading, or on our way to school in a very well named clay field called “Scrapehard” . Some were kept in front of the house in the Front Park. But all were kept in fields well away from any growing crops of grain for obvious reasons, though a hen would walk a long way to get into such a field. Paradoxically, after harvest the henhouses were moved onto the stubbles, a very useful and profitable form of gleaning. Every henhouse was held down with wires attached to fencing posts well driven into the ground, keeping them secure against Orkney gales. Though not always I fear. In 1952 a most serious hurricane struck Orkney, hundreds of hen houses were demolished or blown away, hens were lost by the thousand. It was the beginning of the end for the famed Orkney egg production from which it never recovered. One true tale worth retelling was of the fishing trawler coming in through the String between Shapinsay and Kirkwall, seeing a henhouse floating in the sea, heard hens cackling, hauled alongside, a crewman hopped across and they had the freshest eggs for breakfast any man could wish for.
Feeding the hens was tedious, carrying pails of feed to the henhouses, water also, slopping about in the pail. Always carry two pails to balance the load on your shoulders and arms, even if you split the contents between them. Sometimes an armful of fresh straw to clean out and refill the nest boxes. Of course the pails also carried the eggs back home. In winter mash was made up, meal and bran and other niceties mixed with hot water and taken to the hens. At Whitehall we had two stone-built henhouses at the steading, each at one corner of the stackyard. While being closer to take care of and safe from gales, they were a rats’ paradise. However, being next the stackyard the hens also made very good gleaners of what remained after a stack was threshed. They also had so many places to hide away their eggs other than their proper nest boxes, and it was always a constant contest to watch a hen slipping off thinking she was unobserved, then finding her nest among the nettles.
Laying the eggs was the task of the hens, but the work had just begun for mother and her helpers. The baskets or pails of eggs came into the kitchen for washing in very lukewarm water, just enough hot to take the chill off, a slippery job with a little Vim and a rag to help. Check for any chipped ones which were kept for home consumption, pack them in cardboard trays holding 30 eggs to a tray, pack these in large wooden egg boxes for shipping from Stronsay to Kirkwall and Orkney Egg Producers Grading Station. On steamer day the Stronsay peir would be stacked high with boxes from all over the island which were put in rope slings, swung aboard and down into the hold. From Orkney Egg Producers in Kirkwall a ship load if not two was sent every week to Glasgow on the Elwick Bay, a ship owned by Dennison from Shapinsay. Or some other ship he owned.
Then there were the oddities to use at home. Double yolked eggs. We always wondered if they had been incubated would they have produced two chicks. Never did sort that one out. I think folklore held that it was unlucky, mother would never allow us to try it anyway. There were the tiny round eggs, said to be an indication that a hen was about to go broody, clucking we called it. Mother kept them until she had enough, hard boiled them. shelled them, and as they were tiny yolks only they ended up as a last minute addition to the chicken broth, a most tasty adjunct. We usually had fights over who was to get them.

So called factory egg production has finished all that, vastly efficient, target of the do-gooders. But at the price of eggs today we could not keep laying hens at all outdoors as we used to, feed costs are too high, labour too expensive, time too precious. Some do, however, and call them organic free range eggs. Good for them, I wish them the best of luck, but it is very hard work.

2009-03-14T12:33:00.001-07:00

cattle tied in byre

2009-03-14T12:33:00.000-07:00

No 36.Lifting the Tatties

2009-03-06T04:14:00.001-08:00

No 36 Lifting the Tatties.

2009-03-06T04:11:00.000-08:00

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 36. Lifting the Tatties

Tatties were an important part of our farming, not just for ourselves in the Farm House but for the farm men as well. They were as interested as we were in how the potatoes would turn out, a good crop always hoped for. During the War we got home to Stronsay from school in Inverness for the tattie holidays, late September into early October. These tattie holidays, or harvest holidays if you wish, were very necessary as so many men were away in the Armed Forces, or working at the Naval Base at Lyness in Hoy, or on the Boom Defences of Scapa Flow, or many other Wartime things, and seasonal labour Nationwide was scarce. So fly home with Fresson from Inverness to Skae Brae and out by sea next day with the Earl Thorfinn to Stronsay.
The tatties grew well, usually in the best part of that year’s turnip field, sometimes in a part of a lea field, bigger tatties but more prone to scabby skins. The glorious dark green leaves and flowers of summer gave way to the sere and yellow of autumn, the days grew shorter, the skies grew greyer. Harvest was usually well in but sometimes on a morning when the stooks were .too damp to lead into the stackyard we went to the tatties. But not when raining. They were rarely all lifted in one day, more catch as catch can, a few drills at a time unless the leading of the stooks was finished. However, there were times when the whole lifting was straight-forward, warm autumn sunshine, calm skies, and in a couple of dry days all was done.
Bags were gathered and shaken out, checked for holes and repaired where needed - if possible - pails gathered from odd places, baskets or old herring wicker creels found. Sometimes if the bleams were still a bit copious the men went over the tatties before lifting and removed the bleams into a cart to make it easier for the spinner and for the pickers. If the tatties were next to the turnips, which was usual, then a cart-load of neeps - two or three rows - would be lifted beside the potato patch to leave a space of clear ground to spin out the first rows of spuds.

The spinner, horse drawn and one drill at a time, had a slatted wooden panel to one side against which the spinner threw the tatties, which then fell in a reasonably compact line for the pickers, not scattered too wide. Sometimes an old sack was hung on the panel to make it that much more efficient, dragging on the ground to stop a stray tattie escaping underneath. Sometimes a drill plough was used instead of a spinner, worked quite well but a bit of digging needed at times to howk (dig) a hidden tattie out of the side of the row. Usually opened out at one side with the horse and digger going back empty, sometimes opened out in the middle with the first rows being spun onto the next rows. Full bags were then set across a few drills until space was made, then onto already cleared ground. The spinner depth lever had to be set just right to lower the share into the ground under the tatties, too shallow and good tatties would be sliced in half. Back with the next row after the first had been picked...

Tants were set out, such and such a length per two people, handy where one could hold open the bag and the other tip in the buckets. Varieties were kept separate. Sometimes, but not often, we gathered small tatties in one bucket and larger ones in another. They would need to be sorted later anyway and doing it in advance helped. Always hurry, hurry, the rain’s coming, the stooks are drying, must get back to the leading. Farming was and is so weather dependant. Extra hands appeared from the Village, usually ones who had a few drills for themselves and helped with the lifting, their own being lifted by the squad as payment for their labour. A bit of fun sometimes with friends along with the farm men. They paid our father for their drills, how much I have no idea.

With the afternoon closing in, or rain coming, lifting stopped and a cart or even two began lifting the bags. They were not neck-tied so had to be stored on the cart leaning forward to avoid spilling, one man up. Usually two men lifted a bag between them from the ground, but a full bag was an easy enough lift for one fit man, just that two men meant less spillage. Cart loaded, back door in place, and off to the steading. If not finished lifting the pails and baskets were left in the field up-ended until next lifting day, but unfilled bags were taken home to keep them dry.

The tattie shed had been cleaned out, any old wrinkled sprouted tatties from last year not already fed to the pigs were disposed of, wooden partitions re-erected to make cubicles for different varieties. Bags carried in on a man’s back, tipped out and heaped up in their appropriate places, Kerr’s Pinks here, Golden Wonders here, Beauties of Hebron there. Kerr’s Pinks have been around a long time, still a good main-crop tattie. Where we had picked small ones they too had their special place but constraints of room often decided that this was not often done. Twice only to my memory. Seemed a good idea at the time!!
A day or two of grace to let some drying of the heaps, then cover with some old bags and a thick layer of straw on top of everything to keep the frost out. And the daylight which turned the tatties green with chlorophyll.
During the winter sorting the tatties was a good indoor job on a bad day when carting neeps or thrashing a stack could be avoided. This was all done by hand picking or by using round hand held riddles of different mesh size, one man filling, one holding and shaking the riddle. If a good crop, big tatties bagged up for selling, smaller ones set aside for next year’s seed, brock (bruck) a name for rubbish in this case applied to tiny tatties for the pigs, eaten raw by them, or for the hens but boiled. Tended to smell out the kitchen if the pot boiled over on the stove, or even if it did not, and not my favourite kitchen aroma at all. Sometimes sorting was just by hand picking off the face of the tattie heap, slow work but who was in a hurry on a stormy day anyway. Sit on a soft bag on top of an upended pail for comfort, giving origin to the phrase “Sitting down on the job!” Only later at Greenland Mains did we have a tattie riddling machine and that was borrowed for a few days from Hector Farquhar from Inkstack. Quite good even if hand cranked, bags at appropriate chutes being filled with tatties, but still someone overlooking the tatties on the machine to check for splits or damaged or rotten, because at times an old seed tattie escaped being thrown away in the field and got into the heap. Or a stone.

There is the apocryphal story of the Chief Constable of Edinburgh, I think it was Edinburgh anyway, who wanted a restful holiday from the strains of police work with his cousin in Caithness Somewhere about Tannach if I remember correctly. His cousin Donald was going to Sinclair’s Mart in Wick for a big sale and would be away all day. Wishing to be helpful, he asked what he could do to help while he was away in Wick. Donald asked his Chief Constable cousin if he could sort the tatties for him. “Sure, no bother, just show me what to do”. “Just put the big tatties in that heap, the middle sized ones in that heap, the little ones for the pigs in that heap”. “No bother, Donald”.
So off Donald went in his horse and cart to Wick, looked in to the Station Hotel after the sale, had a dram and a yarn with Willie Ro…., got home late, went to the tattie shed to see how his cousin had got on.
Still sitting on a bag on the floor, the Chief Constable was looking as harassed as any man could be. “Whit’s wrong, Davie?” “Decisions, decisions, decisions, Donald, I’m knackered. I’m off back to Edinburgh the morn!!”
That’s tattie sorting for you.

2009-02-25T13:19:00.000-08:00

2009-02-25T13:18:00.000-08:00

FLYING WITH FRESSON in ORKNEY

2009-02-25T13:11:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, 25 February 2009
FLYING WITH FRESSON in ORKNEY.
Fresson in Orkney.
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 33. Flying with Fresson.

The name of Capt. E. E. Fresson lingers on with but few people in the North, of Scotland, yet in Caithness and in Orkney and in Shetland he should not be forgotten. Nor in the Western Isles. He first discovered Wick on 19th April,1931, flying Gypsy Moth G-AAWO, landing on a field on the farm of Barnyards after circling the town. He and Miss Pauer, who owned the aeroplane, flew on to Kirkwall the next day, Sunday 20th, and again, after circling the town looking for a field, landed on one next the Balfour Hospital. There they were greeted by Ian McClure, Orkney’s surgeon, a World War 1 flyer himself, as was Fresson. McClure, who lost a leg in the First World War, took Fresson in hand and drove him around Kirkwall looking for a more permanent field. It is quite fascinating that Gypsy Moth G-AAWO is still flying. Nigel Reid, its present owner, made the two-day trip from Christchurch in the south of England to Orkney on the 8th May for a 75th year celebration of Fresson’s pioneering air service, which was well featured in the Orcadian of 15th May. From that initial jaunt to the North, followed by some exhibition barnstorming and joy-flying for the adventurous, Fresson saw the possibilities for air transport in the Northern Isles, and his Highland Airways came into being.
Air services between Inverness Longman Airfield and Kirkwall in Orkney began officially on 9th May, 1933 with his De Haviland being christened with a bottle of whisky by Mrs Macdonald, wife of the Inverness Provost, and appropriately named, what else, “Highland Dew”. Caithness was then added, mostly using various fields on the outskirts of Wick and Thurso. Later he had competition on the routes he had pioneered from Gander Dower’s Allied Airways, which really did neither of them very much good.

