MAKE HAY WHILE THE SUN SHINES.
Posted: 28 Jan 2026, 02:46
MAKE HAY WHILE THE SUN SHINES.
While walking up from Victoria Park the other day I took a short cut through Corn Mill Yard and was surprised to see the biggest silage cutter I have ever seen parked there. Anyone who knows me will tell you I’m no stranger to big lumps of machinery but even I was impressed by this one. The engine compartment was bigger than my back kitchen! For those of you not brought up to farming, a silage cutter is a machine that cuts the grass, chops it and blows it into a wire mesh box trailer for transport to the pit at the farm buildings where it will be tipped, consolidated and sealed airtight so that it will keep for winter feed for cattle.
Preserving winter food for cattle in this way has been understood for over 4,000 years and is even mentioned in the Bible, if any of you are interested, look up Isaiah, 30:24 in the Old Testament. However, it wasn’t a common practice in Britain until the 18th century when many improvements in agriculture were made. Even then, it was mainly arable crops that were ensiled. As late as 1950, silage was virtually unknown round Barlick and the usual method of keeping grass for winter-feed was haymaking.
When I left school I only wanted to do one thing, get into farming. I went as a pupil to a farm in Warwickshire and was on course for going to agricultural college when two things spoilt my plans. One was the Queen who wanted my body for two years and the other was the fact that when I finished serving her I had to scrap my plans because my dad was going blind and I was needed to run the family grocer’s shop at Sough. My love of farm work hadn’t deserted me and I soon found a farm where I was welcome to give them a hand when it was needed. This was Greenbank up on Gisburn Old Track above Whitemoor Reservoir and Abel Taylor and his wife Maude farmed it. More about this in a minute but we need to take note of a connection between farming and the cotton industry here.
In the early days of the water-powered industry there was a very strong link with farming, this was often described as ‘One foot in the field. One foot in the shed.’ It arose from the fact that many of the early manufacturers and spinners owned land. They needed to in order to get the water rights to the stream powering their mill. As we’ve discovered earlier, one of the problems with water power was that it could be very unreliable in summer when there was dry weather. If the manufacturer owned land, this would be just the time when he needed labour for his hay harvest and so it made sense to use his workforce on the land instead of in the shed. A tradition grew up which survived to some extent into the steam-powered industry when some people would use their holidays to earn extra money helping with the hay harvest. It worked the other way round as well, Harry Horsfield from Sunnybank on Whitemoor told me that his father used to send him to work in the mills when he could be spared from farm work, he said he hated it but had to go.
Back to Abel Taylor and Greenbank. I have little doubt that some of my younger readers would be amazed if they could go back and see what conditions were like on an upland farm in the 50’s. Electricity wasn’t installed in Barlick itself until the 1920’s and by the 1960’s it was just reaching the outlying farms. It must be very hard for young people to appreciate what life is like without electricity, no lights, no washing machine, fridge, iron, TV, in fact nothing automatic or labour saving at all. In most respects, life was exactly the same as it had been a hundred years earlier and this applied to the farm machinery as well. Abel farmed with a horse, Dick, and a variety of horse drawn machinery, all of which would qualify for a museum nowadays. The only thing that could be considered ‘modern’ was a 1930’s Austin heavy 12 car converted to a light wagon by cutting the body off and building a flat on the back. Anything that couldn’t be done using these implements or the horse had to be done by hand. Hay time, which started around about the end of June if you were lucky, carried on until mid-September if you were unlucky! It all depended on the weather.
Hay making was very labour intensive and everyone had to lend a hand. If the farm were a large one, an Irishman would be hired for the month. These men were itinerant labourers who, because of the shortage of work in Ireland, used to come to Britain and, starting in the south, would work their way up the country following the harvest to make money to tide them and their families over the winter. They would have their regular calling shops and would turn up just before they were needed and set on for an agreed sum plus keep for a month. If the weather was bad they were put on to other work like thistle mowing or walling but the farmer hoped for good weather so that he could use the Irishman for the hay harvest. I can remember during the 1950’s when the cost of an Irishman went up to £50 for the month and the local farmers thought it was the end of the world!
