TURN WREST PLOUGH

In its early years the Museum of English Rural Life toured the nation’s many country shows, picking up objects from farmers and the public and using its collections to show rural communities about the past. This old horse-drawn plough was displayed at the World Ploughing Championships in Shillingford, Oxfordshire, in 1956. Other stands at this same event featured the latest farming tractors and technologies. Horse ploughing was demonstrated during the Championships but the main focus was on the skill of tractor ploughing.

This type of plough is called a turn wrest and was commonly found in Kent, where it was collected by the Museum in 1955. If you are ever at a country fair or agricultural show, keep an eye out for old farm machinery that links to our rural past. But also keep an eye out for new farm machinery. Are technologies being demonstrated by scale models, or promoted with farm toys? Using miniatures in this way is much less common than it would have been back in the 1950s.