The Harvesting and Processing of Grain

Nothing struck early commentators on the Hebrides more forcibly than the sight of how the average farmer harvested and processed their grain. The hall-mark of the supposedly primitive practices that confronted them was the harvesting of grains by hand, though this had the advantage of enabling the grain to be selected from amongst a ground cover rich in weeds and enabled more of the straw to be preserved for thatch. Graddaning, or the drying of grain over an open fire, needs also to be seen in context.   It was only used where communities did not have access to a drying kiln and where or when grain was harvested under wet conditions.  The use of the quern or horizontal mill, both widely used practices, also had a context. Both provided localised solutions. The quern especially was a domestic solution, enabling the harvest to be quickly turned into available flour in house, a positive advatange when communities had struggled through a hungry gap. Though it involved heavy inputs of labour, the harvest was also not top-sliced by a miller and the demand for multures.   In other words, the quern maximised the use what was often a very limited harvest. Horizontal mills too can be seen as a localised solution, with the larger touns having four or five within their bounds. They were suited to environments in which small streams were fairly present but not the large rivers and regular flow needed to operate a vertical mill economic. The lack of rivers with a regular flow became an issue by the late seventeenth century when landowners decided that building larger vertical mills enabled them to raise estate income with those built covering quite large districts. Having to carry grain some distance over difficult ground and to lose part of their crop in the payment of multures was seen by communities as an unnecessary burden. It is for this reason that landowners struggled to force tenants into the use of vertical mills even where estates set out to confiscate querns.