Nostalgia

It was a lovely warm evening yesterday and the local farmer was in the fields behind our house collecting the hay into bales. The thing that particularly caught my eye was that the baling machine was one of the older type which bound the bales into brick shapes - not the current trend, which is to roll the hay into huge cylinders and then wrap them in polythene.

I am long enough in the tooth to just about remember the days when a lot of farmers still used horses as the main motive power to pull the machinery on their farms, and the machinery they used was very basic and simple.

The picture above shows a horse drawn hay rake. Notice that the farmhand walking behind also has a hand hay rake.



Once the hay had been cut it was collected and piled into stooks similar to the ones in the photo above, and left to dry in the warm sunshine. Then along would come a flat cart pulled by two Clydedale horses, and the hay would be piled high on the back of the cart and taken to the farm, where it would be stored in the farm barns.

Sadly, today, mechanisation has taken over, and the magnificent Clydesdales have been replaced by deisel powered tractors, with power take offs so that the cutting machine, the woofler (to turn the hay) and the baler can all operate behind the tractor.