No 25. The Long Loft.

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.

Thinking of the many places we escaped to from the house to play, and on a bad day when the wind howled in off the sea from the North and the flat driving sleet stung our bare knees, the Loft was prime. Treasure-house of the farm actually, every window snibbed from the inside, the gable end door barred and the main door at the top of the outside stone stairs locked with a massive old fashioned lock, the key to which the foreman kept. Even father had to get him to open up when needed. Two main lofts actually, the short one next to the threshing mill where the shaking grain trough, slung below the couple backs of the rafters over the straw barn and then through the back wall, delivered the grain from the mill. And the long loft at right angles to it above the yearalts byre where most of the home grown seed grain for next year was stored, and any surplus grain. Between the two lofts was a small connecting loft with the huge pitch-pine farm meal girnel for oat and bere meal, and that loft held the big brass scoop and steel-yard weights hung from the rafters for weighing out meal for the farm workers, or anyone else from the Village buying a little from time to time. That small loft also held the substantial close woven hessian sacks used for meal, kept clean solely for that purpose and no other, stored inside a chicken wire cage, hung over rails out of reach of destructive rats or mice,
The first loft also held the bruiser driven by the Campbell oil engine by a separate belt from the one for the mill but off the same wide driving pulley, opposite direction, changing round the belts as needed. The 6inch wide bruiser had to be manually filled from the heap of oats with a wooden double handled box scoop holding about a bushel of 42lbs – near 20 kilos - but not the round measuring bushel with the official Imperial stamp upon its side. Scoop, lift, tip, scoop, lift, tip, scoop, lift, tip, a long day of monotony for whoever had the task, usually the foreman as he also took care of the engine. The newly bruised oats had to be shoveled back from the bruiser into a long heap along the wall.
From that smaller loft any surplus oats or bere, or any grain to be kept for seed, had to be wheeled in sacks or carried in bags down a few steps into the longer main loft for storage, especially the seed oats with each individual variety in it’s own proper place, shoveled carefully into heaps, squared and dressed, all neat and tidy, never more than three feet high at most, or a bit less. There were good reasons for that, we had no drying facilities for grain, and even after threshing it needed to be looked after. The loft had small wooden hinged door windows either side, still to be seen surviving in old barns of many farm steadings. Some of these doors were horizontal vent louvered, but with gaps too small for even sparrows. A good drying day saw them opened wide to allow fresh air to blow over the grain heaps. When work allowed it, or when necessity demanded it, the men would go to the loft to turn over a suspicious heap, the windows open to give a through breeze. Even quite damp grain could be kept sweet and prevented from heating, but it might need frequent turning and gradually dried in the process. Hard work. The thermometer used was thrust your hand into the heap and feel for warmth. I have seen a heap getting quite warm, and even at Isauld long years later we did the same with grain spread on the loft floor, and it worked. In the cornyard stacks would keep surprisingly well even if harvested a bit “soft”, but threshed grain from those stacks could be a bit dodgy. Turning over the grain heaps was good practice anyway, kept grain just that bit fresher and sweeter. Nothing changes.
The labour expended on just moving grain from the mill was monstrous, the distances along the lofts substantial. Differing varieties obviously had to be kept separate, and there were many different kinds. Castleton oats, said to be named from the farm of that name in Aberdeenshire where the farmer saw a specially interesting oat growing on his dung midden, looked after it to ripeness, saved it and multiplied the oddity by sowing it again and again over several years till it was safely established. Potato oats began in Cumberland in 1788 in a potato field sown to oats the year after the tatties, hence the name “Potato”, one lonely aberrant mutated plant but noted and put to good use by the observant farmer. Sandy oats, thin skinned and very good for meal milling, had a similar beginning in 1824 at Milton of Noth, Aberdeenshire, when a herd boy, Sandy Thomson, seeing it growing on a bank of cleanings from a ditch, saved it, and it was grown on by the farmer. It eventually became a very widely grown oat on poorer soils and was again a good milling oat, thin skinned as we called the husk. Indeed many of the new varieties of oats were found accidentally but with keen observation. Genetic modification in its infancy I guess, and all as natural as could be. An oat growing on the midden was not unusual, we saw it many times, and sometimes wondered if we could emulate that Aberdeenshire farmer. Murtle oats, black and white mottled grain, bonny, a good meal oat, said to originate in Murkle in Caithness. Black oats with a very oily polished skin, a very sweet variety, a nice oat. Pure line oats. The oats I mentioned are just some of the ones which we grew at Whitehall, there were many other varieties, tried and kept or discarded. I remember a Stronsay farmer getting some new seed oats, and we went with father to see them growing, a possible new import for ourselves.
