Praise indeed from William Marshall, agricultural writer!
Here is a question for fans of the popular ‘Only Connect’ television programme – what links the following terms
Bow, Box, Barge and Boat?
Answer – horse drawn waggons and carts.
Waggons have four wheels, carts have two. I spell them waggons, but one ‘g’ will do. The pride of the carpenters/ wheelwrights who made them and the farmers who used them, a century ago they were to be found in every farmyard.
Have you seen the amazing collection, along with the wide range of other farm equipment, in the sheds at the Old Prison at Northleach?
Next time you’re passing pop into Relish the café at The Old Prison for one of their excellent meals or a coffee and cake (Cafe | The Old Prison, Northleach | Northleach for opening times) and then have a wander around outside. The Old Prison building is well worth a visit. Opened in 1792, it is now owned by the Friends of the Cotswolds. Feast your eyes on the wonderful collection of old farm waggons, tip carts and timber nibs to be found nestling under the shelters; unrivalled in our area. It’s a collection of regional importance, bettered in range perhaps only by the national collection at the English Museum of Rural Life in Reading. That’s certainly worth a visit too!
Have a good look too at the reconstructed carpenter’s shop & forge, not forgetting the two old unrestored shepherd huts also on display.
This cornucopia of equipment was mostly gathered, during the late 1960s/early 1970s by Miss Olive Lloyd-Baker of Hardwicke Court, (a large number of items were also donated later).Visiting her own local tenant farmers, she persuaded them to part with their obsolete equipment, or she purchased at local farm sales. UK Farming was becoming increasingly mechanised. Productivity was the name of the game. Tractors became more powerful and comfortable and the older equipment was already obsolete and too frail for use by these bigger tractors. Pride of place in her collection went to the traditional horse drawn waggons, used especially at harvest time, even then languishing in the back of sheds and cast aside in stack yard corners, replaced by the bigger all metal framed tractor pulled four wheel trailers and the very popular two rear wheeled hydraulically tipping ones, made by companies such as Ferguson, Martin Markham, Weeks or the Yorkshire firm of Tye which sold in their hundreds
Miss Olive managed to collect a fine selection of farm waggons from the Vale of Gloucester and the Cotswolds which came to the Cotswold District Council’s Museum Service, following her death in June 1975. In 1981, following much planning and hard work by the then Museum’s curator David Viner and his staff, her collection was to form the centre piece of what became the new museum of rural life in the grounds – well the prisoners’ exercise yard – of what had been the former House of Correction at Northleach. New sheds were built around the perimeter wall and some of the interior of the building itself was given over to smaller items, such as hand tools and horse harness and kitchen equipment. The Cotswold District Council successfully obtained £20,000 from the PRISM fund and in the early days several of the newly acquired waggons were sent for conservation to David Empringham in High Wycombe or to the Timsbury based Michael Horler. In the forty years that have followed the smaller hand tools/artefacts have been moved into store and worked on by Andrew Cleaver, as the buildings were used in different ways, the upper level used as offices by the Cotswolds Conservation Board.
Since then the waggons and some of the other items have some TLC by volunteers to help to maintain their condition and to research their history. Currently three of us are busy working on the waggons. More about that in the next blog.
Blog post written by
Volunteers – Simon & Sylvia Colbeck, Geoff Dubber