Abel couldn’t afford an Irishman and the way he got extra labour was to rely on his neighbours for help, in return he would help them when they had a heavy day, and free casual labour like me who just enjoyed the work. This way of working is long gone now so I’ll describe just what had to be done to get the grass dried and stored in the barn as hay. I’ll assume that there’s a spell of good weather, recognise that if at any stage there was a wet day the whole process was halted and had to be started from the beginning when the weather improved and each time this happened the quality of the hay went down with subsequent bad effects on the winter feeding of the cattle and the need to buy concentrated food in from the millers. A good hay time was the foundation of the farm’s finances for the year. Be aware as well that we are describing what had to be done to get one small field in, if everything was going well another field would be started before this one was finished so as to provide a progression of work.
Abel’s first job was to mow the grass. This was done with a Bamford horse drawn mower that had a small petrol engine to drive the cutter bar. This felled the grass in swathes, each one separated from the other by a small strip of bare ground. This bare ground was important because it had to dry out before the swathe was turned over on to it to dry the underside. The grass was left in the swathe long enough for it to dry on top, in good weather this could be 24 hours, in bad it could be a fortnight, the longer it took, the worse the hay. The small engine on the mower was water-cooled and Abel carried an old baked bean tin with him, each time he got near the ditch he would stop and replenish the cooling water. Dick, the horse, knew his job and needed little guidance, he kept straight by following the previous cut and knew when to turn at the corners. Abel told me he had seen his Dad hang the reins on part of the machine and cut his twist up for a pipeful of ‘baccy’ while the horse plodded on without any guidance. He had a young bloke there one day demonstrating a modern mowing machine. Abel said he was going so fast he couldn’t even have lit a cigarette let alone a pipe!
Once the swathe was dry on top it had to be turned. This was done by hand with rakes and his wife Maude and daughter Margaret would join us for this job. Swathe-turning is quite an easy job and with practice it gets to be automatic, you just walk along the swathe with the rake at an angle behind you and stroke the swathe over by raking the butt ends where it had been cut. With four of us working it was amazing how quickly a field could be turned. 24 hours later with luck the swathe was dry on both sides but still wet in the middle. Abel and the horse would set into the field with the shaking machine. This was a large cylindrical rake that was driven by the motion of the wheels on the ground and as it passed over the swathes it whirled them up into the air and left them scattered on the ground. This was hard work for the horse as it was pulling the machine and driving it as well.
Once the hay was ‘abroad’ as it was called, it was left until it was dry on top and then shaken again. This could be done with the machine but if the horse was tired or working on some other job, the labourers, (Maude, Margaret and me) would shake it out by hand using two tine forks. Each evening while the hay was drying we would go in to the field and rake the hay into foot cocks, so called because you used the rake and your foot to make a small pile of hay. This was to stop the dew from wetting too much of the hay again during the night. If the weather was really bad and looked like setting in, the hay was made into larger heaps called pikes that were like a small haystack. This made it less likely to be spoiled by the rain but was a lot of work and didn’t improve the quality.
Assuming all had gone well we finished up after four or five days with a field of beautifully dry, sweet smelling hay. The job now was to get it into the barn. We would set to with the rakes and rake the hay into cart rows. These contained the equivalent of four or five swathes and the idea was to roll the hay over in such a way that it could be forked up on to the cart for carrying up to the barn. Once in the barn, it had to be forked up by hand again either on to the baulks above the shippon or on to the floor in the barn to make an indoor stack. Out in the field, as soon as it had been cleared Margaret came into her own with the ‘rover’ or ‘donkey rake’. This was a large rake with curved tines that you dragged behind you as you walked in order to gather up any hay left lying on the ground. These tailings were gathered up and carted to the barn with the other hay.
There you have it, a brief description of what had to be done in order to feed the cattle over the winter. If all went well, haymaking was a lovely job but if the weather turned it could be a nightmare. By the way, we’re into living history this week! Some of you will have recognised that Margaret Taylor is now Margaret Broadhead and is licensee of the Foster’s Arms. Go and have pint and ask her if she can still use a donkey rake!
UPDATE ON EDDIE’S BACON BUTTY
My readers have been hard at work and there has been news of the possible identity of the lady who made Eddie Spencer his breakfast in 1940. A lady called Winifred tells me that sixty years ago she used to play with a girl called Joyce King who visited her Auntie, Mrs King at the house behind the Co-op shop which later became the present offices at Rolls Royce’s entrance. The only problem is that we think that Mrs King moved and may have left the town. Does anybody know anything about her? Ring me if you can help. Thank you.
