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Spademaking in Ireland came into existence as a specialised iron-working craft during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The technical pre-requisites had existed earlier, since there is evidence for both the vertical water wheel and the tilt hammer before 1750, the latter certainly in the seventeenth century when trade tokens from iron works in southern and northern Ireland bear representations that may be interpreted as the heads of tilt hammers. The effective stimulus towards specialisation in spade-making was not technical, but social in origin. Irish population expanded rapidly after 1750, and while for a generation or so the local blacksmiths, who formerly had produced tillage hand tools, continued to cope with a growing demand for spades, about 1780 the first of the specialist spade-mills came into existence to cater for a demand that the blacksmiths less and less were able to meet.
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