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The foot plough is a type of plough used like a spade with the foot in order to cultivate the ground.
Describing the Scottish Highlands around 1760, Samuel Smiles wrote:
The plough had not yet penetrated into the Highlands; an instrument called the cas-chrom, literally the "crooked foot"- the use of which had been forgotten for hundreds of years in every other country in Europe, was almost the only tool employed in tillage in those parts of the Highlands which were separated by almost impassable mountains from the rest of the United Kingdom.It was an implement of tillage peculiar to the Highlands, used for turning the ground where an ordinary plough could not work on account of the rough, stony, uneven ground. It is of great antiquity and is described as follows by Armstrong:The cas-chrom was a rude combination of a lever for the removal of rocks, a spade to cut the earth, and a foot-plough to turn it. ... It weighed about eighteen pounds. In working it, the upper part of the handle, to which the left hand was applied, reached the workman's shoulder, and being slightly elevated, the point, shod with iron, was pushed into the ground horizontally; the soil being turned over by inclining the handle to the furrow side, at the same time making the heel act as a fulcrum to raise the point of the instrument. In turning up unbroken ground, it was first employed with the heel uppermost, with pushing strokes to cut the breadth of the sward to be turned over; after which, it was used horizontally as above described. We are indebted to a Parliamentary Blue Book for the following representation of this interesting relic of ancient agriculture. It is given in the appendix to the 'Ninth Report of the Commissioners for Highland Roads and Bridges,' ordered by the House of Commons to be printed,19th April, 1821.
In the Western Isles, with a foot plough, one man can perhaps do the work of four men with an ordinary spade, and while it is disadvantaged compared to a horse-plough, it is well suited to the country.
Historic distribution and the current diversity of forms point to the mountainous region of Southern Peru as the likely place of origin of the chaki taklla. With the expansion of the Inca Empire, the taklla was carried north to Ecuador and south to Bolivia where early colonial writings confirmed its presence.(Jimenez de la Espada 1965, II, 227; Vázquez de Espinosa 1942, 660) It probably never occurred in Southern Chile, either before or after the conquest by the Spaniards.Tschudi's (1849, 14)
It is probable, nevertheless, that agricultural peoples living on the Peruvian coast long before the Incas contributed to the idea of the taklla. Copper-shod digging sticks known by the Mochica culture () may have been a forerunner of the taklla.(Bushnell 1957, 83) Pottery representations and remains of proto-taklla tools from the Chimu culture (1300 CE) on the coast verifies its development by at least that time.(Horkheimer 1960) However, the friable soils of the coastal desert were easily turned without the taklla, and the incentive to develop such a tool probably came from the adjacent Highlands.
Men wielded the plow, called a chaki taklla. It was made of a pole about long with a pointed end of wood or bronze, a handle or curvature at the top, and a foot rest lashed near the bottom.
The Inca Empire Emperor and accompanying provincial lords used foot ploughs in the "opening of the earth" ceremony at the beginning of the agricultural cycle. Inca vessel in the form of a digging stick, Peru, 15th-16th century, exhibit at the British Museum referencing C. McEwan, Ancient American Art in Detail, London, The British Museum Press, 2009, (retrieved 16 February 2012) Incan agriculture used the chaki taklla or taklla, a type of foot plough.
Chaki takllas are still used by peasant farmers of native heritage in some parts of the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes. Modern chaki takllas have a steel point.
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