I do not remember Stronsay before Fresson when our only service out was by slow steamer. For me he seemed to have always been there. His aeroplanes in 1934 brought to a people who had previously traveled at the fastest by horse and gig, the thrills of hurtling through the air at a hundred miles an hour or more. Fresson’s air service to Stronsay beat my father’s first motor car by a year. And Fresson wrote in his memoirs, “Air Road To The Isles”, pub. 1997, that ”the natives of the outlying islands (ourselves) took to this new form of transport as ducks take to water”.

Our place in this new air service venture was father accommodating the airfield for Stronsay on Grice Ness, the lowest part of Whitehall Farm lying behind the Village. “The Ness”, as we called it, was reasonably flat, grazed by sheep only, no cattle allowed. Kept the passengers shoes the cleaner! The sheep had to be off the Ness well before flight time though father cut it a bit fine on occasion. Had at least one row with Fresson on that score, I know because I was there!!
As boys - and girls - we would listen for the first faint distant thrum of the approaching plane G-ACIT, a De Haviland Rapid seven seater twin engined fabric covered biplane, wings held together with wire stays. It might be coming from the South from Fresson’s Orkney base on a field at Wideford Farm where he had a hanger overlooking the present Airfield at Grimsetter. Prescient. Or it might be coming from the North from Sanday or North Ronaldsay, in any case always flying in over the surrounding sea. We would vie as to who would see it first, initially an imaginary far-away speck in the sky, then a tiny bird that grew rapidly into an aeroplane. Slow circuit over the Ness to see how the wind sock was flying, then turn away and a banking turn to approach into the wind for landing on the grass field. No runway. Looking at the size of the field today I wonder how anyone could have landed there at all. Charlie Chalmers from the Village was in charge, attending to mail and news papers and passengers. No boarding passes or security!! Charlie’s brother was father of T.V.s Judith Chalmers. Many years post-war, about 1965, when air services to the Isles were resumed by Logan Air, the Stronsay Airfield was relocated to Huip Farm, owned then by my brother David, with a stone dyke between two fields being removed by him to make one large field.
Stronsay indeed took to flying as ducks take to water. Not every islander was a good sailor, indeed frequently otherwise. So a straight short flight of 20 minutes into Kirkwall was an attractive consideration rather than all day on stormy seas, sometimes calling on other islands en route. Plus the convenience of flying into Kirkwall in the morning and home again on the afternoon flight.
We many times were taken by father to the Ness, sometimes to help chase off the sheep, sometimes just a run. The sheep were actually pretty well trained and as flight time approached were often waiting at the gate. Don’t say sheep are stupid, it is just that, like humans, they can sometimes do daft things.
Fresson’s services were regular, and by the time I took notice flying was just a part of normal Stronsay life. One of my mother’s sisters, our Aunt Tibby (Isobel) Tait from Inkstack, Barrock, visited us once by air for a few days, accompanied by George Black whom she later married. Just a “good friend” she said then, and of course we bairns believed her!!! Their eldest son Ian, our cousin, swam in the Rome Olympics among other events.
It was Fresson himself who landed early one summer morning in July 1935 on Grice Ness, took our uncle John the surgeon from New Zealand, and his wife, our uncle Steven the doctor from Willenhall, Staffordshire, and his wife, our father the farmer in Stronsay, and his wife, and conveyed the three brothers and their spouses to land on a field on Cleat Farm, the airfield for Westray, the farm of yet another brother – our Uncle Bill - and his wife. Fresson returned to Cleat in the evening to take them all back to Stronsay, well wined and dined. It was a memorable day for a family of five brothers so wide spread but all were together for a brief time save David, the remaining brother, who was in Invercargill in New Zealand keeping their medical practice going.

It was Fresson himself who flew our family, with the exception of brother David and myself who were then at school in Inverness, from Whitehall Farm to Greenland Mains in Caithness in May 1944, and I still have the memorable account for it somewhere. The Ness had been mothballed during the War with stone pillars erected over it by our father to keep the Germans from landing, but by May 1944 the crisis was over and the pillars had been removed.

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They took off from the Ness, flew west over Eday and Rousay to avoid Scapa Flow and trigger-happy AA gunners around Stromness - the War was still on - flew west of the Old Man of Hoy over the old St Ola, came in over Dunnet Bay to land at Thurdistoft Airfield. There they were met by a car driven by Joe Mathieson who ran a taxi service in Castletown, and he took mother and the five younger siblings to Greenland Mains, just a mile along the road, where a meal was ready and waiting for them, according to my sister Anne’s good memory this morning on the phone from New Zealand. Father returned with Fresson to Kirkwall. I myself never flew from Stronsay, just my school journeys to Inverness.
In addition to his regular inter island flying services Fresson did air ambulance work on many occasions, saving more than one life. The one that sticks hardest in my memory was Fresson himself who, during the War when Grice Ness was unusable, came with G-ACIT, his favourite Dragon Rapide and modified to accommodate a stretcher, to Whitehall Farm to land on a small field just below the steading to ambulance Peter Irvine into Kirkwall. Peter, a year or two younger than myself, had a leg taken off between ankle and knee by a hay mower at Midgarth Farm, owned by George (Dod) and Alec.Tait, brothers of my father's mother and brothers of James, founder of J. and W. Tait, Kirkwall.
We were there, and watched Fresson come in low over the Bay of Franks, lift over the shore dyke of the Garth, a field of 15 acres and only 120 metres [133 yards] top to bottom, skim the grass and lift over the stone dyke into Peedie Cattaquoy, a field just below the farm steading, 5 acres and but 200 yards long, two football pitches. Islander aircraft nowadays have impressively short landings but it was some flying, even if Fresson was a barnstormer in China in his early days after flying in Word War 1 in the R.F.C., now the R.A.F. Landing was at least up the slope, turn at the top, stop the near side (left) engine, got Peter in with Nurse Slorach after Dr Pyle had attended to him at Midgarth, and off down the field to lift over the bottom dyke, keeping low to gain speed, skim the sea and climb the sky. We held our breath, but I can still vividly see in my mind’s eye the plane slowly gain height, bank to the left over neighbouring Huip Farm, turn towards Kirkwall, watched by us all till it faded from sight. And the news was good, Peter survived. He was unimaginatively but predictably called “Pegleg Pete” at School, eventually left Stronsay as did so many young people, and went into Kirkwall where I believe he had a garage business, dying but a few years ago. Nice lad. In 1946 Fresson ambulanced Barbara Smith of Blinkbonny, aged four and with a broken leg, into Kirkwall. She still lives married in Stronsay.
But by 1948 things were different. Scottish Airways had been Nationalised in 1946 and swallowed up into B.E.A. Fresson was retained in an uneasy flying capacity. On 11th Feb 1948 Fresson ambulanced another Stronsay boy who had been crushed by a tractor, saving his life, but was severely reprimanded by the Renfrew manager of the newly Nationalised B.E.A. for doing so without proper authorization, and ordered never to do the same again. The incidental saving of a life was not high on their list of things to do. Later that year an emergency appendicitis, seven year old Inga Brown from Westray, had to endure a three hour passage to Kirkwall by stormy seas because officials of BEA in Renfrew would not allow a pilot to fly on an errand of mercy as the fields Fresson and his other pilots had landed on so many times before were not “Licensed”. Indeed she had more than a six hours delay as the Earl Sigurd had to be sent out from Kirkwall on its errand of mercy, which took time to organize, three hours sailing each way, plus getting the crew together, raising steam, and getting everything organized. In spite of the dangerous delay in getting to the surgeon, a journey which Fresson could have done in minutes. Inga survived.
Survive too did our sister Anne who had a similar situation with appendicitis during the War in April 1943 when she was just five. A drifter had to be sent out by Capt. Clemens, King’s Harbour-master in Kirkwall, to take her in, just in time and no more. She was very ill indeed with peritonitis and had measles at the same time. I visited her in Eastbank Isolation Hospital on my solitary way back to school in Inverness. She was on the mend, still very ill, but I will never forget her glorious smile when I came in. While we were still in Stronsay during the War two schoolmates died with appendicitis with too long a delay in getting into Kirkwall, Fresson being unable to land. Davie Smith from Scoulters died on the pier waiting for the steamer. Anne was lucky. There were many others on these isolated islands who owed their lives to a supreme pilot who had no time for red tape but got on with the job. Some were not so fortunate. I think it entered deep into Fresson’s soul that an ambulance service he and his pilots could do and had provided in the Islands for so many years was negated by Post-War Labour Nationalisation and “The New Order of Rules and Regulations”.
Almost as an epitaph to Fresson, in 1933 he pioneered air services to Caithness and the Northern Isles, added Stornoway in Lewis in 1944 though he had done charters there previously, built it all up from scratch, flew his services with great regularity right through the War. His De Haviland planes flew without modern aids to navigation or foreknowledge of the weather. There was the particular Caithness summer hazard north of Helmsdale of dense cloud which sometimes lay only a couple of hundred feet above the sea, or lower, and it was necessary to fly between the wrinkled water and that low white ceiling. Hairy flying at times knowing the cliffs were just beside them, seen and then not seen. It is bad enough today going South over the Ord by car with a pea soup North Sea haar boiling around us, imagine if you can flying in that.
Though Fresson was retained for a short time after his Scottish Airways was Nationalised, it was not long after his 11th January 1948 mercy trip to Stronsay, that on 31st March 1948 Fresson was summarily dismissed by “The Board” of B.E.A. from the services he had pioneered in 1933 and built up from nothing, getting an imposed “Take it or leave it” settlement of a paltry £2,000 for the greater part of a life’s work. His hard won experience counted for nothing in the New Age. Inter Island flights would not resume till many years later. His face just did not fit with the New Order, or with the men in charge anyway. Air Services in the Highlands took many very long years to recover, and are still losing money.
So it is today that when I tell of air travel in the remote Islands so long before the War, to which Orcadians “took as ducks take to water”, for someone to be able to go in to Kirkwall from Stronsay in the morning and back out in the evening, I myself still marvel, and watch my listeners go quiet in thoughtful comtemplation.
Posted by scorrie at 08:53
Posted by scorrie at 12:47
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2009-02-25T12:55:00.000-08:00

MADHOOS PHOTO.

2009-02-06T13:21:00.000-08:00

THE MADHOOS at AIRY.

2009-02-06T07:19:00.001-08:00

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.

Sometime in my boyhood our father built “The Madhoos”. He bought Airy Farm in Stronsay in 1933, an additional 300 acre farm to his home base of Whitehall, selling Airy to the Spence brothers of Millfield. in 1943 in preparation for leaving Stronsay for Caithness in 1944. Sharon and I were in Stronsay in July, 2008, staying in the former cattleman’s cottage at Airy for an enchanted weekend with the sun shining to introduce Sharon to my native island and some of my still surviving friends. Johnny Cooper the cattleman is long gone, but his greatly enhanced cottage and “The Madhoos” are still there.
It must have been about 1938 that our father took the plunge to build the “Madhoos”, begun in ‘38, finished in ‘39. Never before had cattle been loose housed in Stronsay, previously all were tied by the neck in stalls in the byres, from the smallest calf to the largest bull. The foreman at Airy was Jeemie Moad, a spectacularly blue-eyed neat hard man capable of doing anything. Apart from him the farm staff were Johnny Cooper, his sons Wullie and Jackie, Wullie Stevenson o’ Burragate on Rousam Head, perhaps on occasion other casual workers. Anyway in those days no Building Warrants or Plans or .Officialdom to contend with. As father went over to Airy from Whitehall most days we had many opportunities to go and see the work in progress

First all hands up to the old Hundy quarry at the top end of the farm from whence most of the stone for the steading, and the dry stone dykes too, had been quarried, good flagstone rock, easy to lift or prise from the stone face. Horses and carts to take it down to the Farm. Then lay off the foundations parallel to the existing long feeders’ byre wall. The Madhoos was about 100 feet long, 22 feet wide internal, 16 feet to the A-framed ridge, timber rafters and asbestos sheeting. The 80 year-old sheeting is still there in good condition, we saw it in July.
A load of cement from Kirkwall, carted by horse and cart from the Earl Thorfinn from the pier the four miles to Airy. Gravel and sand off the nearby beach. Mix the concrete or mortar with hand shovels on site, nothing mechanised. It fascinated us to watch the circle of dry sand and gravel and cement being turned over and over again by spades to get it properly mixed, then a hole made in the centre for water, a well we called it, banked around with the dry mix, and slowly add more water as the mixing went on. Mix from the centre out, keep all possible leakages blocked until all was properly wetted and ready, not too wet, not too dry. And of course we wanted to help with the mixing, probably more of a hindrance than help, but we bairns were humoured.

