Sometimes when talking to someone from a town, puzzlement will ensue if you mention e.g. the word "buckrake" or "hayflash" or "cutting bar". People don't know what you're on about - and it's not easy to describe the difference between an acrobat, a flash and a tedder ...
So here goes - references in each case are to the pictures beneath:
Trailer - typical of the kind of old wooden (non-tipping) trailer used mainly to draw in (transport) loads of hay bales. You needed an expert on hand to tighten the tethers (tie-ropes) on the load. The idea would usually be to see who could build the biggest load of bales. Of course, more time was wasted trying to build this tower of harvest babel on the trailer - it would have been more efficient to do more runs with smaller loads - and it was not unheard of that the entire thing would topple over and need to be re-built; but sure, that was part of the crack. As a small boy, you would generally be atop the load, which added to the excitement as the thing swayed alarmingly on the typically bad, hilly farming ground of South West Ulster. My scariest moment came as, aged about 7, I ran after the emptied trailer as it was being driven back to the fields. The tethers had been left trailing. My fun was to catch the tethers so as to be dragged along by the speeding tractor (without being seen by the pipe-smoking driver, who had no idea that he had an idiot for company). The fun stopped as the rope looped itself tight on my ankle and I was swung wide at speed, headed for a stout thorn hedge - I managed to get my shoe off, but was a bit bruised and shook up. You didn't call out or tell anyone, for fear of being laughed at, or admonished for being an idiot. Health and safety didn't exist. Provided you survived, perhaps you were the better for it.
Dogs joined in the fun:
2-score plough - the "bad land" plough, very suitable for smaller fields and hilly farms and smaller tractors - the default plough of SW Tyrone and Fermanagh farmers:
Acrobat - an older type of hay-turning device, replaced by the hay-flash:
Traditional small-bale hay baler - a very typical scene from the 1970s and 1980s and, to any farm kid in the 1970s and 1980s, a glorious sound of Summer - nothing said "school's out" more clearly than that unmistakeable sound, carried on the breeze - the "vum-vum, vum-vum, vum-vum" sound of a baler in action as it gathered in the hay, punctuated regularly by the "chunk-click" sound as the knotter finished and the newly-minted bale popped out. You ran towards the first bale, slipping your fingers under the baler twine to gauge the weight of the bale - rushy hay meant a light bale, green hay meant a heavy bale, well-won hay meant a medium weight. There would be thousands of them to be handled in the days ahead, as the 24x7 outdoor weight-lifting of loading and stacking the bales onto trailers and into farm sheds tightened your desk-slackened muscles and the bite of the baler twine calloused your soft student palms into annual manliness.
Chain harrow - an absolute baftard to straighten out if it was stored untidily - you think untangling your PC cables is difficult, try untangling one of these yokes:
Cutting bar (machine in foreground). Prior to the invention of the drum-mower (a device which uses one or two blunt pieces of metal per cylinder and achieves a cutting action by sheer speed and brute force), the trusty cutting bar was the weapon of choice. It was faster than a scythe, but not massively so. Comprising multiple triangular blades sliding horizontally back and forth between vicous looking "teeth", the cutting bar had to be properly set up and each blade hand-sharpened with a file, hone and oil-cloth. It would take a full day to set the bitch up. However, it cut very cleanly - the much faster drum-mower sometimes left untidy fringes:
Cutting bar working:
An unusual machine - the elevator. (The word had a different meaning on farms.) Invented near the end of the small-bale era, few farmers had one. They were a godsend in a large shed. The alternative was two blokes at ground level, swinging the bales 30 feet into the air. Could be a curse though if you were the one tasked with building the bales near the roof of the shed. The thing made it very easy for bales to be sent up in jig-time; and, as the stack of bales got higher and higher and ever nearer to the corrugated shed roof, the last two rows were pure purgatory - the roof invariably was boiling hot, the steam of heat and dust from the bales assailed your nostrils, you were dripping with sweat, the constant chafing from the bales rubbed your forearms raw - and the lack of space meant you had to lie down flat and wriggle your way to the back of the shed, somehow hauling the heavy bale behind you, all the while regaled by shouts from below to "hurry up". Once, in a temper as bales rained in on me from all directions, I started firing them back down again. Nowadays, kids sit indoors and twiddle their thumbs on play-stations. There's no work for them to do; and they have all their activities organised for them. I marvel when I hear other parents talking of kids being "bored" - if you were silly enough to mention the b-word in our house when I was growing up, you'd be landed with a back-breaking task that could take hours to complete. You learned very quickly to make your own crack and to shut up about being "bored"!
