WITH THE FLOOD-TIDE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19418, 28 August 1926, Page 2 (Supplement)

WITH THE FLOOD-TIDE.

A SHETLAND TRADITION. JFACtf. OR SUPERSTITION. A schoolmaster at Lerwick, in the Shetland Islands, describes an ancient and curious practice of the Shetlanders when cutting heather or turf for rooting. The islanders flay the sods from peat banks, and always choose the time of flood-tide rather than ebb-tide for doing so because they find it easier. The custom runs throughout the islands, and is common in districts away from the sea. As it is so general, and as the character and intelligence of the Shetland crofters are well known, it would seem that the practice must have been sanctioned by long experience. It does not seem likely to be mere fancy, and the writer suggests an explanation. Taking, for example, peat banks which are near the sea, he supposes that during the ebb of the tide the root 3 of the heather and grasses are exerting the greatest pull in the capillary vessels, where plant moisture rises, to hold on to the water which is in them, and which tends to fall out with the tide. When the tide floods in again the water should rise in the plants, and their roots would not be so. tensely strained to hold on to the capillary water stretched like a skin over the soil particles about them. Thus, while the heather or turf' is not holding on but taking a rest it might be more easily dislodged from the ground. This explanation has been suggested to the leading English authority on the growth of plants over large areas, who has also studied for many years the salt-marsh plants of both Brittany and East Anglia, but he shakes his head over it. He cannot agree that there is any scientific foundation for the suggestion. His explanation is of another kind. The correspondent states that the practice of " rooiug" the sheep in Shetland, when the wool is not clipped but is lightly pulled off, follows the rule of the tides. The islanders declare that it is harder to " roo" at ebb than at flood; and many crofters point also to the fact that the old hair of ponies and horses comes off more easily when the tide comes in. The botanical authority puts the two things side by side He says that probably the islanders, picturing to selves the tide flowing and ebbing oenaath the soil,- have imagined that it acts in the way described, loosening the sod's grip or tightening it. By long belief he the wool of the sheep and the hide of says they have transferred the idea to the ponies, where the nation is actually fantastic. It is an idea of the mind, not a process of Nature;, a superstition, not a fact.