Jeemie Moad was the Master-builder with everything being brought to him by the rest of the farm staff. We watched as tight lines of twine gave a straight edge to work to, plumb lines to keep everything verticle. The walls grew rapidly when time allowed but was fitted into the normal farm work so there were times of rapid progress and times when all was at a standstill. However, in due course the walls were up to eaves height, and the gables built
All the scaffolding was wooden A-frame trestles, with battens of heavy wood lying across them, no Health and Safety either, one tier set upon another as work progressed. Quite simple, no guard rails, and no-one fell off. Most farms in Stronsay had some of these trestles and lent theirs to any who needed them.
Every stone had to be man-handled up, no front loaders or JCBs then, nor mechanical shovels whatever. A simple rope pulley from a beam was fitted temporarily to help. Mixed cement and more stones were lifted up in buckets or on small square timber trays with a rope attached to each corner, simple but effective. Spades and shovels and trowels. Hammers to rough shape or trim a stone to fit. Then flat wall-head stones just the right size to finish off the top of the walls, but the Hundy Quarry was as good as Castlehill for flagstone, the right natural size or width for tabling as we called it being easily found. This finished off the walls with a level top ready for the rafters.
Next the A-frame timber rafters, made on site by Jeemie Morrison and again man-handled into place, stayed with ropes until nailed securely together with a few crossed purlins or boards. Seemed effortless, and as every man knew his part to play then it was indeed effortless. Most farm workers could turn their hand to almost anything, I never heard anyone say I can’t do that. The cross purlins were of 4”x2” timber, then finally asbestos sheets to roof over everything. The ridge was left open to give ventilation except over the rafters. A doorway was built in the gable end next the farm road, good enough then for a horse and cart but now enlarged to allow for tractors. A big day when all was finally covered.
Inside a feeding passage was built end to end from the straw barn and neep shed along the byre wall, about 4 feet in width, with straw hecks or racks and wooden feed boxes built between the cattle and the passage. Feeding was done from the pass and no need to go in beside the cattle, indeed bedding was usually just pitch-forked loose over the heck and the cattle spread it themselves. No straw bales then, just carried loose from the mill, or in windlins which were good for throwing over. There were internal partitions to separate groups of differing sized cattle into more manageable numbers. The Madhoos was for the younger cattle who next year would be the big feeders and neck-tied in the feeders byre.
About the same time father built a stone-walled water tank about 25 feet wide and 60 feet long and 8 feet deep, same construction as the Madhoos but many inside coatings of cement to make it water tight. I thought when we went to Airy this year in July it would be long gone but not so, it is still there, still water tight, still in use, fed by the rain water gutters from the steading roofs. Recycling and environmentally friendly, no pumping required.
The entertainment value was high, visitors turning up as occasion offered to see this miracle of loose housing called quite appropriately “The Madhoos”.. Slowly the unbelievers changed but in their own time. I think salient to this loose housing was the Orkneyman’s adherence to the value of straw, not to be uselessly thrown under the cattle for bedding, much too valuable as feed. And they made straw go a long way. The neatest bedding I ever saw was one farmer who bedded his cattle for the night with a small pail of chaff, a handfull sprinkled under each pair along the byre after cleaning, and the cattle settled down for the night as if on a spring mattress.
The Madhoos is still there as a monument to progress, the building as sound as ever, though now fitted with modern cubicles and a drive-through passage for tractors, yet another innovation in cattle farming and housing.

No 40 A. BAILLIE FARM CART WHEELS.

2009-01-23T12:11:00.000-08:00

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 40.A. The Baillie Cart. continued.

Following my article on the Baillie Farm Cart I had a phone call from Burray in Orkney from a regular reader of the John O’Groat Journal asking where were the photos of rimming the cart wheel referred to in the article. For reasons of space we did not manage to include all the photos, but my caller was a man who cannot be denied. Willie Mowat, blacksmith extraordinaire, still going strong and working in his blacksmith’s shop at 83, descended from his great grand father John Mowat who migrated from John O’Groats to Burray in 1862. I am glad he called me as he was paying for the call, I spent a most interesting half hour getting my ear bent, which I am not used to!!!
The Baillie Farm Cart brought back to him memories of rimming two cart wheels for Alexanders of Lyth about 18 years ago. He came over the Pentland Firth to trim and repair the old farm implements on show at Mary Ann’s Cottage in Dunnet. His blacksmith shop has been taken under the wing of Historic Scotland and is seriously worth a visit, and most days he is there. One mile into Burray from the South Ronaldsay end of the Barriers after crossing to St Margaret’s Hope from Gills. A visit I intend to make very soon.
But rimming or shodding cart wheels was not so simple as I thought. Even in Stronsay there were so many differing horse drawn conveyances, not just the humble farm box cart. We had the gig which I referred to some time ago, going to Church and to Airy and to the Village, or just plain visiting. Its wheels were shod with rubber rims, and I have no idea how they were put on. Softened the rattles of the hard road a bit. As a gig was used much more rarely than a farm cart, with much lighter loads of course, then the rubber rim would last that much longer. So too was the milk float for the mile run down to Whitehall Village. Lighter wheels, but still the standard twelve spoke design. The Spring Cart had rubber shod wheels and springs, was lighter than a box cart and used for many easy tasks, doing service as a gig for some. Same basic build as the milk float.
All other carts were iron shod. The farm box carts I mentioned, everlastingly being used for farm work, capable of being tipped with its load of turnips, but we had other carts. The Long Cart, not tipping and heavier built entirely, with higher and heavier wheels. This cart at Greenland Mains with hay to sit on took the school children down to Dunnet Beach for a school picnic. The lorry cart as we called it, longer and non tipping, low to the ground for easy loading, used by our father for much carting in the herring season, with a turn-table front end with two wheels, very maneuverable, good for hay carting or loose straw. It was capable of being loosed off from the horse and stand on its own four legs, so to speak, without needing a prop as the box carts needed, be it a barrel under the shafts or a post under the back chain. Very handy for a farm servant flitting from one farm to another with all his household goods. Or a farmer.
There was a barrel cart just for the herring barrels in season, rolling them up the cart from the back and then put in two pins at the back to keep the barrels from rolling off, well designed and good for its task.
There was the water cart, much used on most farms with no mains water in those days and possibly no wells, taking water out to the fields to fill a water trough for the cattle. Or water from a big farm tank filled with rain water off the steading roofs. It was really a very large heavy wooden barrel permanently fixed on a wooden cart frame on wheels. A very steady job in summer for a single horse, very laborious to fill with buckets from a well or a pond or a eater filled ditch or a burn. We had a well with a simple one handled pump but good enough to fill the cart. A similar water cart was used to make water-bound roads before we had tarred roads, watering the final stone-dust coating before the heavy road roller did its final run.
There was the Paddy Cart, a box on wheels used for taking pigs to the steamer, or to another farm. Cattle and sheep were easy to drive along the road, but driving pigs along the road was impossible. They had very definite minds of their own. Even taking a sow to visit a boar on another farm needed the Paddy Cart. Low built and with a cranked axle to carry the wheels and to allow a low level loading floor.
And every one of these carts needed different wheels.

Until I wrote the article on Willie Grant and the Baillie Box Cart I did not appreciate just how much a wheelwright had to learn to do his trade properly, nor the multitude of bits and pieces needed. Oak and larch and ash timber usually, spokes shaped with a spoke-shave, an article of the farm workshop I did not fully appreciate till now. We used it as bairns to shape some piece of wood or other for something or other. Kept razor sharp by Ould Pat, double handled and always drawn towards you. In the hands of an expert it could produce the very finest of finishes on wooden wheel spokes, or any other similar task. We used it to make arrows out of any suitable bit of wood.

Wheels were slightly saucer shaped which gave a wider look at the top than at the ground, looked odd but there was a reason. It put the load directly vertical from the axle to the ground, a very smart engineering concept which avoided any sideways stress on the spokes.

All the carts and gigs and others mentioned above had differing wheels, small and light, heavy and large.
So there was more to Willie Grant and his wheel rimming at Achscrabster than I at first thought.

No 46. Smoory Snow on our Bare Knees.

2009-01-09T06:11:00.000-08:00

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

No 46, Smoory Snow on our Bare Knees.
The days grew shorter, the skies grew greyer, the wind grew stronger, the sun disappeared. Summer clothes went into the bottom drawer, heavy overcoats had the moths shaken out. Winter slipped easily upon us in the North Isles.
Harvest was safe in the cornyard, the cattle were all tied by the neck in the byres, the sheep hugged the dry stone dykes. Early morning and my brother David and I heard the starting thump of the oil engine as the farm men got ready for threshing, a few minutes warming up and then the deep rising thrum of the threshing mill getting up to speed in the barn, the rattle and squeak of chains and belts and shakers and elevators. Father had thought snow was coming and the sheaf loft had been filled with sheaves the day before with so no need to go to the stackyard in the blizzard, they could thresh in comfort. There would be enough straw for a couple of days. We tried to snatch a few more minutes under the warm blankets. “Boys, time to get up”. Porridge smells wafted upstairs, the aroma of loaf bread toasting on the open fire.
David and I usually put our clothes under the quilt at the bottom of our bed to keep them warm, struggled to dress under the bedclothes before putting feet onto the bedside sheepskin rug to avoid the cold linoleum, never too successful. The wind whistled through the ill-fitting sash of the one window, rattling the panes. Fine snow eased through the cracks. The big old stone-built farm house shook now and again, a clatter of Caithness slates on the roof. It was going to be that sort of a day. And it was a school day, two miles to walk.
Downstairs to the kitchen. “Eat up, boys, its snowing a fair bit today. You’d better get off a bit early. Mind to take your pieces”. For the days I write about were a long time ago, no school buses, no school taxis, no school dinners, no electric light, no central heating. David and I were 9 and11 at the time, my last year at school in Stronsay before going to Inverness. Our “pieces” were oat bread with plenty butter and a bit of farm house cheese, a jammy piece with baker’s bread, home made flour scones, maybe a sweet biscuit - not often though - and a screw top bottle of milk each. The War was on, not too many fancy things around what with rationing, but plenty good farmhouse fare and home baking.
The Central School was two miles to walk, the first half mile up to The North School corner, not too bad with the wind slightly behind us on our left side and Hunton’s stone dyke part of the way, then turn left onto the mile and a half to the Central School and the snow laden East wind in our faces. The way the road lay to the dyke meant the drifting snow came over the top of the dyke on our left and swirled and eddied around us, no way that we could set our heads against it. That smoory snow was not to be played with, sharp and extremely fine particles. It got up our nostrils, into our eyes, crept up our wrists, stung our bare red knees. We were indeed snowmen but did not enjoy the fact at all. Heads down, we kept on the road but all we could see ahead was a whiteout, nothing at all visible. We could not even see the dyke beside us other than a dark loom in the swirling drift.

