p>This isn’t strictly travel, but sometimes you don’t have to travel far or fast to immerse yourself in the Cumbrian landscape. I spent the whole of Sunday in a single field, walked less than a dozen times across it, and had the most fantastic day out.
Old Hall Farm in Bouth offers a ‘Working with Shire Horses’ course (http://www.oldhallfarmbouth.com/day-courses/) and being autumn, we tried our hand at ploughing with their enormous Shire horses, ‘Ben’ and ‘Troy’. They may look like gentle giants, but you soon realise their pulling power as the plough hits a stone, skitters out the furrow, and you lurch forward at tremendous pace. You also soon realise that there is an incredible skill to ploughing using horses. Just trying to keep the plough going level and straight is hard enough, add in controlling the horses and making adjustments to the plough on each pass of the field and you have a real challenge on your hands.
There is a different pace to the day. You can’t hurry things along, everything has its own rhythm. The slow plod down to the field (coming back to the stable is considerably faster!), setting and adjusting the plough, making two scratch furrows to start. Then a single pass across the field, feeling the plough tilt at the slight slopes and ‘Ben’ and ‘Troy’ hesitating as the blade meets the resistance of the larger stones before being pushed on with a urgent ‘get on’. When you reach the end of the field and the horses’ heads are nearly touching the hedge, you begin the process of turning. Huge hooves cross in front of each other as the horses shuffle sideways, then back up, and shuffle sideways again. It is absorbing if slightly fraught. Done well, it is a like a giant horse ballet.
A good pair of horses and ploughman would have ploughed about an acre a day, which is tiny by the standards of modern sized fields. Physically hard work, even lifting the heavy leather collars of the harness over the head of Ben and Troy is more than we can comfortably manage.
Working the Land
At the end of the day, we get a brief demonstration of plaiting the horses’ manes and tails for a show. Plaiting the manes requires a tall trestle bench to stand on and strong thumbs. The ‘Shire plait’ uses three hanks of raffia plaited in with hair, running down the crest of the neck with ribbon bows or ‘flights’ woven in. The ‘Clydesdale plait’ uses two wide contrasting ribbons and a different approach to plaiting.
Before we leave, we linger over our cream teas in the tearoom and talk about what we have learned. For me the biggest insight has been how the land affects the behaviour of the plough and how tough a sloping, stony field can be even for the experts. You begin to understand the huge impact that tractors and mechanisation brought to farming and how it changed a whole way of life. I also come away with the desire to slow life down a bit, not rush around from one thing to another. A day spent in a single field might not sound impressive but it certainly made an impression on me. Making the most of the Cumbrian landscape and truly exploring what is on your doorstep can help save many miles travelling.
