This lovely harvest loaf, complete with harvest mouse, graces the window of the reconstructed baker's shop that will soon be opening at Beamish Museum in County Durham.
The museum recently had a weekend devoted to various forms of agricultural machinery, includedan old threshing machine. I'm old enough to just about be able to remember one small farm in Sussex , where I grew up, which harvested oats with a reaper and binder and then stacked the sheaves in stooks like this one, in the late 1950s .......
.... ready for loading onto a cart with pitch forks and an elevator, ready for threshing - although even then it was really an exercise in nostalgia on the part of the farmer rather than commercial farming. He used a tractor as a power source, not a traction engine. He also still kept a couple of heavy horses that my dad looked after (reluctantly) during a short period when he worked on the farm as tractor driver.
And this is me aged about two (with my maternal grandfather), helping with the harvest on that farm (note the dinky little woven basket), just after the harvest had been cut.
These days it's all so much more efficient..........
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