Island Life Magazine Ltd August/September 2008 | Page 70

life COUNTRYSIDE, WILDLIFE & FARMING

June Elford

Make hay while the sun shines
It’s eight o’clock on a summers’
evening and a hay cart drawn
by two horses is trundling along
the track to the farm. It’s the
last load for the rick in the yard
and the end of a long day spent
raking and pitching the hay, an
idyllic picture of rural England
years’ ago, when Constable
painted ‘The Haywain’ and the
smell of freshly mown hay in
June was as predictable as the
swallows’ return each summer
A week after the farmers
sowed their barley, they sowed
clover and rye grass seed
in the same field, cutting the
barley in August and leaving
the hay crop until the following
June. Before the advent of
farm machinery, hay-time was
done manually, scythes were
used to cut the grass and

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By June Elford
forks to turn the hay for it to
be pitched, or pooked, into a
cart. Charles Vancover writing
about the Isle of Wight in 1813
records “The grass, unless
reserved for seed, is always
mown before the plant has
acquired its full blossom; when
sufficiently withered on one
side, the swarth is turned; and
that also receiving a sufficient
drying, the whole is gathered
into heaps conveniently
disposed through the field for
loading upon the wagons, by
which it is carried to the rick.
The word ‘pook’ turns up
in an Isle of Wight farmer’s
diaries. James White farmed
at Briddlesford Farm near
Wootton and kept an account

of his work. Writing in beautiful
copperplate, he says that
on the 14th of June, 1848, it
was “Fine all day. Finished
pooking the hay in Ten Acres
and began carting, made the
rick in North Heath.” And the
following day, “Began raking
Six acres Hay and finished all
but topping the rick, thunder
and lightening in the evening.”
‘Pooking’ is an Anglo-Saxon
word meaning to ‘put hay into
heaps for carting’ and is still
used in Island dialect. In ‘Where
the stream roked’, a book
Harold Humber and Russell
Chick wrote about Bowcombe
Valley, we are told that the
loading of pooks of loose hay on
to a cart was an acquired skill.
Farm-workers reminiscing
about haytime would say that

although it was one of the most
physically demanding jobs on
the farm, it was also one of the
most pleasurable events in the
farming calendar. It was the
social part of it, neighbours
getting together to help each
other with the hay crop when
they had cleared their own
fields that people enjoyed.
Good weather played an
important part in haymaking
and three or four days of
warm dry weather and a light
wind would give the farmer
sufficient time to make his hay.
Harold Humber remembers
“You could always tell the
type of weather you had for
haymaking by the smell of the
hay.” This total reliance on
good weather was one of the
reasons for the change later

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