Loy (spade)
Encyclopedia
A loy is an early Irish
Ireland
Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...

 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,...

 with a long heavy handle made of ash, a narrow steel plate on the face and a single footrest. The word loy comes from the Gaelic
Irish language
Irish , also known as Irish Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family, originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish people. Irish is now spoken as a first language by a minority of Irish people, as well as being a second language of a larger proportion of...

 word laí, which means spade. It was used for manual ploughing which was popular among Irish farmers and was used prior to and during the Irish Potato Famine.

Construction

The loy is a narrow spade with a blade about 14 inches long by 3 inches wide and bent with a handle 5 to 6 feet long. The handle is normally made of ash. The blade has a single step for use with the right foot.

Ridging using the loy

The loy was traditionally used for cultivating the potato
Potato
The potato is a starchy, tuberous crop from the perennial Solanum tuberosum of the Solanaceae family . The word potato may refer to the plant itself as well as the edible tuber. In the region of the Andes, there are some other closely related cultivated potato species...

. In the 19th century, these were grown in a potato ridge, sometimes known as a lazy bed
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....

. Sods were turned from either side to form the ridge. This was sometimes called copin the sods, and the sods forming the sides of the ridge were called cope sods. A sod of earth about 2 feet (two-thirds of a metre) wide on each side of the intended ridge was lifted by the loy and turned over so that the grassy sides were together. Manure
Manure
Manure is organic matter used as organic fertilizer in agriculture. Manures contribute to the fertility of the soil by adding organic matter and nutrients, such as nitrogen, that are trapped by bacteria in the soil...

 was spread on the ridge part first. Narrow ridges were most often made with sets of around twelve sods. Loy ploughing took place on very small farms or on very hilly ground, where horses could not work or where farmers could not afford them and were used up until the 1960s in poorer land. This suited the moist climate of Ireland as the trenches formed by turning in the sods provided drainage. It also allowed the growing of potatoes in bogs as well as on mountain slopes where no other cultivation could take place.

Other uses

As well as ploughing and ridgemaking, the loy was also used for lifting potatoes and digging turf
Peat
Peat is an accumulation of partially decayed vegetation matter or histosol. Peat forms in wetland bogs, moors, muskegs, pocosins, mires, and peat swamp forests. Peat is harvested as an important source of fuel in certain parts of the world...

. Loy digging is still a popular pastime in Ireland with a national Loy Digging Association. Loy digging is an integral part of the National Ploughing Championships
National Ploughing Championships
The Irish National Ploughing Championships take place each year in the month of September. The 2012 Championships will be held at Heathpark, New Ross, Co. Wexford. The first inter- county ploughing contest took place in 1931 as a result of an argument between two lifelong friends, Denis Allen of...

.

Theatre

The Playboy of the Western World
The Playboy of the Western World
The Playboy of the Western World is a three-act play written by Irish playwright John Millington Synge and first performed at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on January 26, 1907. It is set in Michael James Flaherty's public house in County Mayo during the early 1900s...

by Irish playwright John Millington Synge
John Millington Synge
Edmund John Millington Synge was an Irish playwright, poet, prose writer, and collector of folklore. He was a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival and was one of the cofounders of the Abbey Theatre...

, set in a public house in County Mayo
County Mayo
County Mayo is a county in Ireland. It is located in the West Region and is also part of the province of Connacht. It is named after the village of Mayo, which is now generally known as Mayo Abbey. Mayo County Council is the local authority for the county. The population of the county is 130,552...

 during the early 1900s, tells the story of Christy Mahon, a young man running away from his farm. Mahon claims he killed his father by driving a loy into his head. This later turns out to be untrue.

Literature

Irish writer Declan Hughes
Declan Hughes (writer)
Declan Hughes is an Irish novelist, playwright and screenwriter. His most widely known crime novels center around the Irish-American detective Ed Loy. Loy is a homage to the character Sam Spade from The Maltese Falcon as a loy is a traditional Irish spade...

' novels center around the detective
Detective
A detective is an investigator, either a member of a police agency or a private person. The latter may be known as private investigators or "private eyes"...

 Ed Loy, whose name is an homage to Sam Spade
Sam Spade
Sam Spade is a fictional character who is the protagonist of Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon and the various films and adaptations based on it, as well as in three lesser known short stories by Hammett....

, the fictional character of Dashiell Hammett
Dashiell Hammett
Samuel Dashiell Hammett was an American author of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories, and political activist. Among the enduring characters he created are Sam Spade , Nick and Nora Charles , and the Continental Op .In addition to the significant influence his novels and stories had on...

's The Maltese Falcon.

External links

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