Past the Reids of The Hill but not yet at the Marshalls of Yernesetter. David rebelled, he was going home. Up till then I had a perfect attendance record for that year, something I had aspired to over many years but never actually achieved. Still, pride was there, I was going on and David could go back on his own. No way, he would not budge.
So nothing else to do, I had to go back home with him.
It was easier going back, the wind was behind us somewhat. The fine snow still got up our nostrils, into our ears, our eyes, hit the backs of our knees. We had rubber boots with long socks turned down over the tops which kept the snow out. Back to the North School corner, turned right towards Whitehall, the snow as fierce as ever and again in our faces but each step was now one step nearer home. Turned down the short farm road past the upper henhouse with the farm buildings and stackyard now giving us some shelter. And into the back door.
Boy, were we cold. Coats and rubber boots off and stand in front of the stove and open the iron door to let more heat out. The kitchen was warm anyway. I mentioned that when I got warmed up I would go back to school without David but that did not get a good reception at all. So that was my attendance record gone for another year, my last at school in Stronsay. Oddly, though the day was diabolical, those few who made it to school got their attendance credit, I guess they deserved it.
Clothes changed for ordinary run arounds. Got another plate of hot porridge and cream and a glass of hot milk Warmed us up. Then rubber boots and an old coat. Out the door with the blinding white smoor swirling around the close between the kitchen and the washhouse, a small drift building up against the door. That kind of snow stuck to the window panes so one could not see out. Heads down and across the road to the steading. The feeders byre door was the nearest, a door in two halves, upper and lower. The upper part could be opened for ventilation if needed on a warm day. This day it was shut! Inside quick and close the door behind us. Though it was by now full day the lanterns were still lit, their warm glow making the byre a bit more cheerful. .Jock o’ Sound had just starting throwing windlins of straw into the racks above the heads of the cattle, a snap of the wrist and the windlin sailed accurately over the cattles’ backs, hit the back wall and dropped into place. Long practice. We carried some windlins down the byre for him, helping like. He was smoking his pipe which never really left his mouth, even while working. The smell of Black Twist Bogie Roll scented the air. He said “No school today, boys, whit will Mr Drever say? You will probably get the belt for skiving off.”, but with a sparkle in his blue eyes that .told us he was gently pulling our legs.
The day got even thicker with a skirling wind driving the smoor into every cranny, under the door, sneaking through a cracked pane of glass in one window, sifting through the blue Welsh slate roof and drifting gently down to whiten the backs of the cattle. Looking from one end of the byre to the other was like a white mist.
The sheaves stored in the loft had been threshed while we were off to school so all was quiet. The neep sheds had been well filled over the previous few days. We went up through the yearlings byre, out and across the corner of the square and into the straw barn This was a day to do nothing outside if possible so the men were tying windlins of straw for the cattlemen, a skilled job which looked effortless when well done. I was never very good at it. A wide gathering of loose straw with both arms, as much as could be held, shape it into a sausage of straw against the knees and your stomach, hold it there by some mysterious method using the elbows while a straw band was twisted at either end, bring the bands together round the windlin, one each way, and twist them together to hold tight. When well done that windlin could be thrown or pitchforked as easily as a sheaf. But we soon got cold watching, so back to the house and the warm fire in the sitting room, lit early in that morning. And a book to read.

The days grew shorter, the skies grew greyer, the wind grew stronger, the sun disappeared. Summer clothes went into the bottom drawer, heavy overcoats had the moths shaken out. Winter slipped easily upon us in the North Isles.
Harvest was safe in the cornyard, the cattle were all tied by the neck in the byres, the sheep hugged the dry stone dykes. Early morning and my brother David and I heard the starting thump of the oil engine as the farm men got ready for threshing, a few minutes warming up and then the deep rising thrum of the threshing mill getting up to speed in the barn, the rattle and squeak of chains and belts and shakers and elevators. Father had thought snow was coming and the sheaf loft had been filled with sheaves the day before with so no need to go to the stackyard in the blizzard, they could thresh in comfort. There would be enough straw for a couple of days. We tried to snatch a few more minutes under the warm blankets. “Boys, time to get up”. Porridge smells wafted upstairs, the aroma of loaf bread toasting on the open fire.
David and I usually put our clothes under the quilt at the bottom of our bed to keep them warm, struggled to dress under the bedclothes before putting feet onto the bedside sheepskin rug to avoid the cold linoleum, never too successful. The wind whistled through the ill-fitting sash of the one window, rattling the panes. Fine snow eased through the cracks. The big old stone-built farm house shook now and again, a clatter of Caithness slates on the roof. It was going to be that sort of a day. And it was a school day, two miles to walk.
Downstairs to the kitchen. “Eat up, boys, its snowing a fair bit today. You’d better get off a bit early. Mind to take your pieces”. For the days I write about were a long time ago, no school buses, no school taxis, no school dinners, no electric light, no central heating. David and I were 9 and11 at the time, my last year at school in Stronsay before going to Inverness. Our “pieces” were oat bread with plenty butter and a bit of farm house cheese, a jammy piece with baker’s bread, home made flour scones, maybe a sweet biscuit - not often though - and a screw top bottle of milk each. The War was on, not too many fancy things around what with rationing, but plenty good farmhouse fare and home baking.
The Central School was two miles to walk, the first half mile up to The North School corner, not too bad with the wind slightly behind us on our left side and Hunton’s stone dyke part of the way, then turn left onto the mile and a half to the Central School and the snow laden East wind in our faces. The way the road lay to the dyke meant the drifting snow came over the top of the dyke on our left and swirled and eddied around us, no way that we could set our heads against it. That smoory snow was not to be played with, sharp and extremely fine particles. It got up our nostrils, into our eyes, crept up our wrists, stung our bare red knees. We were indeed snowmen but did not enjoy the fact at all. Heads down, we kept on the road but all we could see ahead was a whiteout, nothing at all visible. We could not even see the dyke beside us other than a dark loom in the swirling drift.

Past the Reids of The Hill but not yet at the Marshalls of Yernesetter. David rebelled, he was going home. Up till then I had a perfect attendance record for that year, something I had aspired to over many years but never actually achieved. Still, pride was there, I was going on and David could go back on his own. No way, he would not budge.
So nothing else to do, I had to go back home with him.
It was easier going back, the wind was behind us somewhat. The fine snow still got up our nostrils, into our ears, our eyes, hit the backs of our knees. We had rubber boots with long socks turned down over the tops which kept the snow out. Back to the North School corner, turned right towards Whitehall, the snow as fierce as ever and again in our faces but each step was now one step nearer home. Turned down the short farm road past the upper henhouse with the farm buildings and stackyard now giving us some shelter. And into the back door.
Boy, were we cold. Coats and rubber boots off and stand in front of the stove and open the iron door to let more heat out. The kitchen was warm anyway. I mentioned that when I got warmed up I would go back to school without David but that did not get a good reception at all. So that was my attendance record gone for another year, my last at school in Stronsay. Oddly, though the day was diabolical, those few who made it to school got their attendance credit, I guess they deserved it.
Clothes changed for ordinary run arounds. Got another plate of hot porridge and cream and a glass of hot milk Warmed us up. Then rubber boots and an old coat. Out the door with the blinding white smoor swirling around the close between the kitchen and the washhouse, a small drift building up against the door. That kind of snow stuck to the window panes so one could not see out. Heads down and across the road to the steading. The feeders byre door was the nearest, a door in two halves, upper and lower. The upper part could be opened for ventilation if needed on a warm day. This day it was shut! Inside quick and close the door behind us. Though it was by now full day the lanterns were still lit, their warm glow making the byre a bit more cheerful. .Jock o’ Sound had just starting throwing windlins of straw into the racks above the heads of the cattle, a snap of the wrist and the windlin sailed accurately over the cattles’ backs, hit the back wall and dropped into place. Long practice. We carried some windlins down the byre for him, helping like. He was smoking his pipe which never really left his mouth, even while working. The smell of Black Twist Bogie Roll scented the air. He said “No school today, boys, whit will Mr Drever say? You will probably get the belt for skiving off.”, but with a sparkle in his blue eyes that .told us he was gently pulling our legs.
The day got even thicker with a skirling wind driving the smoor into every cranny, under the door, sneaking through a cracked pane of glass in one window, sifting through the blue Welsh slate roof and drifting gently down to whiten the backs of the cattle. Looking from one end of the byre to the other was like a white mist.
The sheaves stored in the loft had been threshed while we were off to school so all was quiet. The neep sheds had been well filled over the previous few days. We went up through the yearlings byre, out and across the corner of the square and into the straw barn This was a day to do nothing outside if possible so the men were tying windlins of straw for the cattlemen, a skilled job which looked effortless when well done. I was never very good at it. A wide gathering of loose straw with both arms, as much as could be held, shape it into a sausage of straw against the knees and your stomach, hold it there by some mysterious method using the elbows while a straw band was twisted at either end, bring the bands together round the windlin, one each way, and twist them together to hold tight. When well done that windlin could be thrown or pitchforked as easily as a sheaf. But we soon got cold watching, so back to the house and the warm fire in the sitting room, lit early in that morning. And a book to read.

The Stars at Night in Stronsay.

2008-12-20T11:29:00.000-08:00

THE STARS AT NIGHT.

Long time ago, when time began, the stars were invented. Anyway, in the days before anything David and I walked with our father in the cool star-lit darkness of a sharp winter’s evening near to Christmas up the one mile of road from Whitehall Farm to Midgarth to see his Uncles George [Dod] and Alex Tait and their cousin William. The full moon had not yet risen though there was a glow in the sky just below the horizon, the Evening Star hung low down in the sky, the stars very bright and clear. So we had a lesson from our father as we walked along, he pointing out the Plough with the Pointers at its end which showed the way to the immoveable North Star, so important for mariners. There were the Seven Sisters, the Belt of Orion, the shadowy bands of the Milky Way far off across the sky, the shimmer of the Merry Dancers hanging high in the sky to the North, usually a sign of approaching bad weather in a few days. He had tales to tell us about the sea and the stars, family stories I have mostly long forgot of forebears sailing ships from Kirkwall in Orkney to Bergen in Norway with malt and grain and tallow, then on to Alesund to load timber and iron and skins for Orkney, and to Danzig in the Baltic for tar and more skins and wine and silver. Though his father David was a farmer he was called “The Skipper” by the family, and we were told he was a good man in a boat, actually a very great compliment to an Orkneyman.
William, the W. of J. and W. Tait in Kirkwall. retired to Midgarth to end his days with his cousins in Stronsay. He and Dod and Alex were unmarried and had Maggie and Bella to look after them and the house. Father loved an after-day-set with them, and for we boys to be allowed to come along was a real treat. Dod’s humour was endless, even with small boys, his stories of South Africa where he was a piper in the Boer War, ostriches and lions, antelopes and crocodiles. His arguments with our father about the best methods of farming this and that, keeping in touch with Island gossip, or with National affairs, no need for a daily paper. Without any asking if we wanted any, Maggie and Bella came “Ben the hoos” with monstrously laden trays. Their home made cheese tasted different from our mother’s, sharper, their rhubarb jam had more ginger. Usually father got a towering glass of Midgarth home brewed ale, we boys got ginger wine, fiery too. And we sat on the edge of our chairs and listened to our elders.

