Friday, 10 May 2019

Pikel?

Growing up the tool below was used a lot on the farm.
It was used for chucking the silage to the sheep, as well as wads of hay and straw. With it's long handle it meant that they could be chucked quite far and dad would soon put what he needed in each pen with a quick swing of his arms.

He called it a pikel and until the other day I've never questioned that name! But apparently that is a really regional word to Shropshire, the county both he and I grew up in. 

So my question to you all is what would you call this tool?

And is there regional names for tools that you use that no one else has heard of?

21 comments:

  1. Hay fork or Pitch Pike. My mother called the watering can a degging can. I believe its an old Lancashire word.

    In England they say tape measure and over here in Ireland its a measuring tap.

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  2. pitchfork round here. And measuring tape :)

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  3. pikel here in Leigh near manchester, I was brought up on a farm

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  4. Pitch fork or hay fork in Suffolk
    Tape measure is what I have in sewing box those used outside are just measures.
    Have you got a croom? is that just east anglia?

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  5. Pitch fork back home in Somerset

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  6. You're a carpenter Kev. Airing cupboard or hot press?

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  7. Pitch fork in Lincolnshire where I'm from originally but here in rural France it's called a fourche à foin

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  8. Pitchfork here in the east midlands. I associate them with feeding our pigs as a child - even moreso when my dad stuck one through a sack of pig meal straight through a nest of baby rats - I was devastated - but he wasn't !!

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  9. Well, it is a hay fork for me if I'm talking to outher people. But I usually have a several names for things, because my grandma was from Russia and another grandma is from Sweden, and hb's grandma was from Germany. My father's family have a different name for it, which I use when I'm thinking it. It actually is closer to pikel than hay fork...

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  10. I have always known this as a hay fork. My ciusin used it to toss the hsy down from the hay lofts for the horses nets xx

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  11. Interesting. I've never seen one in the US.

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  12. Pitch dork, in New Jersey, USA

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  13. Here in Iowa, USA, they usually have 3 tines - and are called 'pitch forks.'

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  14. Pikel in Lancashire. I ended up here on this site because on a recent walk through Kent countryside I came across two women who were maintaining a footpath. They had pitchforks and when I mentioned that you don't see many pikels these days they gave me puzzled looks, as did my fellow walker. I thought I'd made up the word and was relieved to discover that my memory was still intact.

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  15. To me, from Warburton, near Lymm in Cheshire, that is a pikel, used for throwing bales of straw and or hay onto the back of a trailer, a pitch fork, was older, usually made of wood and had three or four prongs, and was used for loose hay being thrown onto a cart. And yep in England it is a tape measure.

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