Morris Pottinger: When farming was done at walking pace
Farmer, historian and ex-Groat columnist Morris Pottinger died in September this year, aged 94. In this feature from our archives, Morris was preparing to spend Christmas 2006 in the United States and found his thoughts turning to the old, unhurried way of life when man and horse worked in tandem
A strange peacefulness comes over the Earth as we approach the festive period and draw breath for yet another year. Here I am in Chicago with my American wife Sharon for Christmas with her family, and we talk of farming and days gone by and the walking pace of life then. Sharon fastened on to it, and said that instead of just talking about it I should write it down for others, “lest we forget”. Quite a challenge, but, as we talked of farming when I was a boy, so many uncountable aspects came to light. Walking pace was but one.
Many know and use the phrase today, but of its deep original farming origin they know not. It was a marrying of horse and man with a naturally matched steady step – the pace of the farm. So we talked, her 12-year-old grandson Joseph with us – my own age when I was still in Whitehall Farm in Stronsay, Orkney, before we moved to Caithness in May 1944. My father’s horses came there with us: Meg, Tibby, Prince, others. That walking pace was the pace of life on the farm itself: unhurried, nothing left undone, slow, steady, long working days, yet all got done in proper season.
It often struck me that, though the horse was about a ton in weight and we were a fraction of its size, we walked together, pace for pace, matched step for matched step. Even the phrase “matched pair” meant just that: two horses that strode together pulling the plough, a natural symphony of movement. When you got a pair of horses that did just that you treasured them, and they often worked together for many long years.
So many tasks other than ploughing were done by a pair of horses: harrowing the ploughed fields, rolling with one horse per roller, the pair working in tandem and in echelon, their horseman walking behind the first roller and keeping the second on line. The hay was mown by a pair in the reaper; for corn harvest with the binder a pair was often added to by a third to make a stronger team for the harder work. And they had their walking pace, matched again. To pull together had a very real and functional meaning. Not every horse fitted. The stooked sheaves were carted from the field to the cornyard and back again; at times we boys led a loaded cart home and another empty one back to the field, though we were too small to pitch sheaves or build the cartloads. Sometimes we walked beside the horse, sometimes we were on top of the load with the long reins thrown up to us. It was wonderful to be trusted.
As boys our father often gave us other easy jobs to do with the horses: carting a load of turnips or some bags of feeding oats to the sheep on the links, going the 10 miles from Greenland Mains to Thurso to get cart-loads of coal off the train in the goods yard, taking the wool bags after sheep-shearing to the same goods yard, sometimes combining the two jobs. We boys were not horsemen, but we could do these easier tasks as the men worked at something harder – threshing stacks of corn, for example. We took the horses to the blacksmith to be re-shod, sitting on their bare backs for the miles we had to go – an easy, gentle, rolling pace, soporific, the steady clack of their feet on the unsealed stone road below us. We had to be lifted on to the horse’s back – a mile high, it seemed – with a wonderful view of our friends as we passed by their farms, maybe feeling a bit snooty!
We took sacks of oats or bere to the meal mill for the attention of the miller. He gave us boys a guided tour of the mill with all its magic: the slow-turning, splashing water wheel, the easy moving of clicking or clacking elevators, whispering belts and grinding millstones, hoists and doors, the fine drift of meal dust whitening everything (the miller included), the kiln for drying and the wonderful warm smell of the mill. Oatmeal and beremeal had different aromas – bere was sweeter than oats. Days later we would go back to the mill to collect the finished product, bags of meal and sids and grop, loaded on the carts by stronger hands than ours. I left Stronsay when I was 14 so we did these things while quite young; it was a wonderful education and we so wanted to be grown up, and were so proud when we came safely home, job done. Felt grown-up, too!
Later, at Greenland, we had another walking pace. In summer the horses grazed in Learigtoon, the nearest field to the steading. After work we boys were sometimes allowed to take the easier horses from stable to field, some with a halter, some by their forelock, some just walking well-trained beside us. They were sober in gait and mien as we walked; who would have foreseen the mayhem when they got loose in the field? Heels kicking aloft, galloping round in circles just to show us they were not tired after a long day’s work, onto their backs and rolling from side to side, up again and an almighty shiver or shake as the dust of the day went skywards. They enjoyed it so much. Then, having expressed their independence, they settled down to graze. We had our favourites, and gave them a titbit now and again.
This is but a mere taste of yesterday, a time gone away and fading into the grey past. Christmas seems a good time to remember it. There is much more I would like to write about, and hope to. Sharon is good for me, stirring me out of my too-long lethargy. The thoughts are there on occasion, but they must be recorded. Wish me luck.
- In memory of Morris Pottinger (1929-2023).
