George Square, Glasgow, Scotland

The mowing with scythes is done by gangs of men who go from farm to farm doing the work. I came across a party of mowers one morning eating a “tenner” (ten o’clock lunch) under a hedge. In his basket each man had half a loaf of bread and a large piece of cheese, from which he cut off such lumps as his appetite demanded. Each man also had a jug of beer brought from home, and the party had collectively a little keg of ale that was furnished by their master. One of the men went up to the farmhouse for this at about nine o’clock each morning and brought it back slung up on a stick over his shoulder. The men, after they had disposed of their bread and cheese, drank two glasses each of the ale from a horn tumbler, and smoked a pipe of tobacco in between.

When their half hour was up, they all whetted their broad blades and went to work again. They told me that, in their opinions, mowing-machines had had their day, and were destined everywhere to be more and more displaced by hand work.

Tedders and horse-rakes are much less common than with us, particularly the former. Turning and raking are largely done by hand, usually by the women, who also roll the hay into tumbles.

When the work in the hayfields is well under way on a big farm, the operations take on a decided aspect of business and bustle. The most typical haying scene of this sort that I witnessed was in the broad acres of a gentleman’s park. There were two wagons, one always at the rick unloading, while the other was in the field. Two horses were hitched tandem to each wagon, and a ploughboy accompanied each pair to drive them. Two men were on the load, three pitched on, and two old men with big rakes followed the load and gathered the scatterings. At the rick were two men unloading, three on the rick receiving the hay as it was pitched up, and two or three others getting drinks of beer out of the bottles in their baskets that lay under a convenient elm. Two old fellows with fag-hooks were reaping the grass left by the machines along the hedges; two old women and an old man were rolling up the windrows; and a young fellow on a horse-rake was going leisurely back and forth across the field.