On the West Coast, the heavy rainfall is unfavourable to agriculture on any extended scale. From Assynt to Mull the average rain-gauge is thirty-five inches, and the cottars of Ross were threatened with the fate of the Irish in Connemara, through periodic failures in the herring fishery and liabilities for their scanty holdings to their landlords. Miller found the men of Gairloch, in 1823, where the public road was a good day's journey from the place, still turning up or scratching the soil with the old Highland _cass-chron_, and the women carrying the manure on their backs to the fields in spring, while all the time they kept twirling the distaff--old and faded before their time, like the women in some of the poorer cantons the traveller meets with in Switzerland. Their constant employment was the making of yarn; and, as we have seen, the spinning-wheel was for long as rare as the possession of a plough or horse. The boats built for the fishing were still caulked with moss dipped in tar and laid along the seams, the ropes being made of filaments of moss-fir stripped with the knife, while the sails were composed of a woollen stuff whose hard thread had been spun on the distaff, for hemp and flax were practically unknown. Such, in 1263, had at Largs been the equipment of the galleys of Haco, 'When Norse and Danish galleys plied Their oars within the Firth of Clyde, And floated Haco's banner trim Above Norweyan warriors grim.' _Marmion_, iii. xx. Such, too, had been the traditional custom for centuries after of the boatbuilders in the Western Highlands.