By introducing labour-saving machinery we have recently been getting better results at less than pre-war cost. If work on a large scale is being done, the steam navvy or grab might be tried for excavating and making hummocks, etc.; traction engines are useful in uprooting small trees, and larger ones can with advantage be blown up by dynamite. I recently used blasting charges for the purpose of assisting to make bunkers. An article in one of the Sheffield papers somewhat humorously stated that this was not the first occasion Dr. Mackenzie’s bunkers had been “blasted.”
The “Scraper” at work on Wheatley Park course, Doncaster.
Trolleys on rails are frequently used to save carting or wheeling barrows.
The two machines which are found of the greatest value in saving labour are the turf-cutting machine and the American scraper or scoop—the former made from designs by the writer. It will cut an acre of sods in an afternoon, and, moreover, cuts them of a more even thickness than by hand. This machine is worked by two horses like a plough. One or two clubs have condemned it without a fair trial, and on inquiry I have usually found that the weather was too dry, the grass too long, the blades had not been set properly, or that it had been used by a man who had had no previous experience in working one. It has been used by scores of clubs with a great deal of success. At Moortown we sodded over twenty acres of sour heath land with it. The cost of this amounted to little compared with sowing, as we were able to remove the sods from a neighbouring field. Sowing would have cost at least twice as much, as there were no signs of even a blade of grass on most of the land, and no sowing was likely to be successful without lime and manuring, and carting a tremendous quantity of soil so as to form a seed bed. The results have been infinitely better and quicker than sowing at the rate of even twelve bushels of the best grass seeds to the acre.
Grange-over-Sands: the turf-cutting machine at work. The photograph shows the dead, flat, featureless character of the country before the work began.
Grange-over-Sands: sandhills constructed by means of the scraper on terrain originally perfectly flat.
The scraper is worked by a horse or two horses, and is particularly useful for excavating light soil, but can even be used on heavy land if each layer is ploughed before the scraper is used. The scraper is shaped like a large shovel, the handles are raised, and the horse pulls and it digs into the ground until it is full; the handles are then depressed and the horse pulls it along to the required situation; it is then tipped up, and the horse returns for another load. One horse and two men by this means can do the work of a score of men working in the ordinary way with wheelbarrows. In making hollows and hummocks it has an additional advantage in that it gives them automatically a natural appearance, and at the same time the horse in climbing up to the top of the hump compresses the soil, and it does not sink so much afterwards.