Crossword clues for hayloft
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Hayloft \Hay"loft`\ (h[=a]"l[o^]ft`; 115), n. A loft or scaffold for hay.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
n. The upper storey of a barn used for storing hay
WordNet
n. a loft for storing hay [syn: mow]
Wikipedia
A hayloft is a space above a barn, stable or cow-shed, traditionally used for storage of hay or other fodder for the animals below. Haylofts were used mainly before the widespread use of very large hay bales, which allow simpler handling of bulk hay.
The hayloft is filled with loose hay from the top of a wagon, thrown up through a large door, usually some or more above the ground, often in the gable end of the building. Some haylofts have slots or holes (sometimes with hatches), each above a hay-rack or manger in the animal housing below. The hay could easily be dropped through the holes to feed the animals.
Another method of using a hayloft is to create small bundles of hay (1–4 cubic feet), then hoist them up using a block and tackle—in this case a hay elevator to the room. This allows for more efficiency when moving hay around.
The difference between a hayloft and a mow is significant. A mow is exposed to the weather, only elevated on a small platform off the ground. This is often used for drying hay. A hayloft is used for more permanent storage of hay. It is sheltered from the weather and where a modern day attic would be.
A struggle in any type of keeping hay is that it must be totally dry. Otherwise, when piled up in a hayloft, it will start to compost. The insulation provided by the other hay ensures that thermophilic bacteria involved in decomposition will be at their ideal temperature, thus turning the good hay into dirt. That is also why farmers are so determined to keep hay off the ground, since it would absorb moisture.
Haylofts in old buildings are now often used for other storage, or have been converted into habitable rooms. However, farms that use small square hay bales may still use the hayloft for storage of hay.
Many farmers now use bales of hay so large they must be handled by machinery, and these are normally stored in more open buildings or outside. Some more farmers have either forgone hay in favor of grain, or use silage.
Usage examples of "hayloft".
The traffickers machinegun each other, dodging through the machinery and silos, storage bins, haylofts and mangers of a vast red barn.
She places a hand on his, bends it to a more innocent place of hayloft and pine, a quick foray of unrealizable possibility, all that can obtain, here, just yards from the inhabited picnic ground.
At the tiny hamlet of Vaux, near Creil, Marie-Victoire Monnet, the eldest of a family of fifteen children, hid in a hayloft with three of her sisters.
He was about to glance into the hayloft, to satisfy his sentimental vision of how it would have looked to him and Joyce, a cavern of country fragrance, a musk of dead summers still banked there in pourried mounds.
Everyone had something that set them apart: Master Frallit was as bald as a berry, Willock the cellar steward had a club foot, even Findra the table maid had to bear the shame of being caught in the hayloft with the blacksmith.
So Longarm consulted his watch and crunched off across the traprock ballast of the Golden rail yards as he idly wondered why it always smelled like a cobwebbed hayloft over in these foothills, indoors or out.
We march back over the wretched roads and pass our three days' interval of so-called rest either billeted in the stables and haylofts of the village or encamped in the woods around the château.
Fancy me after a year and a half of sleeping with my clothes on in trenches and haylofts, sleeping now in a most voluptuously soft bed in a pink and white room, with a tiled bathroom adjoining.
They rode by day and stayed in crofters' haylofts and open-air camps by night, the wayside inns along the way burnt to the ground or yet standing but abandoned, and these they stayed in as well and left a few coins upon counters when they rode away the next day.
If that meant a night in a stable loft, well, he had slept in haylofts before, although he did not recall hay sticking through his clothes quite that sharply.
For that matter, he remembered when Nynaeve caught Kimry Lewin and Bar Dowtry in Bar’s father’s hayloft.
Qwilleran could picture her milking a herd of cows, feeding a kitchenful of farmhands at harvesttime, and frolicking in the hayloft.
Before he slept in the hayloft above the mule barn, to which he earnestly hoped he hadn't been followed, Antryg scanned through the crude sketch maps his Irregulars had drawn for him of the portions of the Vaults they had patrolled.