Caithness had a great interest in growing oats and bere a long time ago – see my transcribed copy of Aneas Bayne,1734, in Wick Archives - exporting 16,000 bolls of 140 lbs weight of both grains, mostly from Staxigoe, Scrabster, and the Rivermouth of Thurso, shipping it to Norway, Danzig ( now Gdansk ) Glasgow, Inverness, and to Strathnaver, that wonderful Strath which as far back as 1734 had to import grain from Caithness as they were not self sufficient, paying for it with young horses to Caithness and small black cattle to drove South.
The loft also was the store for bought in feed for the cattle, sweet black locust beans which we stole and ate on occasion, linseed cake in slabs which were crushed for the cattle through a hand turned oil cake crusher with spiked rollers, linseed meal flakes the size of small biscuits, bran, flaked maize, barrels of treacle, some fish meal from Stronsay’s own fish meal factory, an adjunct to the herring fishing, very smelly indeed but the cattle seemed to relish it. Indeed the heady smells of the various bought in feeds were evocative, so we dreamed of far away places and distant lands.
Father had some Aberdeen Angus pedigree cattle, sold a few pure bred yearling bulls each year in Kirkwall, and had some fancy feeds for them. All these feeds were lifted into the loft through a door in the gable end, again hard work with no hoists but two men on the cart swinging the bags between them and then “Hup” and through the door for someone else to store on the loft floor. While not totally free of vermin the lofts were reasonably rat proof with Rodine poison laid down and rat traps set.
But the most memorable use I remember for these same lofts was in 1935, 12TH Dec., when Peter Stevenson married Nettie Shearer, both of them working on Whitehall Farm. Peter, one of the Stevensons o’ Burrogate on Rousam Head, was our foreman. The bruiser was covered for the occasion with blankets or rugs, or spare bed spreads, the floors were swept and swept again, all odds and ends disappeared temporarily, such grain as was on the floors was unobtrusively tidied away. We did not store much grain apart from seed oats, feeding grain was generally used as it was threshed, seed oats being threshed nearer sowing time as it kept better unthreshed in the stack.
The marriage ceremony was held in the bruiser loft, Mr. Ramage, later to Wick, officiating. Then the company moved to the long loft, trestle tables laid out down the middle, benches for seating, food piled high but from where I do not know. Hissing primus stoves boiled the water for tea, Island life would see to the wedding feast, a wealth of willing helpers. I do know our mother made a broust of Orkney home-brew for the occasion, brewed some time previous as it had to mature for a few months to be at its drinkable best. Memory dims somewhat, I really cannot remember if we sat at the table to share the feast, I think not, but I and David and Norna were there at the wedding ceremony. I would think we would have snitched a morsel or two off the table anyway, then back into the House while the floor was cleared and the dance got going. We could hear the drift of music from the loft, no nonsense such as today’s amplifiers, and the lively sound of people enjoying themselves as only Orkney Islanders can.
Peter later came to Greenland Mains with us in November 1944, then on to Thusater above Scrabster with Andrew Sutherland, then got a small farm for himself, Fairview in the Hill of Forse. He got a day job with the Council working on the roads. They ended their days in Robertson Lane in Thurso, celebrated their golden wedding there in Dec. 1985. A short few months later, Monday 11th March 1986 Peter died, his funeral on the Thursday. Nettie died on Friday. You could well say of them full of years and still together.