After tea and the smoking of a pipe by father, the lighting of the paraffin oil lantern to go out and see the cattle, and the stars were there to light us on our way to the byres. That particular and special night was very still, the dark close around us, the lantern light hardly seen, lighting a little luminous circle round our feet. There was a hint of frost to come later. The loud whisper of the sea on the shore below Midgarth, muted by distance, echoed round the corner. Whoever wrote “In the still of the night”, long before the Satins sang it, must have walked to Midgarth with us.

So to the byres. Always start with the feeders byre, always. It took pride of place on all the farms, feeding cattle near to market. In those far off days it was normal practice to girth an animal around the heart to see and confirm if it was ready for shipping the long sea voyage to Aberdeen. A leather covered cloth tape measure was always in father’s pocket, as most other cattlemen. Get the beast up, gently up the stall between the two animals, throw the tape over the back of the one in question and catch it behind the front legs to bring it round. Now do not hold me to measurements, I could be quite far off, it was a long time ago and we boys were not so interested in the weights. Still, I think about six and a half feet was normal, seven feet was about 11 cwts. and ready for shipping to Aberdeen. When we came to Greenland Mains father reckoned that in Stronsay they had to make a beast 11 cwts to weigh ten in Aberdeen, it was a long two day sea voyage from the North Isles and they lost a fair bit of weight compared to sending them into Thurso the day of the sale. The buyers in Aberdeen normally allowed for that weight loss. Our elders compared this or that animal, its breeding, its mother, the Aberdeen Angus bull large in its own stall, who bred it, Calder of Sebay or Flett of Kingshouse, David and I tagging along. Always the byre cat to rub itself against our legs, purring the while, well fed but alert for the odd mouse.
The steading was quiet for the night, cattle all lying down contentedly chewing the cud, a change of position to settle the better, the scurry of a rat in the straw. The byres were warm, the differing smells of yellow and swede turnips and bruised oats and oil cake and the special spices that were added in those days as being good tonic for the cattle. The straw and the hay, the byres clean and bedded down for the night, a few sparrows chirping quietly above us in the rafters. Where have they all gone, few are left.
Still, with Dod and his lantern, we went round the byres, the feeders, the yearlings, the cows with calves, the stable of horses, always a sow in the pigsty usually with a smart litter of many tiny ones. Took a fair while to go round everything but there was no hurry, we did not have a train to catch!! At Midgarth they had a tractor before we did at Whitehall so we boys just had to see that, a red CASE on iron wheels, to sit on it and steer the motionless wheels.
Characteristic of Midgarth was the total tidiness of everything, absolutely nothing whatever left lying around, all tools in their proper place, almost too good to be true. Just no comparison whatever with Whitehall, not that we were untidy but Dod and Alec were something very special, not fussy but very special.
So we set off for home again, the moon now risen but low down on the horizon to the east, the stars not quite so visible in the moonlight but still clear enough. More constellations pointed out to us, a reminder of the disappearing ability of an Orkneyman to find his way round the North Sea and the Baltic by a glance at the night sky. We looked for and saw shooting stars scud across the sky, a bit of a competition between David and myself to spot one first. By now it was a bit frosty so father took a hand from each of us and tucked them in his into his warm pockets, changing sides after a while for the other hand.
Today who knows anything of the stars, what well-lit city street allows more than a passing glimpse of sky, perhaps the Moon, of the constellations almost nothing at all. Still, there must be some boys and girls around who will ask their dad to tell them about the stars, if he still can!!

The Mens' Gardens.

2008-12-05T03:13:00.000-08:00

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.

AN OLD WHITE ROSE, FROM YESTERDAY’S GARDENS..

The farm servants’ gardens were a place of domestic bliss, a place to work in the evenings at your own speed without the “Boss” shouting at you to hurry up, although “her indoors” might just do that. As the weather calmed after winter the men emerged in the evening with shirt sleeves rolled up and good intentions to “dell” (dig) their gardens, normally at the front of their house. They usually also had a hen house at the back and often a pigsty for a pig or two. Around the garden either a stone dyke or a flagstone one, much needed for shelter in Stronsay, or in Caithness. A squeaky gate, a narrow path up the middle, thin bits of flagstones set on edge for sides and dividers, paths often paved with shingle off the shore because we were beside the sea. Blackcurrant and redcurrant bushes round the walls and in the corners, and sometimes gooseberries. An old herring net to protect the berries. Honeysuckle either side of the gate with its well named sweet lingering smell, an evening breath, a sprig in the buttonhole for Church on Sunday. Or a rose bush or two, that old white rose that still has the best scent of any. Fushia in profusion, ox eyed daisies, red and white campion outside the walls, kind of a weed but nice and grew well beside the dykes in the fields too. London Pride each side up the main path. A few flowers according to the worker’s wife’s fancy, but not too much.
And rhubarb, always rhubarb, a small sweet red variety and a coarse variety with huge stems if not cut soon enough. We thought the redder the better. If enough sugar then jam making was the order of the day, the kitchen steaming, the huge brass jam pot bubbling on the stove, the delicious aroma penetrating the whole house. Jam jars were resurrected from odd corners and scalded clean with boiling water. During the War we could apply for and get a bit of extra sugar from officialdom, making jam was encouraged and a most welcome addition to our rationed selves. Country wide. The men, or rather their wives, always put a bit of ginger into the rhubarb if they could get it.
Today we have every vegetable under the Sun in the Supermarket, plastic wrapped, clean, foreign, enticing, tasteless. But in my early days buying vegetables was unknown. So working in their gardens was the evening job for the men, dell the ground early to let the frost break it down into a fine tilth, plan the layout for the season to vary and change the beds. Usually, indeed always,
a cart load of well rotted dung (FYM) from the cattle midden was tipped outside the garden wall, left to further rot down all winter - nowadays it is called “composting” - then barrowed in or thrown over the dyke and generously dug down. The gardens often had their various beds delineated just by narrow earthen paths, trodden hard by tackety boots over many long years.

First to be planted in Spring were the early tatties, specially chitted (sprouted) for a flying start. The men had their earlies to plant in the field as well in their allowed 60 chains but the garden ones could be planted sooner at a time of their own choosing without waiting for the later farm tattie planting. Planted out in the garden and leaving the sheltered corners for more tender plants. Dig the first row and bed it with some dung, good natural fertilizer, plant the row, then start all over again with the next. The earth was thrown over the first row from the second to cover the seed, and so on till the patch was finished. Weeding came later, but tattie leaves soon covered the rows and shaded out any weeds. We never heard of potato eel worm, that bane of gardens further south, and of Southern potato farmers as well. The cherished early tatties were the first to be planted, and near enough a competition to see who would be the first to get them in, and the first to lift them later. “Trying the tatties” it was called, “Hiv ye tried yir tatties yet, Wullie bhoy?” “Yaas, lifted a few bleams last Setterday and we hid them for Sunday denner”. “ Whit lek, Wullie? Whit lek? Wir they good?”. “Pure nectar, Jeemie, chuist pure nectar”. And these new-lifted garden tatties were indeed the tastiest you could ever dream of.

Cabbages were usually started from seed in shallow boxes before planting time, sometimes indoors or in the porch of the house, sometimes under a simple glass frame in the garden, maybe only an old window set on a low stone wall square. Seed packets appeared in the local shop, early cabbage, late cabbage, white cabbage, winter cabbage, curly kale, savoys for later use, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli, onions, leeks, carrots, beetroot, lettuce, peas, beans. The list is endless. Sometimes one worker was better than anyone else at starting plants from seed, or his wife had green fingers, and times they swopped a few plants. Much of the seed came by the Postman, mail ordered from a catalogue.

Beds were worked till fine enough, dug over again, raked, leveled, a tight line between two wooden pegs to keep everything straight. Speak of fussy women, nothing matched a farm worker in his pomp. The back of a rake or the edge of a hoe scratched a fine shallow groove along the line of the string, dead straight for pride, or even the sharp end of a stick.

According to what was needed, a pinch of carrot seeds between thumb and fore-finger, sprinkled thinly and lightly covered, or lettuce, or beetroot, or radishes. And always shallots, always shallots, I think the pride of most farm worker gardens, get them in early too. After the tatties I seem to remember that the next task was the shallots, Grown from a single shallot bulb rather than a young plant as were the onions, good ones being hand picked and kept over from last year for seed. The shallots got plenty room, voraciously responding to good feeding and very rewarding. We were fascinated to see them multiply to an unbelievable cluster of separate young shallots come autumn, we used to count them to see who had the greatest number on one plant. Later in autumn their leaves would be bent over, two rows towards each other, then lifted when leaf dry and strung in bunches along that thin strong tarry old herring-net rope that fronted many a cottage wall to further dry before indoor storing for winter. Boiled shallots were really tasty with mince or cold roast lamb, or more likely farm-butchered mutton from an older sheep, and all the tastier too. Don’t get it nowadays in our butchers either.

On to the onion sets, small young plants in bunches grown from seed, disentangled and planted singly in line, six inches apart if for mature picking, the width of a hoe, three inches if every second one was to be picked early for garnish or soups or stews or whatever, leaving the others more space to grow to full size. Young plants watered to get a good start.

Leeks were planted, young single plants again, and sheep droppings were later collected off the fields to be steeped in a pail of water to make a special brew to gently feed them. Seed and Root Show stuff with the W.R.I.., and some leeks were monstrous. No wonder the Welsh wave them about at their Rugby Internationals. All too soon they will be classed by the P.C. as yet another dangerous weapon, and one more wonderful old tradition will be lost. A clout over the ear with a large leek was to be avoided, the Welsh know a thing or two, indeed to goodness they do, boyo!!

Weeding was a never ending task but these gardens were not too dirty as many years of TLC had reduced the weed burden. Still, weeds are always with us. Workers gardens were inspected by visitors, commented on as need be. Pride was paramount, and many a worker was shamed by his fellows to keep his garden well. Even our father at times would have a look. I think they all got a great deal of fun out of their gardens, as well they might.
Only now do I realize that these gardens were not just for show, they provided a great deal of good food for the workers, fresh and in season, or stored for winter, and if they bought all they grew for themselves at today’s prices it would cost a small fortune.

No 40. THE BAILLIE BOX CART.

2008-11-22T10:35:00.001-08:00

No 40. The Baillie Cart.

The long arm of co-incidence never ceases to amaze me. I wrote some time since of Jeemie Morrison making a new box cart for our father in Stronsay. A few days ago while turning out some rubbish many years old from the bottom of a drawer at Isauld, I came across an old account for a new box cart for Baillie, which account I found in Baillie Farmhouse when we were doing some work there after we took it over in May 1971. We found it down behind an old mantel piece we were taking out, must have dropped through a gap with the wall. I put it in a drawer and forgot it until I came across it in that recent tidy up. It was from William Grant, Achscrabster, wheelwright, joiner, undertaker, cabinet maker, and was as follows:-

P. 128 T.A. Campbell, Baillie , from P5.

1930. To Balance from last a/c. £ -.19-02
Aug. 6
To 1 New Wheel fitted to old Rim £ 3-07-06

To New Box Cart with Shelwings
Oak Framing, Larch Cods,
Larch Cladding, New Shafts,
Old Corn Wings fitted £ 9-07-06
Aug. 23.
1 New Wheel 4’ 5” £ 3-07-06
1 wheel filled, 6 Fellos & painted £ 1-10-00
£18-11-08
Feb 20th. By cash £18-00-00

Balance due 11-08

This was interesting enough though only somebodies long ago account. But then came Spooky Tuesday. Out of the blue old friend Donald Macintosh arrived at the door with some ancient photographs he had turned up, and with them William Grant’s old accounts ledger. Grant was Donald’s great grandfather. Donald had read my story of Jeemie Morrison making the new cart for our father in Stronsay and thought, rightly, that I would be interested in the photos. They show in graphic detail the new wheels being rimmed - or shod, the new wheels on their axle being painted, the new shafts with William Grant standing behind them, his wood plane in his hand. And the completed box cart with Donald’s mother Una the small girl in the cart, her proud grandfather standing behind.

