ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS 237 



from place to place wherever their principal fixed on 

 land suitable for the puT-pose. To these itinerant " wad- 

 men " is traced the system of building Woad mills and 

 their own dwellings with turf sods, and of employing 

 horses to drive the crushing mills, the survival of both 

 characteristics at Parson Drove to the present day forming 

 such an interesting feature for the archaeologist. The 

 next stage leads to the crushing mill, where in a long 

 cart of special construction, the leaves are brought and 

 deposited on its floor — a circular depression thirty feet 

 in diameter and two feet deep, paved with stone slabs. 

 Three large, equidistant crashing wheels radiating from 

 a common centre, and propelled by three horses walking 

 round and round outside and just above the rim of the 

 floor, effectively crush the leaves into pulp. The mass is 

 then thrown out into the Balling House, and moulded 

 by hand into balls about the size of a cricket ball, which 

 are carried to the drying shed, and arranged on shelves 

 constructed so as to ensure a free circulation of air, where 

 they remain to the end of the season, by which time 

 they have become quite black — like the hands of the 

 workers who manipulate them — though by picking off" 

 the surface the brown fibre of the leaves is at once 

 discernible. The next step is to bring these hard, black 

 balls back to the same mill to be crushed into dry powder, 

 which is shovelled out, and spread on the brick floor 

 of another building called the Couch Barn, to be couched. 

 " Couching " means heating to produce fermentation, a 

 process which lasts for about two months, water being used 

 to assist it. The final operation consists in weighing the 

 thick, dam]), brown paste, for such it now is, and sending 

 it off" in half-hundred-weights to the Dyer or Drysalter 

 for treatment in his vats. Up to this stage, though there 

 is black, brown and olive-green, there is not the slightest 

 indication of any blue colour. In order to obtain blue 

 from Woad (which, paradoxically enough, as I shall explain 

 later on, the dyer of the present day does not want to do !) 



