No 13. Threshing the corn, old and new.

RAIN ON MY WINDOW, TEARS IN MY EYES. Morris Pottinger
No 13. Threshing Day. Pb 21.03.2008

All hands to the mill. Threshing corn must have been the first of the old farm tasks to be mechanised, slowly progressing from the days of wooden flails and winnowing the grain between two opposing barn doors designed to get a through draught. This can yet be seen in many of the old clearance houses, ruins on the land but with foundations still standing. These systems were completed with a simple drying kiln at one end of the building, beehive shaped with stone built corbelled walls, good examples still to be seen at Rossal in Strathnaver. Of course one does not need to go to Rossal, there are plenty to be seen in Caithness, one still at Sibster, Wick, but Rossal is worth a visit anyway, to stand and stare and marvel at how people then lived, to be cleared from Rossal in 1819, the truncated remains wonderfully preserved today for people to visit.
On then to laborious hand mills still in some farm museums. There must be one at Laidhay, if not then there should be. As boys we saw one working on a small croft, I think more of a curiosity but it did work. Some of these old ways were still around when we were small, we tried an old one ourselves at next door Yernesetter until we tired, pinching for it a sheaf of oats for a bit of boyhood fun.
There were many forms of driving the very simple wooden-peg-drum threshing mills. Water power was important where it could be harnessed, the mill dam a feature, and still existing if unused on many farms, fed in a variety of ways by ditches or by tapping a mill lade into an existing burn or stream. There was a wonderful arrangement on Forss Estate (Sinclair) west of Thurso, water being taken across the hillside and back again by ditches from one farm to the next lower down so that all in their turn got benefit of the water. Again now all gone, but well shown in the first Ordinance Survey Map of 1876.
At Lower Dounreay before my day there was a water wheel driving the mill and worked from a mill dam fed by the former meandering burn straightened in 1853 by Robert Brown, C.E. and William Reid Tait, factor for the Murkle Estate. That new mill lade still runs beside the present access road to Vulcan. The mill dam was there with it’s attendant sluice gate when I bought Lower Dounreay, though by then no longer used, the water wheel gone for scrap though the shed remained. It drove the threshing mill but now all is gone under the UKAEA. An alternative system on many farms was the horse mill course where a varied number of horses walked round and round harnessed to a cross beam and a rotating centre pivot, the drive taken underground by a shaft and through the barn wall into the mill. I have an old existing now unused horse mill course at Buldoo, better ones still survive as relics of the past. Move on then to steam engines with tall sixty foot high brick-built chimney stacks of which none are left in Caithness that I know of, but still there until recently in memory of man. In turn these were superseded by the wonderful paraffin oil engines I grew up with, and indeed worked at Lower Dounreay until finishing end of Spring 1956. Power moved on from these to tractors with belt pulleys, some rear mounted such as Ferguson {Fergys} and David Brown tractors, some at the side such as Fordsons and Nuffields. Then on to electric motors and finally combine harvesters have seen them all off. At Whitehall Farm almost on the top of the hill there was no water power for threshing and I remember only that old Campbell oil engine and the starting of it in the mornings. Thus it was “ All hands to the mill.” on threshing day.
I wrote previously of starting the old oil engine and getting everything going. The mill at Whitehall was built in situ, who by I do not know, but I do remember Davie Davidson, a superlative millwright with Robert Scarth in Kirkwall, coming to Whitehall and doing work on the mill. What he did I do not remember but he was very skilled indeed and worked miracles with shafts and belts and cross overs that one had to see to believe. Later he came over to Caithness and did the same work on our mills at Greenland Mains and at Stemster Mains, putting in wonderful things such as straw blowers and straw elevators and grain conveyors and bruisers.
Threshing day at Whitehall began in the stackyard loading a patient horse with a cartload of sheaves, two carts time about. Into the sheaf window and one man pitch-forking the sheaves through the window, where another man forked the sheaves onto a waist high sheaf board at the side of the drum. There the foreman took the sheaf in his left hand, slashed the bindertwine with a sharp knife part of a right hand glove made for the job, at the same time spreading it thinly completely across the mouth of the high speed drum to give a smooth feed. Could be quite dangerous and care had to be taken not to let one’s hand be snatched with the sheaf into the maw and lose it. Did happen at times, once to a relation of my father. These drums could really grab the sheaf and smooth feeding was a fine art.
The mill itself did all the next part of threshing, separating the grain from the straw, and the chaff from the grain. Older mills had a man at the far end bagging off the sacks of grain from alternate spouts, heavy enough work as he had to move a filled sack away and place another on the spout handles. These 4 bushel sacks would weigh about 160 lbs for oats and 220lbs for heavier barley, though not weighed directly off the mill. My first winter at Isauld,1955 to 1956 we did just that, the heavy bags then being hoisted up through a three foot square hatch in the loft floor and wheeled to wherever we wanted the grain to lie. Arduous work, time consuming, we knew no other. The following winter all was changed with a wonderful new Garvie mill, grain elevators and conveyors, straw conveyors, corn bruiser worked off the mill so we could thresh and bruise at the same time.
At Whitehall we had a grain elevator, then delivering by a oscillating shaking horizontal trough which took the grain along below the rafters above the straw barn and into the grain loft beyond. On occasion it did not work too well if the crop was heavy with grain and the trough would spill over, necessitating stopping and clearing the problem. This was one of the improvements Davie Davidson did for my father, a far cry from carrying bags of grain on one’s shoulders from the threshing mill and out and along an outdoor flagstone pavement and up a sometimes slippery outside stone stairs and into the grain lofts, as had been done long before my memory.
The mill also discharged lighter grain called tails at the side of the mill and a man had to keep an occasional eye on that to keep it’s exit clear, and also to keep the short bits of straw called strumps from building up at the end of the mill. The threshed straw had to be continuously carried away from that end of the mill, a two man job with one man carrying and pitching it up to another who built it in high tiers across the width of the straw barn. A steady job again, no slacking allowed. And always slipping flat belts needing tightening, or breaking and needing repair. These were threshing days when I was a boy.
There was one other item worthy of mention, more to we boys favour. The stacks in the cornyard were often home to an incredible number of mice and a not quite so large population of rats. Standard practice before starting to take in a stack for threshing was to put a ring of chicken-wire right round the stack far enough away to prevent any rat from jumping over it from on high. Inside that ring we often had a small terrier, and sometimes we boys had a chance to take part in the hunt with sticks and tackety boots. When the stack was almost finished sheaf pitching slowed right down to give us a better chance to deal with an avalanche of pesky critters. The last sheaf was the best, little varmints going everywhere. I rather think that was our real interest on threshing day.