IN THE HIGHLANDS 187 



the grass of their distant hill pastures by grazing them 

 with sheep, instead of with cattle. 



Before the potato blight in the early forties, it was 

 fairly easy to raise food anywhere on the coast, where 

 sea-ware was procurable. Though most of the ground 

 consisted of poor peaty soil among stones and rocks, 

 sea-ware with its potash would generally force a crop — 

 often a bumper crop — of potatoes out of almost any soil, 

 even though wet and boggy, if it was made into what 

 were known as " lazy beds," such as are so common 

 to-day in the West of Ireland. Though the good effects 

 of the sea-ware were not very permanent, the land thus 

 planted with potatoes would give at least one heavy 

 following crop of oats the next year. There was also a 

 considerable amount of cultivation inland, there being 

 in the parish of Gairloch a good number of what are 

 called in Gaelic Bailtean Monaidh (inland townships). 

 These townships were too far from the coast for sea- 

 ware to be transported on men's and women's backs, 

 the only method of transit in the days when there were 

 no roads and consequently no carts in the district. So 

 what the inland crofters did was this. They chose fairly 

 smooth pieces of sloping ground, which had to be as dry 

 as possible naturally, as they knew nothing about 

 artificial draining, and they would then surround them 

 with a low dyke of stones and turf, just sufficiently high 

 to keep the cows from getting over. In some cases they 

 used movable wicker-hurdles, where birch and hazel 

 were handy, and into one of the enclosures the cattle 

 were driven after being milked in the evening, to pass 

 the night, for perhaps a fortnight or three weeks, until 



