Mrs Down's Diary April 8 2009

The land under the plough at the match is much lighter than ours. It has been down to grass for a lot of years. Several hundred lambs being fattened for market were in the next field. They looked fed up about being thrown off the grass for the ploughing match and having to content themselves grazing stubbles.

We stood in silent reverence beside tractors John had driven as a youth. He started work on the farm when barely into his teens. Wouldn't be allowed now. No cover, no Q cabs. One of the David Brown's Implematics had a Lambourne cab, a sort of tarpaulin with windows.

"I thought it was luxury to have one of those" John reminisced. Good heavens, its hissy fits now if the air conditioning or heater doesn't work. A Massey Ferguson 65 chugged past, then a Fergie T20 and a Fordson Dexter. John by now a drooling heap of nostalgia. Men in overalls and boiler suits stood wisely judging at the end of rows. Soil heaven.

The field had been divided up into small areas for each tractor and plough to work in. Rather reminiscent of the medieval pattern of working when villagers and peasants (i.e. me and John) worked their arable land under a communal system known as run-rig.

Designed to allow everyone a fair share of the land and its produce, the unenclosed run-rig fields were divided into rigs or narrow strips that were sometimes called "acres". Although I have also read that an acre is the land that could be ploughed by one man with one horse in a day.

"Now he hasn't set his rigs straight there" John would tell me. And I would hear echoed by the boiler suits all around. "He's not covered up the trash either" they would mutter "That won't make a seed bed, all that grass will grow through in next to no time". Every one of them an expert.

The ploughs in use were nearly all conventional, not the sort that famers use now where they can turn them over and start back up the field when they have finished one furrow. These have to set a rig and then make the first furrow, tuck in coming back round, plough round and round in a sort of rectangular circle until they get back to the central furrow. If that makes sense. Then next time they would set the rig up further across the field so that the last furrow would end in a different place.

I've glazed over already and so have you no doubt. But that is the end of my lecture.