RETTING 261 



The water of the pond soon assumes a deep brown 

 hue and a powerful putrefactive odour. The evil 

 effects of flax water upon fish when it finally gets 

 washed back into the rivers is a sore subject in the 

 North of Ireland. In other cases on lower land deep 

 ditches may be cut, or a small stream may be dammed 

 or a pond dug out by the side of a river, so that it can 

 be readily filled. In the pond the bundles lie for a 

 week to a fortnight, according to the temperature and 

 the character of the previous growth (on all public 

 places we saw notices posted by the Department of 

 Agriculture warning growers to steep their flax 

 specially thoroughly in that year of drought), then the 

 bundles are taken out, opened and spread abroad on 

 a field from which seeds hay has been cut. Here the 

 retting process completes itself in about a week, but the 

 grower has to use his judgment when the flax is really 

 ready to be gathered up into stacks. The flax plant 

 has a green cylindrical stalk and the linen fibre for 

 which it is grown forms a sheath round the central core 

 just below the green outer skin. During the retting 

 process the outer soft green matter decays away and 

 also the material uniting the linen fibre to the core or 

 pith, until a stage is reached when a brittle stick of 

 pith can be pulled out whole from the sheath of freed 

 fibre. 



After stacking some time between October and 

 February the flax is carted off to the scutching mill, 

 where it passes under a simple tool which beats the 

 straw until the core or pith is reduced to a powder and 

 falls away from the clean fibre. Throughout all the 

 processes from pulling to scutching the flax stalks are 

 kept parallel and not bundled up together so as to 

 entangle the fibre. The scutching mill makes a fixed 

 charge of is. a stone, and from the mill the flax is also 