10 August 2000
While walking up from Victoria Park the other day I took a short cut through Corn Mill Yard and was surprised to see the biggest silage cutter I have ever seen parked there. Anyone who knows me will tell you I’m no stranger to big lumps of machinery but even I was impressed by this one. The engine compartment was bigger than my back kitchen! For those of you not brought up to farming, a silage cutter is a machine that cuts the grass, chops it and blows it into a wire mesh box trailer for transport to the pit at the farm buildings where it will be tipped, consolidated and sealed airtight so that it will keep for winter feed for cattle.
Preserving winter food for cattle in this way has been understood for over 4,000 years and is even mentioned in the Bible, if any of you are interested, look up Isaiah, 30:24 in the Old Testament. However, it wasn’t a common practice in Britain until the 18th century when many improvements in agriculture were made. Even then, it was mainly arable crops that were ensiled. As late as 1950, silage was virtually unknown round Barlick and the usual method of keeping grass for winter-feed was haymaking.
When I left school I only wanted to do one thing, get into farming. I went as a pupil to a farm in Warwickshire and was on course for going to agricultural college when two things spoilt my plans. One was the Queen who wanted my body for two years and the other was the fact that when I finished serving her I had to scrap my plans because my dad was going blind and I was needed to run the family grocer’s shop at Sough. My love of farm work hadn’t deserted me and I soon found a farm where I was welcome to give them a hand when it was needed. This was Greenbank up on Gisburn Old Track above Whitemoor Reservoir and Abel Taylor and his wife Maude farmed it. More about this in a minute but we need to take note of a connection between farming and the cotton industry here.
In the early days of the water-powered industry there was a very strong link with farming, this was often described as ‘One foot in the field. One foot in the shed.’ It arose from the fact that many of the early manufacturers and spinners owned land. They needed to in order to get the water rights to the stream powering their mill. As we’ve discovered earlier, one of the problems with water power was that it could be very unreliable in summer when there was dry weather. If the manufacturer owned land, this would be just the time when he needed labour for his hay harvest and so it made sense to use his workforce on the land instead of in the shed. A tradition grew up which survived to some extent into the steam-powered industry when some people would use their holidays to earn extra money helping with the hay harvest. It worked the other way round as well, Harry Horsfield from Sunnybank on Whitemoor told me that his father used to send him to work in the mills when he could be spared from farm work, he said he hated it but had to go.
Back to Abel Taylor and Greenbank. I have little doubt that some of my younger readers would be amazed if they could go back and see what conditions were like on an upland farm in the 50’s. Electricity wasn’t installed in Barlick itself until the 1920’s and by the 1960’s it was just reaching the outlying farms. It must be very hard for young people to appreciate what life is like without electricity, no lights, no washing machine, fridge, iron, TV, in fact nothing automatic or labour saving at all. In most respects, life was exactly the same as it had been a hundred years earlier and this applied to the farm machinery as well. Abel farmed with a horse, Dick, and a variety of horse drawn machinery, all of which would qualify for a museum nowadays. The only thing that could be considered ‘modern’ was a 1930’s Austin heavy 12 car converted to a light wagon by cutting the body off and building a flat on the back. Anything that couldn’t be done using these implements or the horse had to be done by hand. Hay time, which started around about the end of June if you were lucky, carried on until mid-September if you were unlucky! It all depended on the weather.
Hay making was very labour intensive and everyone had to lend a hand. If the farm were a large one, an Irishman would be hired for the month. These men were itinerant labourers who, because of the shortage of work in Ireland, used to come to Britain and, starting in the south, would work their way up the country following the harvest to make money to tide them and their families over the winter. They would have their regular calling shops and would turn up just before they were needed and set on for an agreed sum plus keep for a month. If the weather was bad they were put on to other work like thistle mowing or walling but the farmer hoped for good weather so that he could use the Irishman for the hay harvest. I can remember during the 1950’s when the cost of an Irishman went up to £50 for the month and the local farmers thought it was the end of the world!
