Rest assured, this is not about the kind of people you see comatose in the corner of the pub just before closing time. This is a village devoted to market gardening, and carrots and cabbages, broccoli and leeks, have been grown here since the 19th century. Apparently, when the weaving trade collapsed with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the villagers turned to growing vegetables in the light, sandy, hungry soil, and made such a success of it that the business is still thriving today.
As a historian, I find it very interesting. Here, in the 21st century, is a place where people are still visibly working on the land. They're not insulated in cosy tractors (well, most of them aren't), but out in all weathers, apart from hard frost and snow, pulling carrots, cutting cabbages, harvesting potatoes and onions. Parts of the process are mechanised - sowing the seeds, setting out the young plants, spreading muck and fertilizer - but you won't see any of those huge contraptions they have in the Fens, the moving tents/conveyor belts/soil looseners/washers under which the workers spend all their time. Our farm workers pick and bunch the carrots entirely by hand, working in groups of three or more: they wash them off using a hose or a trailer full of water, and pack them in boxes ready for Sainsbury's (I was thrilled to see some of our carrots on sale there a few weeks ago). I think the supermarket contract must be fairly recent, but it's obviously lucrative, as suddenly carrots in various stages of development are being grown everywhere.
Not just carrots, of course. Over the eighteen years I've lived here, I've seen pretty much every outdoor crop being grown in the fields around us. I had an old book, a soil survey of the village done by the Min of Ag sometime in the 30s, which basically said that yields would be a lot better if only these ignorant yokels could be persuaded not to plant so many potatoes. There are still plenty of them, alongside everything else. Sometimes you wonder whether there's a demand for it. Who still eats marrow in that sort of quantity these days? Do they actually sell all those pumpkins in the brief run up to Hallowe'en? Why does that farmer grow so many beetroots and then fail to harvest them, year after year?
There's a lot of waste, of course. Forget how much is thrown out by the supermarkets: here in our fields there's enough to feed half the country, just lying discarded. Sometimes you can tell why: green spuds, forked carrots. But quite often there doesn't seem to be any reason why some veg fails to make the grade. I know of at least one person in the village who used to run a market stall purely on what had been rejected at the packing warehouse. If you're discreet (walking around with a bulging plastic bag is not exactly tactful), you can create a whole meal with what's thrown away in the fields. We had some very nice stuffed round courgettes a few weeks ago, salvaged from a heap dumped beside the path, and my 'pick-up soup' is very popular in the winter months. Other people are less scrupulous. A few years ago one of the growers experimented with unusual vegetables, including purple brussels sprouts. My husband, walking past, took some off one stem to try (they tasted just the same as normal ones). I mentioned the purple sprouts to the farmer when I met him a couple of weeks later. 'And you know what,' he told me in disgust, 'some bugger had the whole row a few nights ago.' Even though Steve had only taken two or three, I didn't know where to look. Needless to say, the purple sprouts didn't appear next year, but the black 'Tuscan' cabbage has been widely grown recently, along with lots of different types of squash. The only crops I've never seen on a large scale are peas and beans: they do well in the soil (I have them in my own garden) but maybe the hassle of supporting the plants with sticks and poles is too labour-intensive.
I think the fact that there has always been plenty of work available on the land has kept many of the old families in the village. It's not quite the 'place with only three surnames' but when Hugh started at the school, ten per cent of the pupils went under the name of Paget, and if you counted the ones whose mothers had been born a Paget, it was more like twenty per cent. Apparently they all go back to one 19th century couple with about six sons who all stayed in the village. Some other Wiltshire villages have 'local names' but not to this extent: every time the blood donation people come to the Social Centre, they run a sweepstake on how many Pagets will turn up. There are Fennells and Mortimers, Kings and Hughes and Amors as well, and some of them have ancestry in the village going back hundreds of years. This, I'm sure, adds to the thriving community spirit here: unlike the place I grew up, where all the houses have been sold to people who work elsewhere, so that it's become a dormitory of commuters who don't know each other, and don't care.
The old fashioned farming methods affect the landscape too. Most of the village is built on a plateau, but on the western side the ground falls away steeply to a narrow river valley, where one of the mills once stood, and which is still known as the Common, though it was hedged long ago. Here there are pasture fields full of sheep, cattle and horses, as you can find in thousands of places up and down the country. But above them, on the flat sandy soil between the hill and the valley, the vegetables are grown as crops were grown in mediaeval times, in long strips divided by tracks and banks, with very few hedges or trees: so few, in fact, that the rather ordinary mature oak in our field is covered by a preservation order because of its contribution to the landscape. A local artist once did a picture, which we gave to a friend leaving us, of the lines of cabbages disappearing into the distance, leading towards the graceful Perpendicular spire of our church: it summed up everything I love about this unusual, delightful place that has been our home for more than eighteen years.
