What would you put in a Museum of Contemporary Farming?
By Georgina Barney, artist, and curator of the Museum of Contemporary Farming The Museum of Contemporary Farming is an impossible project. Commissioned by the MERL as part of the project Making, Using and Enjoying: The Museum of the Intangible, it is manifested by me, its curator, with invited guests and the public. I’ve been using […]
Steam Ploughing
Born in Wiltshire into a Quaker family, John Fowler (1826-1864) became one of Britain’s most successful agricultural engineers and invented steam ploughing. Fowler was concerned with the cost of manual labour needed when cultivating land. In the 1850s he came up with the idea of using steam power instead. His method was to set a […]
Harvest Jug
This jug was made for the boozy celebration which comes after a successful harvest. The baking sun sits smiling at the centre of a mariner’s compass on one side, a fitting design for a jug made in the seafaring county of Devon. The varying hues of orange and yellow are rooted in the spent soil […]
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 […]
Ferguson Tractor
Flail
When you look at a flail, you are looking at the sweat, pain and labour farmworkers endured for hundreds of years. Flails are just two sticks, tied together at one end with leather. One stick would be grasped, and the other swung at corn on a barn floor to separate the grain from the husk […]
Suttons Seeds Display Cabinet
The soft wooden hues, globes of glass and intricate carving of this display case would not be out of place in a Victorian apothecary. This case, however, is for seeds. The bottom of the case proudly proclaims ‘Queen’s Seedsmen Reading’ – the Queen in question being Victoria, and the Seedsmen being Suttons Seeds company. Famous […]
Wagoner’s Belt
This belt was given to a wagoner on his retirement, in recognition of his great skill. There was once a strict hierarchy on farms. Horsemen were at the top and worked with wagons and ploughs. Everyone knew their rank, referring to each other with terms such as ‘first man’ or ‘fourth boy’.