Island Life Magazine Ltd August/September 2008 | Page 71

COUNTRYSIDE, WILDLIFE & FARMING
to silage-making because
this new method depended
less on good weather and
wasn’t so labour-intensive
Although some of the older
hands disliked what they called
‘newfangled ideas’, the advent
of the mower in the 1890s
saved them a lot of hard graft.
But until the swathe turner
arrived, a piece of machinery
drawn by a single horse, the
hay was still turned by hand
with all the family being called
upon to help. Den Phillips
remembers some of the farmers
employed Irish labourers.
“In my father’s day, we had
a special stick for turning
the hay,” he told me when I
visited him and his wife, Jane
at Compton Farm, “but you
had to learn the way to use it.
As soon as the early morning
dew had dried on the turned
hay it was ready to be gathered
up and loaded on to a cart.
The farmer might have invested
in a horse-drawn hay rake
but if he was a thrifty man, he
wouldn’t waste any hay left
on the ground; a strong lad
would be employed to walk
behind the rake and pick up
every single bent, or stalk.
(Nowadays, if the modern baler
misses a lot, it’s left behind).
Haywains, carts with headand-tail ladders, were used to

carry the hay to the new rick.
These were generally made
in the farmyard though Den
says that during the war they
had to be 100 yards away
from the buildings in case an
enemy plane dropped a bomb
and the rick caught fire. A Mr.
Marshall who did a report on
‘The Rural Economy of the
Southern Counties’ in 1798
and visited the Isle of Wight
wrote “The ricks everywhere
as round as footballs: very
globes: turned with great
accuracy, and neatness.”
Before the rick was built, the
farmer had to be sure the hay
wasn’t too dry and exhausted
of its sap or too green in which
case the rick might ignite later.
Jane Phillips remembers when
she was sixteen she helped
to tread the rick. “You made a
circle to tread,” she said, “then
filled it in, keeping the sides up,
the middle took care of itself.”
Once the rick was finished it
was thatched and during the
winter months it
was her job to cut
out large slabs
with a hay knife to
feed the stock.
At Carisbrooke
Castle, the grass
was cut by hand,
put into sacks
and rolled down

www.wightfrog.com/islandlife

life

the hill to a farm in Millers
Lane. Hay was produced at
Meden near Cowes to feed
the army’s horses in the First
World War and during the
last war Italian and German
prisoners helped with the
haymaking on the Island
What would the farm workers
of the 1890s think of today’s
modern techniques, I wonder?
A mechanised mower to cut
the grass, the tractor pulling a
hay bob to turn it and a baler to
compress the hay into a block
and tie twine round it. They
wouldn’t know that the large
plastic bundles we see in the
fields keep the New Zealand
grass or sweet smelling
vernal fresh for months. But
the time for haymaking hasn’t
changed. As John Heywood
said in 1546, “When the
sunne shyneth, make hey.”

71