We cannot use all the fotos Donald produced but the first four showed a fiery ring of blazing peats on which the iron rim for the wheel was heated red hot, the metal expanding enough to fit over the wooden wheel. Two men (Willie Grant and Jamie Dundas) with long blacksmith tongs carry the red hot rim from the peat fire to the waiting wheel while David Dundas, the Achscrabster blacksmith, father-in-law to William Grant and father of Jamie Dundas, follows with a bucket for water. Then the rim placed onto the wooden wheel, smoke rising, Willie Grant ready with the twelve pound sledge hammer to tap it home, David Dundas standing by with his hand reaching for the water bucket at his feet. No time could be wasted before the red hot rim began to burn the wooden fellos ( outer rim pieces of the wheel ), so water had to be ready for the moment the rim was in place. Under the wheel can just be seen the massive heavy round iron anvil 4 inches thick, dead flat, a hole in the centre cut out to fit the hub of the wheel to be rimmed so that the outer wooden rim of the wheel would lie flat ready for the iron rim. It is still at Achscrabster, also four Achscrabster Quarry flagstone anvils, two still in excellent condition, six feet square and nine inches deep, similarly holed.

. Against the gable end of the blacksmith’s shop behind the men lie old wheel rims, best seen in a blown up photo, the old iron re-usable by the blacksmith. New rims would be made to measure for every wheel according to a formula I forget, made according to the size of wheel which could vary, but the iron was 2¾ inches wide and ¾ inches deep.

The rimming process finished with the wheel standing vertically in a pool of water. for final cooling,. A close look at this photo shows the wheel on a spindle being rotated in the water by the left foot of Willie Grant pushing down on the spokes, with Jamie Dundas on the other side with left hand and fingers on the spokes. Achscrabster Farmhouse is in the background.

The wheel was made up of a wheel hub, twelve wooden spokes, six fellos dovetailed together - the bits around the rim. The ends of the spokes were rounded and passed through holes in the fellos, two spokes to a fello, the protruding ends then split and a wooden wedge driven in to each from outside to tighten and hold everything together. Crafty in the right sense of the word, who today could do it?

(Karen // foto 7 a poorer foto )
A photo of the cart wheels now assembled on their axle and being painted by Sandy Grant, Willie Grant’s oldest son, colour usually bright red.

(Foto 8.)
A nice photo shows the new shafts ready and waiting for the iron sliders to be fitted mid way along the shafts. The sliders held the chain which went over the saddle on the horse’s back, the hooks for the harness chains for pulling the cart forwards or backwards, the hooks for the belly band that went under the horse and stopped the cart from toppling backwards with a hinderly load of sheaves at harvest, much needed at times. Called sliders because the hooks slid along to find their own best pulling point. Willie Grant, joiner, stands proudly beside his work with his wood plane in his hand.

(Foto 9.)
The new Baillie box cart sitting ready for the road, iron sliders now in the shafts. Willie Grant has his grand-daughter Una on the cart, Donald Macintosh’s mother.

The buildings are still there, the joiner shop, the blacksmith shop, though their use has changed The massive flagstone anvils are still there. The iron anvil is still there. I must explore some more.
It is for me a fascinating photographic sequence of the rimming of cart wheels and the making of a cart, mirroring the cart we saw as boys being made by Jeemie Morrison. That it was for Baillie, which my son Tom now farms, is even more personally interesting. .
These old dying crafts of the countryside are out of sight and out of mind. Would it not be good if Caithness could record some of them before everyone who remembers them is gone?

No 38. The Men o' Hobbister

2008-11-08T00:12:00.001-08:00

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.

"The Men O' Hobbister."

I wrote of the “Men o’ the Bu’” as an introduction to my grandfather’s wages book, which ran from 1906 to 1942, and an introduction to the men and women who kept the farms going for us with their hard labour. Later we come to the “Men o’ Whitehaa” where I spent my early days, and knew most of the men. Meantime as a family we spent six years in Hobbister in Orphir before returning to Stronsay, from Nov. 1913 to Nov.1919, spanning the 1914 – 1918 Great War. .This relatively short period began changes which leapt out of the Wages Book, reflecting the rapidly altering face of agricultural wages and prices during that time, and worth a look on that account.
Some of the names reflected that men came with my grandfather to Hobbister from The Bu’ in Stronsay, staying in employment with the family. In May 1914 on pay day we find Benjamin Norquoy, £12 in the half year, John Norquoy, £10, Robert Youll, £10, William Norquoy, £5, (a boy), but with his three bolls of oatmeal, all from the Bu’ in Stronsay to Hobbister. Other names appearing on payday 28th May 1914 were Miss Clouston £8. Mrs Norquoy £1.10.6d, Mrs B. Norquoy, £0.18/-d, and again Mrs Norquoy £2 for milking and three days work at the hill, obviously at the peats. Peat cutting was interesting as the Highland Park Distillery in Kirkwall still has its peats cut from the Hobbister Hill, making it my very favourite Malt Whisky. That was the first pay day on 28th May1914 after they went to Hobbister the previous November. All the above sums were for six months work, quite incredible.
Other names appeared over the six years, John Muir, James Gunn, Alex Laurison, [ a Shetlander] William Scollie, Mary Clouston, John Mowat, Andrew Linklater, Alex Rendell, James Sinclair, Robet Croy, Alex Swanney, Herbert Shearer, Tom Owen, Tom Clouston, David Forsith, James Rossie, *** Kemp, Peter Guthrie, David Swanney. These names over the six years in Hobbister I mention because over many years I would meet someone in Caithness whose forebear had once worked at Hobbister. Teachers, bankers, policemen, other good people, who had all come a long way from farm workers at £10 for half a year’s work. Which is nice.

National Insurance appeared for the first time in 1912 at the Bu’ with stamps at 4d a week, 8/8d for the half year, deducted from the worker’s wages. That rate stayed all through their time at Hobbister, and was still at that rate in Nov. 1919 when they moved back to Stronsay.

Through 1914 little change took place, wages staying at the same levels. John Muir came in at Nov 1914 to May 1915 at £10, paid £1 on June 14th 1915 on leaving. Did he go to War, did he come back? His wage at £10 was a man's wage.

Moving on to 1915, William Scollie at £5.10/- was still a boy, Alex Laurison at £15, a man, indicating escalation of wages, John Mowat at £15; Alex Rendell at £14.10/-, John Gunn, at £15; Mary Clouston at £8 was an outdoor worker, William Norquoy at £5, still on a boy's wage. Mary Norquoy got £2 for milking, and also 3 days at the "Hill", had to be the peats again. At Nov. 1915 Andrew Linklater comes in at £16, to £18 at May 1916, and moves on. Kemp appears, a local Hobbister man, at £21 in Nov 1918, £30 at Nov 1919. Met his grand-daughter in Caithness.
Robert Yule, spelling differed but not to worry, in May 1914 at £10, to £16 at Nov 1916, to £18 at Nov 1917 and 1918, £21 in Nov.1918. He was paid £3 on Dec.1918, with DESERTER written below the entry, obviously he left. My grandfather must have taken a dim view of his leaving betimes as replacements would have been hard to find between terms. I am very sure DESERTER was not from the army. Seems my grandfather took it personally. Yule had come with them from Stronsay in 1913. Maybe he got a better offer, wages going up, there was a War on. Or did he go to the Army?.
My father told me that all over Orkney men went to war, to be replaced in many cases by old men and young boys and women, to the detriment of farm work. He too was called up in 1914 with the Territorials, but was never sent to France, serving in Fort George, on the guns in Scapa Flow, heaving them on rope slings up the cliffs of the Barrel of Butter in Scapa Flow. He was then sent out to Stronsay with two other Territorials to patrol the Cliffs of Rothiesholm Head [ the Bu’], which he naturally knew like the back of his hand, local knowledge perhaps helping the posting. They had a small wooden hut and a good stove with plenty coal. Naturally he knew everyone locally in Rothiesholm, and had plenty of time on watch to put them all in a poem for posterity, a copy of which I still have.
On one occasion he was skiving off sitting in the farm house at the Bu’ of Rousam with his feet under the table when someone rushed in and told him his Sergeant had sneaked quietly out to Stronsay and was marching up to Rousam Head to check up on things. Arriving at the watch hut he found Private Pottinger missing. Back down to the Bu’ to find the miscreant. But father had dodged out the back door, crossed the “Peedie Loch“ by a causeway, back up to the watch hut in the Sergeants absence by a slender hill track. When the Sergeant came back from his abortive search father was marching up and down the cliffs with his rifle on his shoulder. When charged with “Desertion of his Post in Time of War”, he said he had been further along the cliffs as he had heard something suspicious, possibly a German Invasion. And that was that.

With so many ships being sunk and food growing scarce, men were sent home from the army in 1917 to the farms. Father was one of those, with no regrets, so perhaps my own presence in this World owes something to that. Many of his friends went and many did not come back. The same sending home was done in 1939 to 1945, with men coming back to the farm from the forces, two to the farm of Airy to our father. Farmers had to apply for a former employee to get them discharged.

Perquisites coming in more strongly were oats, no doubt bought to feed some hens, at 5/6d a bushel {42lbs.} in 1919, a rise from 2/-d a bushel in 1913, over double. The normal three bolls of meal was paid per half year. No bere meal appears nor was any sold to the workers, perhaps Hobbister did not grow any.

Other perquisites appearing were a barrel of potatoes on occasion, meal being bought over the three bolls standard half year supply, a cast ewe sold to Robbie Yule for £1.5/-. Meal in 1917 at 4/- the stone of 14lbs. There were a few extra payments, cutting peats in the hill, singling turnips, harvest, casual workers giving a hand. Peter Guthrie bought a stove for £1.4/-, a dear item against a half year's pay. Insurance was at 8/8d for the six months term. Kemp bought 8 lbs of wool at £1.3/-, about 2/10 a pound. Home spinning it had to be, knitting for the household.

An interesting entry was paid for Alex Swanney in 26th June, 1918, £1 cash to P.L.Johnston, it had to be for a suit. Known all over Orkney, P.L. was a draper and tailer who travelled all over the Islands selling his wares, mostly made-to-measure suits hand made in his shop in Stromness. He married my father’s sister Jeannie who died in giving birth to Thora, their only daughter. Thora lived to 88 in 2005, still in Stromness, married to Bill Tulloch, who predeceased her. Sharon came with me to her funeral, not knowing what to expect at her first funeral in this country. Thora’s funeral was a celebration of her long life, not an occasion for sadness. Full of years and full of friends. Perhaps the most touching moment was on our way from the Church to the Cemetary when the cortege stopped for a minute or two on the street below Thora’s house on the Hill overlooking Stromness harbour, a peaceful moment for quiet contemplation and reflection. Very nice, poignant, and it had been at her own request.

And so the family stay at Hobbister came to an end on 18th Nov. 1919. Not one of the farms my father spoke of most highly in an agricultural sense, but a very special farm in terms of the family, of growing up, of father’s doctor brothers Steven going to study Medicine in Edinburgh, of David on leave from the hell of a doctor in Flanders, of John, a surgeon far away on a Hospital Ship in Alexandria during Gallipoli, of sister Nan marrying George Flett, staying at Hobbister while he was also in France.

