Читать книгу Footsteps in the Furrow - Andrew Arbuckle - Страница 5
ОглавлениеAS a boy, my walk to primary school took me along a quiet rural road running parallel with the south side of the river Tay from the small town of Newburgh. Along with half a dozen other youngsters, we would some days dawdle and play along the way. Other days, when the rain beat down upon us, we would scurry home as fast as our short legs would carry us.
Some sixty-odd years later, I still live along that same stretch of road looking out over the land my family farmed for the best part of half a century. The road is known locally as the Barony, after the Barons of Rothes, who, for five preceding centuries, owned the riverside strip of land. Their castle, Ballinbreich, now lies in a ruinous condition but still commands a dominant position looking upstream towards Perth and eastwards to the estuary of Scotland’s largest river.
In those feudal times, the castle was the hub of all life. Small, unfenced bits of land might have been tilled around its sturdy walls. Sheep, and a few of the now-extinct Fife breed of cattle, would have been tended on the slopes. The purpose of the castle had little to do with defence against some invader. It was re-built in the sixteenth century but Fife had never been marauding country, leaving that activity to the more quarrelsome peoples in the Highlands and the Borders.
The castle had more to do with status. Its sturdy presence stamped its mark upon the area and also on the people who lived under the shadow of its walls in those days. Most of those living in the parish would be sheltered within the castle and tenant farmers paid their feus to the barons as they eked out a living from the land.
Although running roughly parallel with the riverside, the road takes the easy route, like all tracks born in the days of horse and cart. Hills were tackled gently, with no steep gradients; winding round the contours rather than heading for the shorter, steeper, more direct route.
It is a road where a steady pull on the cart shafts would transport the loads of grain and potatoes towards the local markets; a road where ridden horses could also keep steady pace without breaking stride to cope with sudden ups and downs on the carriageway. To call it a ‘carriageway’ is somewhat grand. It was a statute labour road, meaning the adjoining landowners were required to carry out the maintenance on it.
This was never a main road between two important points. In the early days, the Barony road would have been no more than a couple of stone-filled tracks for the cart wheels to follow and a softer, unmade up section between for the horse. Only in the early days of the twentieth century did the local authority get round to covering it with tarmacadam, classifying it in their bureaucratic way as ‘C46’.
In those days, the main town of Newburgh had a corn market to which grain merchants from Perth and Dundee would travel, either by horse or by boat. Grain and potatoes for markets in the south of England were loaded onto boats by the simple expedient of horse and cart backing down towards the vessel that lay beached at low tide. Later, in my time, farm produce was transported by tractors and trailers, hauling seed potatoes from the farm towards the station in Newburgh and then onward to their destination in the south of England.
Horse carts and gigs have long gone and although the main Edinburgh to Perth line still crosses the land, the railway closed down four decades ago in Newburgh. Today, agricultural traffic consists of large articulated lorries and is largely limited to a two-month period at harvest time. It sees bulk lorries of grain with 20-plus tonnes of wheat or barley, heading for the malting or distilling markets – or, if the quality is less than it should be, for feed mills. For an equally short period, unwary rural travellers may also encounter large heavy goods vehicles with potatoes in 1-tonne wooden crates being driven away to centralised stores.
The road still winds through the countryside, but in the past hundred years farming has changed more dramatically than in a score of centuries. At the beginning of the twentieth century, along the 5-mile length of the Barony road were a dozen farms. Some were small, with only the tenant working the acres and keeping a few cattle and sheep. Ownership of the estate passed to the Zetland family – absentee landlords, who acquired it from the Rothes family through a marital link.
Some fifty years later, in the middle of the twentieth century, the number of working farms had shrunk to 7. Smaller units were subsumed into the larger ones, to leave only a small biggin – a small set of farm buildings – behind.
On these 7 farms were some 25 cottages, with another 4 added by the estate in the 1950s to cope with demand for additional farm workers. The valuation roll of those days showed all 29 dwellings housed farm workers.
As we march onward in the twenty-first century, only three of the original dozen farms work as independent units. The rest are farmed from outside the parish and all the arable work is done in a short burst of feverish activity at springtime and a slightly longer bout of high-tempo activity in the autumn. One solitary farm along the road has retained its livestock enterprises, so it is still possible to see newborn calves from the commercial suckler herd.
In the spring, the latest crop of lambs can be seen initially looking as if they want to confirm all the prejudices farmers have about sheep having a death wish. However, within a few days, they, and dozens of their colleagues, romp about the fields engaged in pointless, but joyful chases. The rest of the livestock along this parish road arrives for the summer grazing season and departs either to market, or back to the owner’s farm, several miles away.
