HIDDEN HISTORY AND SERENDIPITOUS FINDS
Here in the U.K., older tractors are always cherished by collectors. These machines as seen as artifacts of our early days of farming, and there is an overwhelming feeling that they must be preserved for future generations. It’s wonderful that such passion for vintage tractors exists. It would be a sad world if we failed to appreciate and learn from past technologies, but all the same, tractors are relative newcomers on the farming scene. Many far older farming artifacts often go largely unnoticed. Rural relics that pre-date mechanization can be found all around us, and often these old objects tell us far more about our farming history than tractors do.
On my travels (which I must admit are not big travels, for I rarely journey outside of North Wales) I try to photograph any interesting rural artifacts that I see. Conversations about farming relics often lead to someone saying, “Come and see what I’ve got.”
Older people enjoy asking a younger person to guess at a relic’s identify, hoping the item will baffle and generate head scratching. I’m becoming better at this game, as by now I’ve been shown a lot of curiosities from the past. If I didn’t know what they were at the time, I made