The final look we will have into Grandfather Pottinger's Wages Book will cover Whitehall, the period between the Wars, changes coming in but no great revolution in worker's pay and conditions. Still, changes there were, and this trilogy will finish, eventually, with Whitehall, 1919 to 1942.

No 26..The Long Loft Again.

2008-10-24T11:22:00.000-07:00

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.

The farm lofts were not used just for grain storage, they had so many other uses. They were usually the most free of draughts of all the buildings, a clean working area with a good wooden floor though usually the coldest with no cattle to warm them in winter, though the Long Loft at Whitehall had the yearlings byre below.
Loft tasks were many, the first that comes to mind was making and repairing the stack-nets. Each man made for himself a net needle out of a suitable piece of smooth hardwood, sometimes a piece of good driftwood found on the shore. Difficult to describe a stack net needle in detail but a Stroma man could tell you, or show you one inherited from his father. The stack net needles were a larger version of the needles used by fishermen (Stroma men again) to repair or make their creels or repair their herring nets, whittled down by the farm worker with a knife and soft smoothed with sandpaper and long use, a treasured work of art. On to it the sisal stack-net twine was wound, over and under from either side in turns onto the central peg till full The needle released just so much twine when needed by a flick and a half turn of the wrist, and, if let go or if it fell by accident, it did not unravel. It all fitted nicely into a man’s hand.
Stretch the stack-net along the wall, hang it from the rafters on nails or loops at head height, look for breaks, stitch the torn hole together with a simple over and under but holding knot, a reef knot for a broken cord, a sheet bend like a figure 8 for a loop, the usual knot for making a new net, which took me quite a while to learn but simple enough when mastered. The net could be spread on the floor but suspending it was preferred, easier on the back. Tears in nets were common enough, especially as they got ripe and tender with age. Each year the nets were steeped in tan bark preservative or creosote, but an outdoor life holding down corn or hay stacks all winter told its own tale. On the stacks rats could and did cut the nets, inedible maybe but keeping their teeth in trim. Sods. Or a gale could at times do much damage.
Making new stack nets was another task when time allowed. A long master board hung from the rafters, clear of the walls. On to it the first loops of twine for the new net would be cast, the farm women would tell you it was just like knitting but bigger loops. Much bigger. The square mesh was about 12 inches, and I do remember that the sizes were in odd multiples of 15, 17, 19, 21 squares, and so on. There had to be a reason for the odd numbers but I know it not. The mesh was kept to the correct size by a thin wooden rail or rod hung on a loop of wire from either end, reset for the next row. A skilled man could make a net quite rapidly, though they could be bought ready made. Saved a bit of money if home made, and gave the men an indoor job for any spare time, especially on a rough day. The new and the repaired nets were individually wound up, a neat tight bundle three feet long, and stored hanging from the rafters out of varmints reach.
Rope making in the Long Loft was another rough day job. Two moveable wooden rope-making frames with hooks and gears and winding handles, one each end of the loft, or at whatever distance needed according to the lengths of rope required. Three hooks triangulated on the master winder driven by small pinions from one big pinion, all turning together at the same matched speed, and three fixed hooks on the slave winder at the other end which would be anchored to the floor. The master was free standing with two small jockey wheels on the front corners. It sledged slowly along as the ropes were wound and the twine tightened in the making, the man doing the winding standing on it. Binder twine was run from one end to the other, back and fore, back and fore, three separate bundles, the ball of twine carried from end to end, the twine running out from the centre of the ball, and as many strands as needed according to whether making thin rein ropes or heavier cart ropes or ropes for cattle halter making. The initial winding made three separate thin ropes, then the three slim new ropes were put onto one hook on the master winder and the rope was ready for the final stage. For this the handle was turned in the opposite direction to the initial winding by one man, his partner having a polished wooden shoe with three smooth round grooves triangulated into which the three thinner ropes fitted. By winding in the opposite direction against the initial twist and allowing just so much to slowly run through the shoe by moving it along, a three ply rope emerged, the opposing twist holding it together. The speed at which the shoe was moved along determined the tightness. Quite long lengths could be made, coiled up neatly and stored in the rat proof wire cage in the girnel loft. There was a rule of thumb for making some of these ropes, a cart rope just so long, reins another length, and the winding frames could be set out at the right distance marked on the floor to end with the correct length of rope. Neat work. And there was always in the loft when rope making the fresh, clean, rather pleasant smell of new sisal twine. Farm made ropes were of high quality and stood comparison with bought-in rope any day.
A relic of that rope-making still exists in Castletown with the Ropewalk from the centre of the Village to the right of the road down to Castlehill Harbour, a double hedge hiding it a bit. Ropes were made there for ships sailing out of Castlehill Harbour with flagstones exported around the World. That ropewalk was operated by James Tait, one of whose cousins, also James Tait, was a Master ropemaker in Wick, and another cousin, David Tait, was a Master sail maker there.
The A-frame rafters of the loft had crosspieces we called couple backs - good storage for many things. Paramount were the canvases for the binders. Thoroughly washed after corn cutting harvest by steeping them in the horse trough or the pond, then set out to dry hanging over a stone dyke. Before storing until next harvest they were all gone over on the loft floor, any tears or worn bits seen to, the leading edges replaced with a strip of new canvas where worn, torn or just ripe with age, buckles and straps replaced, new wooden laths replacing broken ones. The running repairs of harvest, often done in haste just to keep the binders going, were tidied up or redone properly. These running repairs were constant through most harvests anyway. One year only do I remember otherwise. In the wonderful summer of 1955, our last while we lived in Lower Dounreay Farmhouse before moving to Isauld, we took our wonderful International 7ft power drive binder out of the shed on Monday morning, cut everything by Friday evening, never changed a canvas, nor a knife blade, nor threw a single loose sheaf, and the binder went back into the shed on Saturday morning cleaned, oiled and ready for next year. Cut round and round every field, finished cutting before the end of August, and never ever did the like again!! Never!
The couple backs were storage for hoes, sharpened and oiled. Scythes were kept there safely out of reach, binder knives well oiled, any broken or damaged blades repaired, a slotted safety board covering the sharp blades. Bits and planks of good new wood lay handy on the couple backs, and everyone knew where to find a bit when needed. There would be old binder canvasses from long gone binders, waiting for their own Resurrection perhaps. They were not in anyones way, so they stayed there covered in dust and out of sight until forgotten, or at least until the farm roup our father held on finally leaving Whitehall in November,1944.
It was amazing what else could be stored there, and after our 25 years in Whitehall the rafters of the Long Loft were an Alladins Cave. I should know, I was there. I set off from Greenland Mains on my own to walk to Thurso to catch the St Ola, was picked up by car at West Greenland road end by Dan Gunn who was luckily going to Thurso anyway. He took me down to Scrabster, I caught the St Ola, stayed the night with Charlie Tait in Kirkwall at Buttquoy, caught the Earl Sigurd very early next morning, and the two hour voyage out to Stronsay, a special trip laid on by father for the sale. And at the sale out of that loft door, and sold by the auctioneer from the top of the stone stairs, came an endless succession of odds and ends. Pride of place went to an ancient harpoon and a flensing knife, relics of the days when Stronsay caaed whales onto the sandy beach at Mill Bay. They gave the auctioneer his cue for some serious laughter.
Anyone who has been to a farm roup will recognize the “Loft Door”, usually at the top of the stone stairs, and wonder where all the odds and ends come from, stare in disbelief at some bits, at times ask in amazement what some article is, put in a small bid for something he does not really want just to be mentioned in the roup roll, and how long will it be till we reach the real objective of sailing all the way out from Kirkwall, the implements, the horses, the cattle, the sheep and the pigs. Or was it just a rather nice way for my father’s farming friends from all over Orkney to bid him, on leaving his native shores for Caithness, a good and memorable fare-thee-well.

No 39. Half Yoking Rembered.

2008-10-10T12:37:00.001-07:00

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.

HALF YOKING REMEMBERED.
The sheer humanity of days gone by still catches me, the many people on the farms, their lives and times, on our farms and many others. I can merely touch on it here and there as best I can, with a lump in my throat sometimes. One of the special moments is not too often remarked upon amid the many old farming stories one might chance to hear. I read again a short time ago a small private obituary written by my wife Sharon for our good friend and neighbour George Mackay of Buldoo, who died 14th May, 2006, aged 90. She quoted an interlude George and I had shared. It was called “Half Yoking”.
Half Yoking was so much a part of farming it never was commented upon, it was just there. The working days were long and hard and physical, who today ever sees anyone with sweat on their brow. But for man and horse half-yoking was a welcome if short rest, a time for the nose bag for man and beast. Indeed many a time we heard the men refer to their own half yoking bag as their nose bag. Or piece bag, or just half yoking bag. And the horses also had their own well named nose bag with a feed of oats, the origin of the title. Kept them quiet while their horseman had his. Often enough it was an old kacki Army hard-canvas shoulder bag with a strong buckle strap, or two, capable of many long years of wear and tear.
My own memories of Half-yoking were at neep singling time, sitting at the top of the field with our backs to a dry stone dyke, sheltered from the almost incessant wind, hoes tidily leaning against the wall beside us. We were but boys giving a helping hand but to have our own nose bag was great as we felt so grown up. The paramount item in the bag was a thermos flask of hot tea, a dangerous item as the glass vacuum flask inside was expremely delicate and a fall to the ground brought instant and explosive comment as it meant a broken flask. Unscrew the top and a rattling mixture of hot tea and glass fell to the ground. I never rememeber coffee, I do not think it had been invented in my early days, not at least for the men. I do remember highly concentrated Bantam Coffee on a small tin or Camp Coffee in a bottle, used in the farm house, but we were not keen on coffee anyway. Too sharp. Now I live on it!!
Today we have thermos jugs with metal insides or indeed complete metal flasks capable of extreme treatment, but great care was taken then by the men of their fragile thermos. Choice words would inevitably follow a disaster.
A bottle of milk and a small screw topped jar of sugar completed the beverage. Milk was never put in the tea at home as it tasted differently than when just added, and the flask held that much more hot tea if the milk was extra. The screwed on top of the flask served as a cup.
Their pieces were thick home baked well buttered bere bread, or flour scones, or oat cakes, home made cheese on the bere bread or on the oat cakes, rhubarb jam on the buttered scones, all wrapped up in a bit of old newspaper. Or kept in a small tin box inside the capacious bag. Perhaps a slice or two of baker’s loaf-bread from the Village, Jock Stout or Swanneys, with some cold mutton and a bit of pickle, or H.P. Sauce, or Daddies Sauce. .I have seen a bit of cake appear at times, indeed we could say “All’s grist to the mill”.
If milk was plentiful some of the men would have a full bottle to drink straight, or even butter-milk which was a great thirst quencher on a hot day. Some of them had their own cow, kept on the farm by father as part of their wages and had extra milk on that account, but not all. The keep of a cow was not free but the charge was minimal, and every year a calf for the worker to bring on a bit and sell at a few weeks old was an added bonus. Sometimes sold to father if he needed a replacement, or to put on a cow with a copius udder and capable of nursing two calves.
Half yoking was not to be rushed and always time for a fag after food, or light a pipe and have a contemplative smoke. The half yoking rest for the horses when they were working hard was a bonus, and they deserved it.
I remember the afternoon half yokings well, but cannot remember the morning ones at all. Not every worker took a half yoking with them, but all shared the welcome break at the dyke.
Time was called by the foreman with a look at his watch on it’s ornate gold chain out of hs waistcoat pocket, a slow rising to his feet, a wordless command to get going again.
Of course not only singling neeps meant half yoking. Haymaking sitting against a hay cole, or against a stook at harvest, taken by the horsemen in the sheds when carting neeps, the cattleman having his sitting on the bruised oats kist in the byre, even threshing stopped for half yoking. Indeed there was not any job done on the farm wthout it’s attendant short break. When men started worlk at 6 am, broke for top of the day from 11am to 1 pm, finally stopped for the day at 6 pm, their long 5 hour shifts needed a break. But my most memorable half yoking came at Lower Dounreay many years later.
I had just finished our own combining in a field next the main UKAEA entrance and across the road at Buldoo George Mackay had a field of oats half cut by the binder round the outside and stooked, the rest waiting for Johnny Mackay from Skail to come with his combine to finish the field. The sun was shining, the day was warm, the oats were dry, too good a chance to miss. So I crossed the main road and drove my old Ransome Cavalier combine across one grass field and into the one of oats, to be dryly greeted by George with “Have you missed the road home?” We got his small trailer and, after changing the combine settings for oats, set about getting the job done in the ripe standing crop.
Getting on just fine, round and round with no stops, and then I spied George's wife coming down from their house at the corner of Buldoo to the field with a basket on her arm, covered with a tea cloth.
Half yoking, which I had not had for many a year. Home made scones warm and fresh from the oven, home made jam and rich farm butter and hot tea and milk to cool it and plenty sugar, and George and I had our half yoking sitting with our backs to a stook of sheaves and the sun on our faces.

