Boundaries

There are many English Pastoral paintings that depict a team of horses drawing a plough, with picturesque seagulls circling over the turned earth. The quality of the depiction of the gulls is often a fair indicator of the artist's talent. Horses are now a rarity and ploughs are much less common, but the gulls are happy with anything that disturbs the soil and brings a meal to the surface. It's striking here how they have worked out the safe places to position themselves as the machine passes back and forth, suggesting quite a powerful brain. It's good to see there is enough life in the soil to attract this many gulls

This is a seed-drill, with a light roller mounted on the front of the tractor and some cultivating tines behind the drill heads to ensure the soil is level and the seed is fully buried. There is an out-rigger on the left that provides a mark for the driver to follow when they return on the next pass, ensuring each pass over the field is parallel with the previous one

The green-lidded hopper contains spring barley seed, dressed with pesticide, which is being trickled down each of the many pipes to the drill-heads and into the soil. We spent some time thinking about the complexity of making sure that each of those pipes stays free-flowing, and wondering if there is some monitoring system that detects the problem if the grain stops flowing, and alerts the driver

This is light, easy-draining land, on which it is easy to create a seedbed. My farming family, toiling over intractable Warwickshire clay, would refer to this disparagingly as "boy's land". The rich colour reflects the underlying ironstone rock that it derives from. We are at the head of the valley, high above the village. The trees in the middle distance are on top of the ridge that runs to the Rollright Stones - our local mini-Stonehenge - suggesting this high ground has been a pathway for four of five millenia. The ridge divides us from the next parish and county, and separates the Thames and Severn catchment, as well as being the ancient boundary between Wessex and Mercia. Like all borders, this is something that is of no concern to the gulls