A Walk from London to John O'Groat's: With Notes by the WayBurritt, Elihu
History
A Walk from London to John O'Groat's: With Notes by the Way
Burritt, Elihu
Agriculture -- Great Britain; England -- Description and travel
I noticed on this day's walk the same singular habit that struck me
in the north part of Yorkshire; that is, of cutting inward upon the
standing grain. Several persons, frequently women and boys, follow
the mowers, and pick up the swath and bind it into sheaves, using no
rake at all in the process. So pertinaciously they seem to adhere
to this remarkable and awkward custom, that I saw two mowers walk
down a hill, a distance of full a hundred rods, with their scythes
under their arms, in order to begin a new swath in the same way;
four or five men and women running after them full tilt to bind the
grain as it fell! Here was a loss of at least five minutes each to
half a dozen hands, amounting to half an hour to a single man at the
end of each swath or work. Supposing the mowers made twenty in ten
hours from bottom to top of the field, here is the loss of one whole
day for one man, or one sixth of the whole aggregate time applied to
the harvesting of the crop, given to the mere running down that hill
of six pairs of legs for no earthly purpose but to cut inward
instead of outward, as we do. The grain-ricks in Scotland are
nearly all round and quite small. Every one of them is rounded up
at the top and fitted with a Mandarin-looking hat of straw, which
sheds the rain well. A good-sized farm-house is flanked with quite
a village of these little round stacks, looking like a comfortable
colony of large, yellow tea-caddies in the distance.
Reached Perth a little after dark, having made a walk of nearly
twenty miles after 11 a.m. Here I remained over the Sabbath, and
greatly enjoyed both its rest and the devotional exercises in some
of the churches of the city.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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