skaffel

noun, variation of ‘scaffold’ | ‘scaffold’: a temporary platform usually supported on poles or (sometimes) trestles, but occasionally suspended, and designed to hold the workmen and materials employed in the erection, repairing, or decoration of a building (“scaffold, n.” OED)

“They used to put me on the skaffel on the side. I didn’t know how to pitch hay. I sure learnt. Somebody’d pitch it up to the skaffel, and then I’d pitch it from the skaffel up to the top of the stack, and I couldn’t build a stack to save my life…”
“Used to have it under a tree?”
“Sometimes we did, other times we’d just use the skaffel. We really didn’t have any trees right close by.”

“The actual stone tower, it didn’t have paint on it? Just whitewash?”
“Just whitewash. And it was an old skaffel he had made up … And you had to watch we didn’t get any wind, because the whitewash’d be between here and Old Tom’s up there if the wind come up.”