Abel couldn’t afford an Irishman and the way he got extra labour was to rely on his neighbours for help, in return he would help them when they had a heavy day, and free casual labour like me who just enjoyed the work. This way of working is long gone now so I’ll describe just what had to be done to get the grass dried and stored in the barn as hay. I’ll assume that there’s a spell of good weather, recognise that if at any stage there was a wet day the whole process was halted and had to be started from the beginning when the weather improved and each time this happened the quality of the hay went down with subsequent bad effects on the winter feeding of the cattle and the need to buy concentrated food in from the millers. A good hay time was the foundation of the farm’s finances for the year. Be aware as well that we are describing what had to be done to get one small field in, if everything was going well another field would be started before this one was finished so as to provide a progression of work.
Abel’s first job was to mow the grass. This was done with a Bamford horse drawn mower that had a small petrol engine to drive the cutter bar. This felled the grass in swathes, each one separated from the other by a small strip of bare ground. This bare ground was important because it had to dry out before the swathe was turned over on to it to dry the underside. The grass was left in the swathe long enough for it to dry on top, in good weather this could be 24 hours, in bad it could be a fortnight, the longer it took, the worse the hay. The small engine on the mower was water-cooled and Abel carried an old baked bean tin with him, each time he got near the ditch he would stop and replenish the cooling water. Dick, the horse, knew his job and needed little guidance, he kept straight by following the previous cut and knew when to turn at the corners. Abel told me he had seen his Dad hang the reins on part of the machine and cut his twist up for a pipeful of ‘baccy’ while the horse plodded on without any guidance. He had a young bloke there one day demonstrating a modern mowing machine. Abel said he was going so fast he couldn’t even have lit a cigarette let alone a pipe!
Once the swathe was dry on top it had to be turned. This was done by hand with rakes and his wife Maude and daughter Margaret would join us for this job. Swathe-turning is quite an easy job and with practice it gets to be automatic, you just walk along the swathe with the rake at an angle behind you and stroke the swathe over by raking the butt ends where it had been cut. With four of us working it was amazing how quickly a field could be turned. 24 hours later with luck the swathe was dry on both sides but still wet in the middle. Abel and the horse would set into the field with the shaking machine. This was a large cylindrical rake that was driven by the motion of the wheels on the ground and as it passed over the swathes it whirled them up into the air and left them scattered on the ground. This was hard work for the horse as it was pulling the machine and driving it as well.
Once the hay was ‘abroad’ as it was called, it was left until it was dry on top and then shaken again. This could be done with the machine but if the horse was tired or working on some other job, the labourers, (Maude, Margaret and me) would shake it out by hand using two tine forks. Each evening while the hay was drying we would go in to the field and rake the hay into foot cocks, so called because you used the rake and your foot to make a small pile of hay. This was to stop the dew from wetting too much of the hay again during the night. If the weather was really bad and looked like setting in, the hay was made into larger heaps called pikes that were like a small haystack. This made it less likely to be spoiled by the rain but was a lot of work and didn’t improve the quality.
Assuming all had gone well we finished up after four or five days with a field of beautifully dry, sweet smelling hay. The job now was to get it into the barn. We would set to with the rakes and rake the hay into cart rows. These contained the equivalent of four or five swathes and the idea was to roll the hay over in such a way that it could be forked up on to the cart for carrying up to the barn. Once in the barn, it had to be forked up by hand again either on to the baulks above the shippon or on to the floor in the barn to make an indoor stack. Out in the field, as soon as it had been cleared Margaret came into her own with the ‘rover’ or ‘donkey rake’. This was a large rake with curved tines that you dragged behind you as you walked in order to gather up any hay left lying on the ground. These tailings were gathered up and carted to the barn with the other hay.
There you have it, a brief description of what had to be done in order to feed the cattle over the winter. If all went well, haymaking was a lovely job but if the weather turned it could be a nightmare. By the way, we’re into living history this week! Some of you will have recognised that Margaret Taylor is now Margaret Broadhead and is licensee of the Foster’s Arms. Go and have pint and ask her if she can still use a donkey rake!
UPDATE ON EDDIE’S BACON BUTTY
My readers have been hard at work and there has been news of the possible identity of the lady who made Eddie Spencer his breakfast in 1940. A lady called Winifred tells me that sixty years ago she used to play with a girl called Joyce King who visited her Auntie, Mrs King at the house behind the Co-op shop which later became the present offices at Rolls Royce’s entrance. The only problem is that we think that Mrs King moved and may have left the town. Does anybody know anything about her? Ring me if you can help. Thank you.
10 August 2000