Home Page  
  Geography  
  History of Ireland  
  Tourist Information  
  Contact Us  
 

 

  
 

Implements Used on Irish Farms.

The Thresher.

Go to life on early Irish farms home page.
Thresher.
 

The illustration on the right shows a thresher, a machine which revolutionised the processing of grain crops.

The threshing machine was invented around 1784 by Scotsman Andrew Meikle. The thrashing machine as it was first called, relieved farm workers of much of the drudgery of separating the grain from the straw, which was done for thousands of years manually using flails.

The threshing machine brought about great social upheaval and change among the rural population, the widespread use of the threshing machine resulted in thousand of men who were previously needed for the harvest became unemployed which forced down the pay of those still in employment.

In the UK this resulted in what came to be known as The Swing Riots which occurred in 1830, the rioters smashed threshing machines and threatened farmers who used them. The government dealt harshly with the rioters, nine of them being changes and 450 transported to Australia.

The first threshing machines were quite small they were driven by horses using a horse gin (Illustrated above) which was basically a rotating post set upright in the ground, in most cases there was a bevel gear just below ground level this drove another gear which was connected to a shaft which ran beneath the ground to the barn building,

The illustration on the right shows this arrangement, it has a 5 to 1 ratio, each time the horse makes one circuit of the horse walk the shaft rotates five times. Another similar arrangement would have been inside the building further increasing the speed to drive the drum of the thresher.

Multiple Horses threshing.

Lower Mourne Vintage Threshing Day, selection of different threshing machines.