THE LAST CLYDESDALES

These six Clydesdale horses and these three men all worked on my Grandfather's Scottish farms during a time when people still made time to talk to one another.

One man and a pair of horse could plough one acre of land a day.

Today an average four wheel drive tractor with a four or five furrow reversible plough can easily turn 20 or 30 times that amount in a day.

As a young boy i grew up with men like these in the photograph - or at least the remnants of those - people from another time. It would of course be easy to romanticise their lives however that would be doing their toil and labour a great disservice. It was hard brutal work, yet these men were literally and metaphorically, much closer to the land than most of our food producers are today.

This picture sits on my desk beside my Apple state of the art editing equipment - not as a ghost - but as a gentle reminder that without nurturing the land we are all but chaff in the wind!!



Follower


My father worked with a horse plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow
The horses strained at his clicking tongue

An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright-pointed sock
The sod rolled over without breaking
At the headrig, with a single pluck

Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land.
His eye Narrowed and angled at the ground
Mapping the furrow exactly

I stumbled in his hobnailed wake
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back
Dipping and rising to his plod.

I wanted to grow up and plough
To close one eye, stiffen my arm
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow around the farm

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away


Seamus Heaney