Orkney Image Library

I would call them stooks!

Sheaves ... Stooks ... Disses ... Stacks

They look more like "screws" to me.

See picture #1353 for stooks

They look like very peedie disses

They remind me of coles (hay)

Lumps o gress tae me

Dear Violet less than Perfect,
Behave yourself! This is serious straw.

Dear Sandy, I apologise profusely. I'm very sorry that the serious straw looks like lumps o gress.

They are definitely disses this method was used when the stooks were not dry enough to build into stacks.

See also picture #14068

I mind an aald man tellan me " a diss is twa thrave". 24 sheaves = 1 thrave.
That would have been in the early 1950's.

This thread seems never to have reached a firm conclusion. Several names relating to the drying of cut crops are mentioned. I'll list them below, with my understanding of what they mean - which in some cases is simply the dictionary definition.

Stack: a circular or rectangular pile of hay, straw, or grain in sheaf, often with a sloping thatched top. In Orkney, 'stack' was mostly applied to hay. Often in a stackyard; seldom in the middle of a field.
Stook: usually 6 (occasionally 4) sheaves (tied bundles) of a grain crop (oats or bere in Orkney)set up together to dry in the field in which they were cut.
Diss: a small stack, usually temporary and therefore not particularly well finished. The term was applied to almost any crop, not just hay.
Screw: (sometimes skroo) a stack of sheaves built in spiral fashion with the cut ends outwards, terminating in a peaked top. (A thing of simple beauty when well done.)
Cole: a small, more or less neat heap of hay. Coles were set up in rows in the hay-field. (If the weather was wet and the coles slow to dry, they would be turned over and re-made. This was called aboot-coling.)

The heaps in the above picture are apparently of straw. (Bere straw perhaps, given the smallness of the field.) Back in the day, straw was not found in fields; threshing was a separate operation from cutting. So heaps of straw in a field were seldom if ever seen and as far as I know had no special name. I'd call those in the photo 'straw-coles' - not quite big enough for disses, not bundled as in stooks.
As a non-farmer I'm puzzled by these 'straw-coles'. Did they put a combine-harvester into that rather small-looking field?

The disses were built by my husband. He grows oats in our peedie field for the fun it. Once the crop is cut and stooked we have a problem with hoards of rooks sitting on the tops of the stooks to get at the grain. Robbie's answer that year was to build the sheaves into disses as the rooks could no longer get at the grain. He usually cuts the crop with one of his several binders, but, depending on the weather and circumstances, he sometimes gets a local farmer in with a combine.

They are not heaps of straw they are heaps of sheaves in other words "Disses"

As indicated in my previous comment, I couldn't see that the crop was 'bundled' into sheaves, hence my puzzlement.
Thanks for the enlightenment Cathleen. Did the oats dry well in these disses?

I mind going tae farm sales and the crop would be sold by the thrave that was 24 sheaves .

Ower in Longhope we called them Dasses. Sheaves were what was made by the binder, you built them either into peedie dasses or big screws and colls were loose straw piled into a mound.

Tommy Garrioch's and John Budge's comments above are the only references to the term 'thrave' I've ever seen outside of Robert Burns' poem 'To a Mouse' (which we had to learn at school about 77 years ago). My battered copy of 'Burns', from Moxon's Standard Poets series, quotes the relevant passage:

A daimen icker in a thrave
'S a sma' request;

and helpfully provides a translation:

An ear of corn in . . . twenty-four sheaves.

It's good that Messrs Garrioch, Budge & Burns all agree on the definition of thrave.