Sutherland Reclamation. 
437 
then asked them to come to work at twelve o'clock that night. 
To this they readily assented. They kept their promise, and 
at midnight mustered well. They rooked all the crop in screws 
in the field before the clearing of the softer land by steam began. 
All was ready on Wednesday night ; two engines were started 
to work day and night without intermission, drawing huge 
sledges to the headlands ; each sledge was piled high till it 
carried a stack of corn ; as soon as it reached the headland a 
cast of a rope was put round the stack and the whole load 
pulled off the sledge en masse. Seventeen horses were em- 
ployed carrying the corn from the headlands to the rick-yard. 
On the following night, Thursday, the 21st of November, it 
commenced to rain and blow hard about eleven o'clock, and the 
storm increased in violence till three o'clock in the morning. 
Two long and four round ricks were blown over in the rick- 
yard and scattered, the fields were once more strewn with corn 
from the field-screws ; the open ditches were choked, the school- 
room was destroyed, and four large skylight window-frames were 
blown from the roof of the steading across the yard and shattered. 
It would have been better for the farm if the whole of its 345 acres 
of oats had been destroyed by fire ; it was a dreary and tedious 
task to clear the fields, and the cost of the labour expended in 
the work far exceeded the value of the rotting straw and grain. 
There is happily no reason to believe that the Lairg district 
is more liable to such storms than other places, or it would be a 
very serious objection to its tillage. Farms in Ross and Caith- 
ness, that had been long under cultiv ation, suffered equally from 
the hurricane, and many a rick on the coast of Caithness was 
that night blown bodily out into the sea. There was nothing 
extraordinary in the cultivation of this farm in 1878. With the 
exception of 40 acres cut by contract, all the oats were cut in 
11 J days by one machine, and, without being put up in screws 
in the field, all was carted into the rick-yard by the 21st of 
September. The dry season was unfavourable to the growth of 
the oats. Owing partly to this cause and partly to the fact that 
they received but half the quantity of artificial manure, the crops 
of 1878 were not nearly so strong as those of 1877. The state- 
ment of the yield from each field is obtained by counting the 
ricks and taking for their contents the average yield of those of 
them that had been threshed out by the end of January 1879. 
Three ricks of the rakings were not reckoned in ; had they been 
included, the average yield of every acre reaped upon the farm 
would have been fully 4 quarters — a very modest yield, but it 
must be remembered that every patch of raw or rough ground 
helped to lower the average considerably. 
There were wintered in 1878-79 at Lubvrec 340 three-year- 
