Use
The tiny islet was used for grazing, and appears never to have been inhabited (although a number of the smaller islands were often used by culdee anchorites). Pigs and sheep were grazed here, but not horses as the name might suggest. As Haswell-Smith says:
- "As with many small islands, the demand for grazing was so great that the islanders would carry sheep to the top of the Horse, but it was said that it could fatten one sheep, and feed two, but three would starve. In the Spring, pigs were also hoisted up to fatten on the huge 'crop' of sea-birds' eggs. The pigs' coarse hair was used to make the strong rope needed for fowling. 'Lee-running' was the local name for the organised collection of sea-birds' eggs, which was still practised on Copinsay in the 1940s."
Read more about this topic: Horse Of Copinsay
Famous quotes containing the word use:
“... it is use, and use alone, which leads one of us, tolerably trained to recognize any criterion of grace or any sense of the fitness of things, to tolerate ... the styles of dress to which we are more or less conforming every day of our lives. Fifty years hence they will seem to us as uncultivated as the nose-rings of the Hottentot seem today.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)