The foot plough is a type of spade

Spade

A spade is a tool designed primarily for the purpose of digging or removing earth. Early spades were made of riven wood. After the art of metalworking was discovered, spades were made with sharper tips of metal. Before the advent of metal spades manual labor was less efficient at moving earth,...

 used for cultivation, in the north west of Scotland

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

. The Scottish Gaelic language contains many terms for the various varieties, e.g. cas-dhìreach (straight foot) for the straighter variety and on, but cas-chrom (bent foot) is the most common variety and refers to the crooked spade. Although no longer as common as they once were, they are still used in some places, especially the Outer Hebrides

Outer Hebrides

The Outer Hebrides also known as the Western Isles and the Long Island, is an island chain off the west coast of Scotland. The islands are geographically contiguous with Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, one of the 32 unitary council areas of Scotland...

.

It is an implement of tillage peculiar to the Highlands

Scottish Highlands

The Highlands is an historic region of Scotland. The area is sometimes referred to as the "Scottish Highlands". It was culturally distinguishable from the Lowlands from the later Middle Ages into the modern period, when Lowland Scots replaced Scottish Gaelic throughout most of the Lowlands...

, used for turning the ground where an ordinary plough cannot work on account of the stony ground. It is of great antiquity and is described as follows by Armstrong:

“It is inexpeditious in comparison with the plough, eight men being necessary to dig as much with it in one day, as a horse

Horse

The horse is one of two extant subspecies of Equus ferus, or the wild horse. It is a single-hooved mammal belonging to the taxonomic family Equidae. The horse has evolved over the past 45 to 55 million years from a small multi-toed creature into the large, single-toed animal of today...

 would plough in the same time. It is chiefly used for tillage, and consists of a crooked piece of wood

Wood

Wood is a hard, fibrous tissue found in many trees. It has been used for hundreds of thousands of years for both fuel and as a construction material. It is an organic material, a natural composite of cellulose fibers embedded in a matrix of lignin which resists compression...

, the lower end somewhat thick, about two-and-a-half feet in length, pretty straight, and armed at the end with iron

Iron

Iron is a chemical element with the symbol Fe and atomic number 26. It is a metal in the first transition series. It is the most common element forming the planet Earth as a whole, forming much of Earth's outer and inner core. It is the fourth most common element in the Earth's crust...

 made thin and square to cut the earth. The upper end of this instrument is called the ‘shaft’, and the lower the ‘head’. The shaft above the crook is pretty straight, being six feet long, and tapering towards the end which is slender. Just below the crook or angle, there must be a hole wherein a straight peg must be fixed, for the workman’s right foot in order to push the instrument into the earth; while in the mean time, standing on his left foot, and holding the shaft firmly with both hands, when he has in this manner driven the head into the earth, with one bend of his body he raises the clod by the iron-headed part of the instrument, making use of the ‘heel’ or hind part of the head as a fulcrum. In so doing, he turns it over, always to the left hand and then proceeds to push for another clod in the same form. To see six or eight men all at work with this instrument, standing on one leg and pushing with the other, would be a curious sight to a stranger. With all of its disadvantages, the cas-chrom is, of all the instruments, fittest for turning up the ground in the country, for among so many rocks, a plough can do little or nothing, and where there are no rocks, the ground is generally so marshy that cattle are not able to pass over it without sinking in deeply.”

In the Western Isles, with a foot plough though, perhaps one man can do the work of four men with an ordinary spade, so while it is disadvantaged compared to a horse-plough, it is also well suited to the country.

See also

• Laia
  Laia (tool)
  The laia is a two-pronged type of foot-plough used in the Basque Country. Aside from being a farming implement, it is also used in the associated laia competitions. The people using a laia are referred to as laiariak in Basque.-Etymology:...
  
   - the Basque h-shaped tool, also described as a foot plough.
• Lazybed
  Lazy bed
  Lazy bed is a method of arable cultivation. Rather like cord rig cultivation, parallel banks of ridge and furrow are dug by spade although lazy beds have banks that are bigger, up to 2.5m in width, with narrow drainage channels between them....
  
  , a form of agriculture