Heckling (flax)

[1] Flax is pulled through heckling combs, which parts the locked fibers and makes them straight, clean, and ready to spin.

[2] Heckling was originally done by hand, but began in the nineteenth century to be undertaken mechanically, with rollers drawing the slivers of flax through the hackles.

[5] Key innovators in developing this technology were Philippe de Girard, Samuel Lawson (inventor of the screw-gill), and Peter Fairbairn.

[1] As a farmer, Robert Burns grew flax, and during 1781 he took work as a flax-dresser in a heckling shop, to try his alternative career.

It was dusty monotonous work, with a sickening smell from the flax, and damaged his health so he left this employment at the end of the year.

The Hackler from Grouse Hall is an Irish song written in the late 1880s by a local man, Peter Smith, from Stravicnabo, Lavey, Cavan, Ireland.