Hay-flash. This replaced the acrobat. Used to turn newly-cut hay over so that the sun could wilt the underside of the swathe. Once fully dried, a "guard" was attached to one side so that the hay could be bunched up in neat rows for the baler. The flash was replaced by the drum-tedder; but, while massively faster, the "tedder" aka "kicker" never could set up a row as beautifully as the flash. A delicate machine with light tines, prone to breaking if the flash was lowered too much on its trailing wheels and in consequence the tines would snag on the earth and would snap. You had to set the height properly - too low and you smashed up the tines; too high and you left half the hay untouched.
The No 1 utility machine in any small farm - the link-box. Attached via a 3-point linkage and equipped with a basic tipping mechanism (modern, fancier link-boxes have hydraulic tipping mechanisms), the link box would carry anything from earth to cow-shit, passengers to sick calves, groceries (in snowy weather when cars were no use and provisions had to be purchased in the village shop - no salting roads or ringing the council) to vegetables.
A jolting task - the potato, or as it was commonly known, the pirdy-dropper. You sat or clung to a metal seat bolted directly to the machine. A small metal guide wheel ran in the furrows. The women and older folk had prepared the "cuts" - raw potatoes sliced in half, always ensuring to leave an "eye" in each cut so that they would grow. The cuts were poured into the container at the top. As the guide-wheel turned, it sounded a bell and as every bell sounded, you dropped a cut down the metal pipe and the ploughs closed over the drill. Months later, bent double, you scurried after the potato digger and gathered proper organic potatoes - the fruits of what you had dropped earlier - before digging a large pit in the field and storing them in the pit lined with straw and covered over with earth. The best way to store potatoes. Skimp on the earth and the frost would have them.
A sharp-toothed silage buckrake, used for lifting and packing freshly cut grass into a pit for fermenting to make silage. Conventional general purposes buckrakes had larger, hollow teeth.
Chemical fertiliser sower. I never was comfortable with the loss of traditional organic farming disciplines such as crop rotation. However, discarded plastic fertiliser bags quarter filled with straw were just the job for sliding down snowy fields - faster and more portable than any shop-sleigh which was generally heavy, slow and useless.
2-rotor (Deutz Fahr) hay-tedder (replaced the hay-flash):
Drum-mower - replaced the cutting-bar:
Baler - roll up your sleeves:
Spinner pirdy-digger:
Side-action muck spreader. Cowshit has to go somewhere folks ... However, this was used to spread proper organic manure, i.e., solid manure mixed with straw - practically odourless and close to earth - an olfactory world away from the putrid femented toxic slurry of today.
And here's a legend - a machine for all seasons - the legendary 35 - pound for pound, the finest small tractor ever made. I had my first driving lesson on one, aged 5.
Farming used to be a physical business - I'm amazed at the plethora of minaturised track diggers, fence post bashers etc that nowadays do what used to be done easily enough by hand. As with ride-on lawnmowers, I'm un-convinced by the need for half of them. Sure, they're handier but most people are overweight - go figure! Do some real work instead maybe - with these:
The pitch fork - in heavy hay, or "second cut" hay (where cutting had been delayed for whatever reason and there was a "double crop", even the best mechanical hay turners would struggle - often, faced with a "plug" of tangled wet long grass, all the machine would do would be to fling the matted grass from one spot to another. Just as rolled-up wet laundry will never dry, regardless of where you hang it, so too did really heavy green hay benefit from being individually teased out into looser strands, for more efficient drying. Particularly useful where rain theatened and 90% of the field was already won, sometimes there was nothing for it but for every man to grab a pitch fork and shake the hell out of that hay ... it sounds idyllic, and in many ways it was - but you have to have done it to realise just how heavy long green grass with the sap still in it could be - once, the stout wooden handle of the pitchfork I was using snapped under the sheer weight of grass.
The graip - chiefly used for mucking out cow byres and "graiping" hand-cut silage onto the link-box for taking to feeders in remote pastures:
Pirdy graip - narrow-gap prongs and rounded prong-ends meant you could shovel up potatoes without damaging them.
The navvy shovel - mainly used for shovelling loads of sand or earth onto trailers. Faced with a new navvy, older men would spit on their hands, and swing it, using their bent knee as a fulcrum. If the balance was wrong, they'd spit on the ground and fire it to one side. Experience had taught them that a badly-balanced navvy shovel would put your back out, and they were as fussy as any hurler or snooker player would be with a hurl or a cue - "Take that back to where you got it, cub", you'd be admonished, "thon's no shovel."
The general-purpose foot spade. Useful for just about anything - digging trenches and drains, gardening, etc.
