RUST & HAY

Hello folks, Dafad is still stuck indoors with Pneumonics and no that is not the name of some new hip and trendy music group. However, the anti-idiotics are working and the chest is clearing. What amazes me is just how much "stuff" a body can produce. I've lost count of the number of tissues and ... sheets of loo roll used, enough to say, quite a lot!

Anyway, today I went back five years, photographically, when all I had was a mobile phone that could take photographs too. Now, the standard may not be of the quality that we are now used to today, but in a photo file that I named "Rust and Hay" I found these.

<<<  Now, when I revisit this small door that leads from the old sheep pens onto the commons, the rushes almost obscure this carefully, stone crafted "door" that once enabled sheep to travel through it. No longer used but at one time it would have seen sorted  out sheep  pass through it, one way or another. What I find fascinating is the way this small gate, door whatever one wants to call it, was originally  designed. At the time, when it was used, it was quite obviously adequate for purpose. Now this mixture of old stone wall and wood, with modern wire fence placed above, is now defunct.

This was another small detail that caught my eye >>>

back in 2007. Part of some rusted cog, laid atop an old lichen marked stone wall and yet somehow the two seem quietly united as part of a history of memories.

Ah but who holds these memories of times long  past and  recently present?

I was very much aware when I photographed this, that times were gradually changing. These, long built, old, stone walls have seen so many years of changing times in farming.

Ffin was a mere pup then and if you look very carefully you can just see him beneath the head of this dinosaur type piece of antiquated farm machinery, now long gone for scrap.

I took these photographs at hay making time when the large cylindrical bales were harvested in and the young, less than a year old pup was dwarfed by almost everything!

The old sheep pens, were disused then but the good news is that the next generation of farming has regenerated this land and has begun to restock with sheep. Yes that old rusting machinery has been sold for scrap, the once field renting farmers large , round bales have now been replaced by the seemingly old fashioned mini bales, but the great new is that this area of sheep grazing land is once again becoming a viable concern.

So ... maybe for at one farm at least there is a future of the new regenerating from the old. And I know that this particular farmer and his hard working wife there are plans to use a mixture of the old fashioned ways combined with the new. It is great to look back at old photographs and realise that in at least one small area of Wales, farming in at least two local farms is changing for the better. But having stated that, I also realise  that in what remains of my lifetime, there will be others less fortunate and for them ... they will be the last in long history of Welsh hill farming. So many here have no-one to follow on be it sheep or cattle. Sad days of "rusted" history with so very few left in the future ... to make hay.
A small P.S to this post. I found a few other photo's that really belong more to these comments than any new ones ...

This was another view of the "farming dinosaur scene >>>
Just look at the background, across the green pastured in-bye fields to the moorland beyond where the November heather seems as rust red as the now antiquated (and scrapped farm machinery). It all seems to just blend, rust bright and sky bright scenes, now ... just a photographic memory of how things were a mere five years ago! How things have changed within a mere five years? I am so glad I captured these moments when I did. But ... there are still those old requisitioned gates that remain the details of which stand out ...