While the Sun Shines

But it didn't. The rains came, and every hour the clouds got lower and lower, and the light got fainter and fainter. But it was still good to be out, water running through hidden channels in the peat, falling into surprisingly deep pools of turbulent brown. Buzzards hunting in front of leafless trees - the antique colours of the bark heightened by damp. All the more ironic then to fall upon this in the long grass beside a deeply incised, surging burn

A hay rake - though that term gets bandied about a lot to mean several different agricultural tools, and my guess is there would be local terms for this machine all over the country. This one has a drawbar to attach to a tractor, but this was just an update of the earlier horse-drawn version. It's simple: the tines are dragged across a crop of hay that has previously been spread around the field to dry. The tines collect the hay in front of them. At a convenient point, the driver pulls a control that causes a lug on the wheel to lift the tines and release the hay in a tidy, sausage-shaped pile, then drop them again to continue collecting the next pile.

Returning across the field, the driver must time their action to release the hay-sausage in line with the ones created by the previous pass. As the job continues, the sausages get longer and longer until they form "swathes" (pronounced to rhyme with 'moths' in the English Midlands where I grew up). The swathes might then be manually forked on to a trailer (a hay-wain!) to take to storage, or mechanically bundled or baled before transport.

As technology progressed, more sophisticated tools were developed, and swathes became a single continuous spiral from the outside of the field to the centre - not something this machine could create, so they became obsolete, often used for blocking a gap in a hedge!

The hay-rake should have a plaque: Carpe Diem