Plough Sunday and Monday

click photo to enlarge
Traditionally the dates of Plough Sunday and Plough Monday fall on the first Sunday and Monday after Epiphany (Twelfth Night). In the eastern counties of England a church service was held that included a plough being brought into the building to form the centrepiece of the worship and for it to receive a blessing. Then, on Plough Monday, the ploughboys would return to work at the start of the ploughing season. Often on this day a plough was taken in a parade through the town or village and money sought from farmers and the well-to-do, welcome funds for workers whose employment was at a low ebb over the turn of the year. Sometimes these festivities were accompanied by morris or sword dances. Individual villages came up with their own traditions unique to their location. One such example centred on the fenland villages of Ramsey and Whittlesey. Every year they paraded a straw bear through the streets drawn by the ploughwitches!

These traditions continue. Sometimes it is in a revived form (as at Whittlesey today), but elsewhere it is an unbroken survival of a traditional custom. In the village where I live a church service, complete with plough, is held every year. This year it is on the Sunday 13th January when the thousand year old Norman building will once again echo to "We plough the fields and scatter".

Today's photograph shows what appears to be an early twentieth century plough. It stands next to a farm, a reminder of the days when ploughing in autumn for winter wheat wasn't the usual way, and ploughs were pulled by real horses rather than the horsepower of an enormous tractor. I took my photograph on a frosty morning when the sun was low in the sky. It seemed an appropriate subject for a conversion to sepiatone.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 5.1mm (24mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: 2.8
Shutter Speed: 1/160
ISO: 80
Exposure Compensation:  -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Turning the plough

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Before I moved from north west England to Lincolnshire I knew more about medieval ploughing than I did about ploughing today. I still do, but a few years in this most agricultural of counties has widened my understanding of modern methods. I was reflecting on this as, late on a January afternoon with shafts of sunlight piercing the cloud that was moving in from the west, we watched a tractor with its plough turning over the ground in a field on the edge of the village of Bicker.

A thousand years ago the single plough was pulled by oxen, five hundred years ago the horse was more commonly used, but during that long period little else changed in the way the land was prepared. A village commonly had three large, open fields each divided into selions of approximately half an acre (220 yards by 11 yards). These were parcelled together in groups (furlongs) that were often at right angles to each other with the irregular spaces at the edges of the fields (butts and gores) also ploughed. Over time each straight selion became banked higher in the centre and to have a characteristic curve at each end making it into an elongated "S" shape. This came about because the plough always turned the soil to the right and and because the ploughman turned the same way at the end of the selion to get ready to plough back down the strip. Where these medieval fields have been turned to pasture and escaped subsequent mechanical deep ploughing you can still see undulating lines, all with the characteristic curve at each end, especially when the sun is low and casting shadows across the land.

The modern plough that a tractor such as the one above pulls always has more than a single blade; here there are 6. The blades themselves are always made of steel where the earlier plough blades were wooden. In addition, the plough is turned over at the end of each run overcoming the problem of banking and "S" shaped curves. I took my photograph as the ploughman was undertaking this manoeuvre and about to reverse into his starting position. Noticing the camera he gave me a wave before he set off.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 100mm
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/200 sec
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Birds, man and the plough

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Today I was looking at the bird box in my willow tree. I placed it there two years ago in the hope that a blue tit (Parus caeruleus) would nest in it. Unfortunately it has been spurned each season; as was the other one I put in the cherry tree. So I've decided that I'll enlarge the hole to make it suitable for the slightly larger great tit (Parus major): I've had better luck with that species in the past.

Those thoughts prompted a short reflection on the way in which birds have adapted to man. Our obsessive tidiness has reduced the number of naturally occurring holes that the blue and great tits formerly used, and nest boxes now provide a significant number of the sites favoured by these species. House martins (Delichon urbica), as their name suggests, have also found man to be a useful provider of nesting places. They get their name from the habit of building their cup-shaped mud nests under the eaves of houses. Before man built houses with eaves these birds built their nests under overhangs on cliffs. I'm only aware of one location in England where that still happens - Malham Cove in Yorkshire; everywhere else man-made structures are preferred. So too with swallows (Hirundo rustica), a bird that I've never seen construct its nest anywhere other than in a building. In the UK one of the key bird habitats is the man-made suburban garden, those that naturally frequent woodland edges finding it particularly to their liking. The food that friendly households put out for them is also a big incentive to hang around dwellings, especially in the leaner winter months.

Of course birds aren't infinitely adaptable to the activities of man, and many species - particularly those of open farmland - are in steep decline. However, today I saw a scene that must have been replayed every year since a farmer first ploughed a field: black-headed gulls (Larus ridibundus) (and rooks) following the tractor, picking up the morsels revealed in the turned soil: a symbiotic relationship if ever I saw one. It being February a few birds were showing their breeding plumage of a full head cap of chocolate-brown feathers, though none would be ready for nest building for another three months. I took a couple of shots of the tractor and plough working the Fenland field, one as it headed towards me, and this one that shows the birds to better effect after it had turned away and started its next set of furrows.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 150mm (300mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/250
ISO: 200
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

A conglomerate of collective nouns

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What has one of the first successful women authors to do with this flock of gulls? More than you might imagine!

Dame Juliana Barnes, sometimes spelt Berners or Bernes, is traditionally supposed to have been the prioress of the nunnery of Sopwell near St Albans. In 1486 her treatise on hunting was published in the "Book of St Albans". Despite the fact that it was printed with worn out type discarded by William Caxton it proved very popular. A later edition that included her "Treatyse on Fysshinge with an Angle" sold even more copies, and the book was in and out of print until the nineteenth century. Included in this work was a long list of collective nouns for animals. Some of them were those used widely at the time: others were Dame Juliana's own poetic, and often very fanciful inventions. Because they appeared in a book that had a wide readership for such a long time all these collective nouns went into general circulation. Consequently, whilst we are likely to know (as the fifteenth century did) a gaggle of geese, a flock of seagulls, and a pack of wolves, now, due to Dame Julianas efforts, we also recognise "a murmuration of starlings", a "charm of goldfinches" and "a murder of crows". Some, such as a "shrewdness of apes" and "a cete of badgers" do, thankfully, seem to have fallen by the wayside. If you look up the collective noun for seagulls you will find, besides "flock", the word "screech". Where did that come from I wonder? Was it one of Dame Juliana's constructions, or did someone invent it at a later date following the principles that she used when coining her own nouns of assembly?

I spotted this flock of gulls following a tractor that was ploughing a field near Bicker in Lincolnshire. Later, as I looked at the photograph on my computer, and reflected on the words we use for groups of animals I wondered if any bright spark had come up with a collective noun for tractors. A quick "Google" found others wondering the same and suggesting "a Massey" and "a traction". Neither will do for me, but I can't come up with anything better. Can you?

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 150mm (300mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/100
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On