The double-edged long-handled bill-hook. Keep one of these boys handy for a burglar! Used for slashing down tangles of briars, small branches and vegetation, it combined weight, length and sharpness - as with the pitchfork, a potentially lethal weapon in foolish hands.
The 2-man cross cut - used for felling large trees where a small chain-saw would stick in the wood.
The fencing crow-bar - grabing it with both hands, you drove it into the ground with all your might to start the hole for a fence post. Once a narrow hole had been made, you drove the fence post home with the sledge. Once, I drove one through a wasps nest. They steamed out, looking for vengeance and went for my sister who just happened to be standing in their outraged way. She had to jump in a river to escape. Meantime, the heroic yours truly fled in the opposite direction, shedding garments as I went. The main difference between wasps and bees (other than bees producing honey) is that wasps can sting repeatedly (bees die after stinging). I've yet to meet anyone who would stand still with a couple of thousand angry wasps bearing down on them, and you can see why they were riled - there they were, settling down to watch some Fox News (wasp TV, gettit, doh) and suddenly a massive steel bar comes through their roof ...
Nowadays, you'd ring the council and ask for pest control; but we had our own retribution. My Dad was an expert bee-keeper and, once they had settled down again into their nest, he swung by with a bale of straw soaked in diesel and well, one struck match later and that was that - wasp inferno.
The sledge. There was a real art to wielding a sledge, when driving home fence posts. On the up-swing, you let some slip happen, and the down-swing comes from your feet, like a boxer's punch. Oh, and you had to be accurate - there was always some poor sod holding the fence post in position as you swung the sledge past his head. It was always comical to watch the feeble efforts of a townie when you handed him a sledge - an unfair test of course, as it's a mix of strength and technique, and if your technique is absent, you'll look like a klutz, no matter how strong you are.
The silage knife - sharpened to a point and kept greased to protect it from corrosive silage, you drove it into packed pitted silage, using your foot on the projecting lug. Try that across the width of an entire silage shed to cut free sufficient silage for a hundred hungry animals and you'd have little need for step aerobics ...
Back-sprayer - for spraying potato plants - "bluestone", aka copper sulphate solution was used to prevent blight - mixed in a barrel - heavy on your back and the usually primitive straps cut into your shoulders. You wore old clothes as the bluestone ruined all it touched. You wore a handkerchief around your face, nothing more:
Not something I ever used seriously, though I would have done all the other jobs associated with "spade" turf - footing, wheeling, spreading, rickling [see my listing of Trillick area vernacular words for the etymology of "rikl" and other words], clamping, bagging, loading and offloading. This is a typical Ulster spade; different styles were in use in different parts of the country. A real expert could cut and nick the turf with his arms alone; and the best cutters would always "nick" the turf so that you could fire the turf up onto the bank without needing to pull them clear of their roots.
A turf barrow, used for wheeling the newly-cut turf out to be spread. Sometimes used for peace and quiet, generally a tractor and link-box would be used.
A pick. Used to start digging a trench when you needed to break though eg concrete or till. My one claim to fame with a pick is that I once managed to break the iron head of one, bashing at an especially recalcitrant rock - great therapy ...
A stubbing-axe, used when you needed to pick and clear ground of weeds or loose earth at the same time.
Slash-hook, used for weeding in inaccesible places where a scythe would be too big.
A scythe. Replaced in general farming by cutting bars and drum mowers, but still in my time used to cut grass in small gardens where machines could not enter, or to cut weeds. Technique was everything - a skiller operator was characterised by an amazing economy of motion (no wild swings) and could set up cut grass in neat swathes. Once, at a party in a Dublin friend's newly-acquired weekend country cottage, I listened to her wondering what she would do with all the weeds and long grass in the field adjoining her cottage. She had tried a lawnmower, with limited results. She and her friends had had a go with the old blunt scythe they found in a shed attached to the old cottage. Watching them, I became concerned that they would kill themselves or whoever was nearby. I am a terrible man with a scythe (my Uncle, who was an expert, would bless himself theatrically any time he saw me pick up a scythe) but, bad as I was, I was still miles better than any of them. Amazed that anyone could operate such a museum-piece at all, they chattered excitedly and took photos, as if they had seen a neanderthal come to life ... which in a way maybe they had.
A traditional wooden hay rake. Used for "raking in" when making a ruck (rick) of hay; and also for tidying up hay rows for a baler. The metal headed short tooth garden rake is useless, being far too heavy and far too short in the tooth. As with pitchforks, impromptu competitions sometimes ensued, to see who could balance a pitchfork or rake on your chin for the longest period while e.g., running.
The short shovel - mainly used for shovelling b/s around. (Nowadays replaced in most jobs by a Blackberry.)
