Tools & tillage: a journal on the history of the implements of cultivation and other agricultural processes (2.1972/1975)

132

A. FENTON

distribution to the peaty or rocky districts of
the north-west Highlands and Islands of Scot-
land. This pattern was confirmed by an early
nineteenth century writer:
“As far as is known, this primitive plough is
confined to the Highlands: no traces of it at
least have been found elsewhere; not even in
India, where the simplest draught plough,
formed of a crooked branch, is still in use. We
might imagine the cashroom to have been the

Fig. 1. A one-piece caschrom from Ullapool, near
Rhu. In the Highland Folk Museum, Kingussie
(5912, A 12).


Ein caschrom aus einem Stuck aus Ullapool bei Rhu.
contrivance of man where the use of animals
was unknown” (Macculloch 1824. III. 209).
Within this area, which was characterised by
an intensive use of the caschrom, no evidence
has so far been found to take it back to any
particularly early period. Though it has been
taken by H. Kothe that a statement relating to
the island of Taransay in 1549, ’’all this tilth is
delvit with spaidis, except sa mekle as ane hors
pleuch will teill” (Monro 1961. 80), refers to
the caschrom (Kothe 1959. 320), there is noth-
ing to support such a view.
Over a century later, it was said that the
people in the island of St. Kilda used a “Crook-
ed Spade” with an iron blade almost half an

inch thick at the edge to cultivate their soil
(Martin 1698. 28, 140). It has been shown,
however (Fenton 1962-3. 313), that though
’’crooked spade“ is a normal translation into
English of the Gaelic caschrom, nevertheless
there is no other positive reference to the cas-
chrom in St.Kilda until the first half of the nine-
teenth century, though spades are mentioned
there in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.
Curiously enough, it also appears that the cas-
chrom was again replaced there by the spade
soon after the mid-nineteenth century, for one
visitor who noted that all their ground was dug
with the spade, nevertheless saw “a cass chrom
or two put away on the rafters” (Sands 1876-8.
XII. 190). Martin, therefore, may have been
referring to the kind of spade known as a cas
dhireach, the form of which can broadly re-
semble the Irish loy, with a similar swelling or
heel at the back that might justify the term,
“crooked”. In his other book that refers to St.
Kilda, Martin speaks only of a “foot spade”
(Martin 1703. 286).
From the point of view of terminology, there
is nothing to suggest an early date. The word
caschrom itself is a simple combination of
cas, a shaft, and crom, crooked, or bent {chrom
is an aspirated form, agreeing with a feminine
noun). The foot-peg is the sgonnan (NSA.
1845. XIV. 350; McDonald 1958. 215), a dimi-
nutive form of sgonn, a short block of wood
(Dwelly (1901-11) 1949. s.v.). The iron blade
of the caschrom is the ceaba (McDonald 1958.
64) or caibe (Dwelly (1901-11) 1949. s.v.),
though this term also applies to the iron shoe
of any digging implement. The terminology is
descriptive or of a general nature, and does
not in itself indicate any particular degree of
antiquity for the caschrom.
The documentary sources, therefore, do not
provide conclusive proof of the existence of the
caschrom in the seventeenth century. Never-
theless its relatively wide distribution in the
north-west Highlands and Islands in the eigh-