Some twenty-eight of the cottages remain, but not one of these provides accommodation for a farm worker. With one exception, work on the farms is carried out by the farmers themselves, or by contractors coming in with seeders or harvesters. The one remaining full-time agricultural worker lives in Cupar – some twenty years after he left the tied house in which I now live.
All the cottages and the parish school and church are now occupied by those who commute from their rural base into the towns and cities. In contrast with the tied housing of a previous generation, many are now owned by those who live in them.
The local primary school has been closed for the past thirty years, and today’s children are collected and deposited, morning and night, by a taxi service that takes them six miles to the nearest rural school. The church has also closed its doors. It sits, roofless, surrounded by a graveyard. Headstones tell of the farmers and workers of previous years. For most of the day, this quiet country road is almost deserted, following the early-morning dash to work until the return journeys in the evening.
Recording the changes
Some twenty years ago, when I gave up active farming to write about agriculture in the Dundee Courier, I would occasionally refer back to farming practices of previous generations. Descriptions of the machine harvesting of potatoes compared with the hand picking of the crop would bring forth letters full of such memories. Similarly, comments on how the Scottish summer raspberry crop would largely be picked by holidaying Glaswegians resulted in phone calls, recalling those seemingly halcyon days. Even reports on relatively mundane heavy physical work, such as dung spreading, seemed to provoke fond memories.
Although the husbandry learned more than half a century ago is still relevant, many of the skills gathered at that time, when labour was an essential of good farming, are no longer part and parcel of farming life. For example, being able to mark out ‘bits’, as the sections of the field were called at potato picking time, lies in the basket of skills now laid to one side and labelled redundant. Likewise, an ability to measure out the capacity of a straw stack is an attribute that now moulders away in the recesses of a few elderly minds.
Apart from the skills skittering away from modern man’s brain cells, many of the customs and practices linked to farming in the last century have disappeared. Gone are the days of labour hierarchy on the farms. With no farm grieves (working farm managers) and no orramen (‘ordinary’ farm workers), this ladder of rural social life has lost its rungs. Gone is the chat or crack between the team of men on the farm and the loon, often a callow youth who was always on the butt end of any prank, or joke – such as sending him for a load of postholes or a tin of tartan paint.
This book is an attempt to shine a light on life on farms in the previous century and to capture some of those work practices and pictures of a rural landscape from yesteryear. It does not pretend to be a history of farming. Although the major events shaping the industry are recorded, they are there merely as directional markers, not part of a definitive history. Nor does it have any pretensions to be a sociological record of rural life: that would be too grandiose an ambition for what is no more than a collection of memories.
The great temptation when looking back into the past is to forget the downside to a simpler way of life and to remember only the good parts. While everyone remembers the camaraderie, few will talk of the harshness of life, where a wage earner’s illness or accident would quickly leave a family clinging onto the proverbial bread line. And while there are happy recollections of harvest fields full of workers, the reality of those days was also one where working conditions were often unpleasant, sometimes severely so.
Pictures of rows of workers standing outside the stables holding their horses reflect the pride and fellowship of the work in the era of the dominant horse. But the photographer was not on hand when those same men were out ploughing in the sleet and rain; sometimes sheltering under the horse with just with an old sack over the shoulders to keep the worst of the weather at bay. I hope that in these memories a fair approach has been taken, one that recognises that some parts were good, especially the camaraderie, and others were not so great.
The physical boundaries of the stories are mainly kept to those around my calf country, that of North-East Fife, but there is a well known saying in the Scottish farming industry and that is, ‘If you want to see the whole country but do not have the time, then just go to Fife.’ It may be one of the most cliched descriptions of the county, but calling it ‘a beggar’s mantle fringed with gold’ describes the rich, fertile coastal strips surrounding the slightly poorer land in the centre.
I have also no doubt that many of the practices recalled within these pages have similarity with those from other areas. The geography is no more than a sampler onto which memories and stories are stitched. One further qualification: this is not a personal history, or even a history of my own family. In farming terms, the Arbuckle family was no different from many others in their origins and work. To their cost, they might have dabbled more deeply in the politics of farming than most, but that is not part of the story.
My own little store of memories and family records has been greatly augmented by the many kind friends who spoke openly of their recollections of times gone past. The verbal harvesting of customs and practices of the older generation has been one of the joys and happiness of this work.
I hope your reading of this book will either tug at your own personal memories, or, if you are of a younger generation, provide an insight to how life used to be down on the farm.
ANDREW ARBUCKLE
Newburgh, Fife, 2009
