Seaweed in the soil
Seaweed in the soil
Algal spores found in soil excavated on the Isle of Arran suggest the use of seaweed as manure by Neolithic people1. It is not unreasonable to imagine that Neolithic Orcadians exploited this valuable sea resource.
Seaweed manure is known to have been used in Iceland since the fifteenth century2. Martin Martin, writing in 1695, gives an account of night-time sacrifice being given to the sea-god Shony in Lewis for seaweed provision: ‘Shony, I give you this cup of ale, hoping that you’ll be so kind as to send us plenty of sea-ware for enriching our ground in the ensuing year’3. The Rev George Barry in his 1796 return for the Old Statistical Account for Shapinsay, despairs of the islanders ignorance regarding fertiliser: he was frustrated by their dogged reliance on seaweed manure and their custom of throwing dung in the sea ‘by way of a peace offering to Neptune, in order to render him propitious in casting ashore for them plenty of seaweed’.
Pre-industrial Orkney made good use of washed up ware and cut tang. Fenton in his book on the Northern Isles described seaweed as ‘the very backbone of the old husbandry’4. Farmers in seventeenth century Orkney grew oats and bere barley turnabout, in soil fed with seaweed5. Later when root crops were introduced, the need for seaweed manure increased and horses were used to cart the ware from the shore. The Old Statistical Account details North Ronaldsay as having sandy soil that is uncultivated ‘unless there be plenty of sea-ware to manure it with. Even manured sandy soil did not yield much in this account, ’80 horse loads of sea-ware have been sometimes carried half a mile..which produce but one boll of bere in return’. The account acknowledges the need for ongoing manuring which drew crofters into a continuous cycle of storm watching and ware gathering. At this time seaweed was being used both for kelp-making and as manure, and so the quantities needing to be carted must have been considerable. At the time of the 1791 Old Statistical Account of North Ronaldsay the population sat at 420 souls in 64 houses and 249 horses being kept for carting ware.
Carting and spreading seaweed was back breaking labour, it is summed up in the Orkney saying ’Ware time is a sair time’.
The division of the shore for seaweed rights was known in North Ronaldsay as ‘the pairting o’ the ware’. After the factor’s initial division of the shore to each toonship on the island, the area was divvied up among the crofters and boundaries were marked with tangles stuck in the sand6. Oliver Scott recalls the procedure: ‘You got bigger shares dependent on the size of your croft..it was divided in halves to start with, one section of the toonship divided the halves and the other side of the toonship picked whatever half they wanted and it went like that. One person divided and the other person picked the section. There was no cheating, you couldn’t cheat’7. Fenton notes that in Shetland ‘the taking of people’s ware was being punished in 1602, and the Old Country Acts included regulations about not cutting tang in another man’s ebb’.
If the ware came ashore in North Ronaldsay before the fields were due to be manured, the seaweed was banxed, carted from the shore and stored to rot until the time came to plough it in8, Helen Swanney gave the name chesting to the same practice referring to the chest steeths, depressions in the ground in corners considered safe from the sea. Spring cast weed, when the laminaria annually cast their old fronds, was carted up and put directly on the land. In Shetland a turf and seaweed compost was used, but in North Ronaldsay, and the other north isles of Orkney, fresh seaweed was ploughed in.9
Seaweed manure had the benefit of being weed-free and keeping moisture in the soil, a further advantage was the shell-rich sand inevitably carried in with the ware.
Robert Rendall from Orkney Variants 1951
1 Guttman, E.B.A., Dockrill, S.J. & Simpson, I.A. (2004) ‘Arable agriculture in prehistory: new evidence from soils in the Northern Isles’. Proc Soc Antiq Scot 134, 53–64
2 Mouritsen, O.G. (2013) Seaweeds – Edible, Available, and Sustainable. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press
3 Martin, M. (1999) A description of the Western Islands of Scotland ca 1695. Edinburgh: Birlinn
4 Fenton, A. (1978) Northern Isles: Orkney and Shetland. Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers Ltd
5 Marwick, E.W. (1991) ed. by Robertson, J. D. M. Orkney Anthology: v. 1: Selected Works. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press Ltd
6 Scott, M.A. (1975) Island saga: the story of North Ronaldsay. Aberdeen, Scotland, UK: Alex. P. Reid & Son
7 Towsey, K. ed. (2002) Orkney and the sea: an oral history. Kirkwall: Orkney Heritage
8 Cutt, J.W.A. (2007) The way we were: Reminiscences of a man of North Ronaldsay. John Cutt, Kirkwall, Orkney
9 Thomson, W.P.L. (1983) Kelp making in Orkney. Kirkwall: Orkney Press
image credits: Sarah o Hooking, Dr Beatrice Garvie, Orkney Library & Archive
Opening up the ware road, Dr Beatrice Garvie, Orkney Library & Archive
Planticru, North Ronaldsay, R Marr
ORKNEY SEAWEED STORIES 