As a historian, I find it very interesting. Here, in the 21st century, is a place where people are still visibly working on the land. They're not insulated in cosy tractors (well, most of them aren't), but out in all weathers, apart from hard frost and snow, pulling carrots, cutting cabbages, harvesting potatoes and onions. Parts of the process are mechanised - sowing the seeds, setting out the young plants, spreading muck and fertilizer - but you won't see any of those huge contraptions they have in the Fens, the moving tents/conveyor belts/soil looseners/washers under which the workers spend all their time. Our farm workers pick and bunch the carrots entirely by hand, working in groups of three or more: they wash them off using a hose or a trailer full of water, and pack them in boxes ready for Sainsbury's (I was thrilled to see some of our carrots on sale there a few weeks ago). I think the supermarket contract must be fairly recent, but it's obviously lucrative, as suddenly carrots in various stages of development are being grown everywhere.
Not just carrots, of course. Over the eighteen years I've lived here, I've seen pretty much every outdoor crop being grown in the fields around us. I had an old book, a soil survey of the village done by the Min of Ag sometime in the 30s, which basically said that yields would be a lot better if only these ignorant yokels could be persuaded not to plant so many potatoes. There are still plenty of them, alongside everything else. Sometimes you wonder whether there's a demand for it. Who still eats marrow in that sort of quantity these days? Do they actually sell all those pumpkins in the brief run up to Hallowe'en? Why does that farmer grow so many beetroots and then fail to harvest them, year after year?
There's a lot of waste, of course. Forget how much is thrown out by the supermarkets: here in our fields there's enough to feed half the country, just lying discarded. Sometimes you can tell why: green spuds, forked carrots. But quite often there doesn't seem to be any reason why some veg fails to make the grade. I know of at least one person in the village who used to run a market stall purely on what had been rejected at the packing warehouse. If you're discreet (walking around with a bulging plastic bag is not exactly tactful), you can create a whole meal with what's thrown away in the fields. We had some very nice stuffed round courgettes a few weeks ago, salvaged from a heap dumped beside the path, and my 'pick-up soup' is very popular in the winter months. Other people are less scrupulous. A few years ago one of the growers experimented with unusual vegetables, including purple brussels sprouts. My husband, walking past, took some off one stem to try (they tasted just the same as normal ones). I mentioned the purple sprouts to the farmer when I met him a couple of weeks later. 'And you know what,' he told me in disgust, 'some bugger had the whole row a few nights ago.' Even though Steve had only taken two or three, I didn't know where to look. Needless to say, the purple sprouts didn't appear next year, but the black 'Tuscan' cabbage has been widely grown recently, along with lots of different types of squash. The only crops I've never seen on a large scale are peas and beans: they do well in the soil (I have them in my own garden) but maybe the hassle of supporting the plants with sticks and poles is too labour-intensive.
I think the fact that there has always been plenty of work available on the land has kept many of the old families in the village. It's not quite the 'place with only three surnames' but when Hugh started at the school, ten per cent of the pupils went under the name of Paget, and if you counted the ones whose mothers had been born a Paget, it was more like twenty per cent. Apparently they all go back to one 19th century couple with about six sons who all stayed in the village. Some other Wiltshire villages have 'local names' but not to this extent: every time the blood donation people come to the Social Centre, they run a sweepstake on how many Pagets will turn up. There are Fennells and Mortimers, Kings and Hughes and Amors as well, and some of them have ancestry in the village going back hundreds of years. This, I'm sure, adds to the thriving community spirit here: unlike the place I grew up, where all the houses have been sold to people who work elsewhere, so that it's become a dormitory of commuters who don't know each other, and don't care.
The old fashioned farming methods affect the landscape too. Most of the village is built on a plateau, but on the western side the ground falls away steeply to a narrow river valley, where one of the mills once stood, and which is still known as the Common, though it was hedged long ago. Here there are pasture fields full of sheep, cattle and horses, as you can find in thousands of places up and down the country. But above them, on the flat sandy soil between the hill and the valley, the vegetables are grown as crops were grown in mediaeval times, in long strips divided by tracks and banks, with very few hedges or trees: so few, in fact, that the rather ordinary mature oak in our field is covered by a preservation order because of its contribution to the landscape. A local artist once did a picture, which we gave to a friend leaving us, of the lines of cabbages disappearing into the distance, leading towards the graceful Perpendicular spire of our church: it summed up everything I love about this unusual, delightful place that has been our home for more than eighteen years.
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