As Sharon wrote in his memory:- “Long after Morris had forgotten the day, he was reminded of it because a little kindness is often long remembered, and stories of home made scones and jam and butter after a hard day's work in a neighbour's field are worth telling and retelling. Each day contains so many stories, so many heartbeats. How do we measure a life at the end of the day? The number of people standing in the cold grey afternoon in and around his little house are one measure, but more telling for a farmer are the fields who gave him his name and to which he gave his life. As we drove past his farm, Morris pointed with pride to George’s fields that contrasted sharply in their lush greenness with the rough ground adjacent to it.”

THE MEN OF THE BU'

2008-09-27T01:59:00.001-07:00

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.

"The Men o' the Bu' "

What of the men who walked through my early days, and the women too. We have in the family a keepsake wages book from these far away bygone days, long before my childhood, well, a bit anyway. Yet many of the names in it are familiar to me even if they do go back before my own memory. Some I only heard tell of, some I knew, familiar names because our father spoke often of them, men of his own early days in the Bu’ of Rousam in Stronsay. And these farm men and women, even those too of my own farming life, deserve a tribute from me, perhaps too long in the making.
A new Century, a new Millenium, just into the 1900s. This look back is a full century to farm workers wages as found in the wages book of David Pottinger my Grandfather. It begins in 1906, it ends in 1942. After my Grandfather's day and his generous handwriting it was kept up by my father, Tom Pottinger of Whitehall, and the last entries are in the hand of Annie Tait of Inkstack in Caithness, our mother. My grandparents, David Pottinger, born in Quoylanks in Deerness, and Elizabeth Tait in Campston, Tankerness, flit in November,1893, from their farm of Upper Stove in Deerness to the Bu' of Rousam when my father was but a year old. They moved in November 1913 to Hobbister in Orphir, a “gey weet farm”, then back to Stronsay to Whitehall in November 1919. There all our own family of eight were born, the final family move being to Greenland Mains in Caithness in May 1944. None of our own immediate family name of Pottinger remain in Orkney, but I dread going into a strange house in my native land to be told:- "I am your third cousin once removed on the wrong side of the blanket.!!" Long memories!!
Our new century will never hear that old and emotive phrase we grew up with, the descriptive "Men o’ Whitehaa" or “Airy”, the "Men o’ Hobbister", the "Men o' The Bu'". There are few farm workers left. All these farms were our family farms at one time or another. Our father’s two farms of Airy and Whitehall in Stronsay led to a cultivated rivalry, kept the men on their toes, taking home a bigger neep from Airy to show "The Men O' Whitehaa", a handful of heavier oats from Whitehaa to return the compliment, bragging to each farm staff that the other farm was ahead of them, bigger stacks, further on with the singling, a heavier steer, ploughing finished. All great incentives!!! And what better Orkney name to begin a tribute to them all than the very first entry in the Wages Book of Rousam for the six month term from 28th Nov. 1906 to pay day on 28th May, 1907, Andrew Delday, one of the “Men O' the Bu'.” Delday had to be the foreman at Rousam as he was at a higher rate of pay than the others. He came with them from Deerness to Stronsay in 1893. Delday is a Deerness name anyway, in the census of 1901 he was 39, married, living in Springwell, a bowman’s cottage on the Bu’.

1906 ANDREW DELDAY
To six months work from 28th Nov. 1906 to 28th May, 1907. , £10,
Nov. 28th one boal meal
Feby 12th one boal meal
March 28th one boal meal
May 28th, 1907, Paid £10

Ten pounds in the half year, 38p a week, 6 p. a day, 6 days a week, 12 hours a day! I am not kidding. Oatmeal was very much part of the wage, of old called "Cost". Three bolls of oatmeal at 140 lbs each was the standard for six months employment, which worked out at 2.3 lbs. a day, just over one kilogram. So when next you shop at ******!!, find a packet of oatmeal at 500 grams, take two, and that was porridge in the morning, porridge in the evening, porridge at suppertime, enough for a whole household for a day, bairns and all. And maybe a little left over for the chickens and the dog. A worker’s cottage on the farm was normally provided, but I will not answer for the standard thereof.

THOMAS GORN was next, slightly less at £9 the half year. The Book does not state whether cattleman, horseman or shepherd, which would explain slight differences in pay. Gorn had one boll bere meal but it was included in his standard three boals. Bere bread was a staple diet in those days. From 28th Nov. he also had 4 bushels oats at 42lb. the bushel (20kg.) price 9/-, or 2/3d the bushel. Obviously he had some hens, as did all farm workers save the bothy men.

THOMAS GORN Jnr. who had to be a son of Thomas, feed [hired] at £7.10/- Got his three boals of meal and paid £7.10/- on 28th May. Not quite a full grown man with a lesser pay. Whether he was married or not I do not know, he could have sold his three bolls meal if living with his parents. Definitely not a bothy man fed in the Big Hoos.

WILLIAM TOWERS followed at £11 in the half year. He bought 8 bu.of oats at 18/-,one boal bere meal at 11/-. Balance due, £9.11/-. At £11 he must have been the cattleman, a seven day week all winter his lot.

JOHN (Jock) MILLER , £9 in the half. 10 bu. Oats at 22/6d., a boll of bere meal at 11/-, an extra half boal of meal at 7/6d. Do not take me to task for misspelling a "boll", I am only quoting my grandfather’s spelling, and it varied - boll, bole, boal.

SAMUEL BROWN @ £9. 8 bushel oats, and on 18th Dec. 2 lop rabbits @ 3/-. they must have been the lop eared breed of pet rabbit, not just a pair of rabbits for Xmas dinner. A pretty hefty price out of his £9. Rabbits on the Bu' were definitely not an endangered species, then or now, and my father told us how, as boys, he and his brother David snared rabbits on the Rothiesholm Links to make a penny for themselves by selling the skins. An early training in High Finance. Sam Brown was the shepherd and a later entry has "meal for dogs." which was farm provided.

ROBERT SINCLAIR, £9. Had two bushel oats and one boal bere meal. Paid £9 at the May term but no meal. Had one boal bere meal, no charge.. He was working at the Bu’ for the whole half year, had his own small croft on the outer edge of Rousam, and a cartload or two of neeps, a load of straw or some oats, would equate for his three bolls oatmeal. His son Jim went to school with me.

THOS: MILLER , £9. Had the standard three boals meal, but also one boal bere meal at 11/-. Had 2 bu and 4 bu and 2 bu oats, eight bushels weighing 3 cwt, over the 6 month term and called a "quarter" even into my day, price 18/-. Therefore oats were priced at 6/- the cwt of 112lbs., £6 the ton. The old bushel measure was a feature of all farm lofts, today a much prized and polished wooden ornament if still surviving, better still with the original levelling roller, both stamped with the Imperial Crown.

JANE STEVENSON Paid £6 for six months. No meal. I cannot tell if she was an outworker or not, but if she worked in the "Big Hoos" I would not think she would have had a wage of this size. Probably one of the "Steinsens o’ Burragate” on Rousam Head.

MAGGIE J. DEARNESS. £5. As above. She was a young girl of 15 in May 1907 when she had £5, in May 1908 she had £5.10/-, in Nov 1908 £6. Of full wage by then. She is special for me as I remember her, unmarried, living in and working her croft just beyond the old and now abandoned Rothiesholm School. I was in Stronsay in June this year with Sharon to show her my native land and the croft is still alive and kicking, though we did not call at the door. An incomer is in the house, someone else is grazing the land, Maggie is long gone. A visit to her with our father was an event, “The Slap” was her farm, the old Norse name for the gateway onto the heather hill grazings of Rousam Head. She kept "gob stoppers” in a tin on the mantel shelf above the peat fire and we boys were kept quiet with one of these well named enormous pandrops while the adults yarned. She ploughed her patch with a yoke of a cow and a stot, reaped it with a scythe, the everlasting peat fire with its well remembered and evocative smell permeating the whole house. I think our father regularly bought her stot when she was ready to sell it, several years old and with another beast coming onto work. Her cattle were kept at grass on a tether. She and our father were ages, grew up together, died together, she slightly before our father’s own death on 23rd Nov.1958. He never visited Rothiesholm without calling on her.

These are the entries for the first term in the book, the staff of the Bu', no outworkers or hirers mentioned, though there must have been many extras at singling neeps and at harvest time and possibly other times like a threshing day. The cottars of Rothiesholm were not so well off that they would or could refuse some labouring when occasion offered. In the herring fishing season some of them made the long six mile daily trek with their own horse and cart to the Village to earn a £1.
There was always the creels for the crofters, lobsters and crabs, always a bit of fishing, to salt cure or to dry their catch for winter, haddocks, sillocks, which were young cuithes - or coalfish to be correct, cuddings in Caithness, ling, cod, skate, dogfish. Always the peat reek even off their Sunday clothes at Kirk. If they worked at the Bu' the crofters must have been paid as they went as casuals, in cash or in kind, a load of straw, a load of neeps, some oats or bere or meal, a bull service for their cow, an old cast ewe fit for yet one more season if looked after.
This is but a look back over my shoulder, touches only the first half year in the old ledger. There are other snippets as I scan the Bu of Rousam Wages Book, opening other lines of comment or thought as time moves on, I must leave it for another time as this article is already long enough.. To do the Ledger justice would need many other articles, not to rush too hastily over the past but take some time to gently digest it, as do all good meals. I must admit to a deep feeling of awe that this was farm life a mere century ago, the times of my grandfather whom I never knew but who was still alive when I was born, the early working days of my father, the farm from whence three of his brothers became doctors, one a surgeon, the fifth brother William to farm finally in Cleat in Westray after sojourning in Canada and in Redhill. Rothienorman, Aberdeenshire..
There were stories of these Rousam men. One had the strength of hand that allowed him to grip the cross beams on the rafters from underneath between thumb and fingers, and pull himself up to chin the same. In the loft one day with a disagreement over some trifle he took one of his fellows and thrust his head deep into a heap of grain, almost suffocating the poor soul. Sam Brown, shepherd, was a small nuggety man, but once my Uncle John, on holiday from his medical studies in Edinburgh University, was sent to help him dose some ewes. Without noticing it my Uncle John found he was doing all the hard work, Sam standing by the while and meanwhile telling him “You’re doing a grand job, maister.” Could not teach that ould dog new tricks.