Looking for a bit of our lost rural past

There is nothing sadder than seeing old agricultural machinery sitting neglected and rusty and prompts the thought that someone somewhere could find a use for them.

Added to which they look so ugly scaring the countryside and offering up a potential hazard.

But I suppose it has always been so, and I guess if you look back into the past you could find examples of old wheels and leather harness left in some corner of a field along with old buckets whose metal sides have become paper thin with exposure to the elements.

Of course the most common find is the broken clay pipe thrown away by some agricultural worker and unearthed a century and a bit later.*

They turn up regularly enough, that in some gardens and allotments they are seen as a nuisance rather than a piece of history which is a shame and points to the fact that pretty much all our agricultural past has vanished.

I have gone looking for wells, and pumps, the odd discarded wagon wheel and bits of plough but all have proved elusive.

Farmer Higginbotham who lived on the green filled his well in sometime in the 1960s and the water pump which stood in the yard of the Bailey farm on Beech Road only went in the 1970s.

But I doubt that much else will turn up.

That said there are still plenty of clues to our rural past.

Some come in the way that roads terminate in dead ends which may echo ancient field boundaries, and there are still a few old farmhouses around in Chorlton, although most have been so knocked about that their original design has long since vanished.

All of which just leaves the most persistent of old rural left overs which are the plants themselves.

So occasionally old field flowers can still be discovered if you know where to look and there may still be a few apples and pear trees from the time when we grew them for cider and perry.

I had long though that there was no reason why we shouldn’t have done so and the evidence came in the from of a newspaper story written in the 1840s by Alexander Somerville who identified types of apples and pears which were grown specifically for cider and perry.

So perhaps I shouldn’t be looking for old machinery but go on a hunt of a few flowers and pears after all the machinery I stumbled across recently was itself a deliberate left over placed to remind me of what had been lost in the delightful Tropical Butterfly House in Sheffield .***

Pictures; discarded agricultural machinery, 2015 and clay pipe, 2014, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Mr Gratrix's clay pipe lost in our garden in 1845, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/mr-gratrixs-clay-pipe-lost-in-our.html

**Chorlton cider and perry, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Chorlton%20cider%20and%20perry

***Tropical Butterfly House,  http://www.butterflyhouse.co.uk/