Another title I planned a while ago, and on a much happier note.
I’m no expert, but I’m fond of the odd haystack. Bountiful nature and all that. Going on holiday to the Isle of Jura most summers when I was growing up, a relative there still had a smallholding, and you could see him out in the fields, gathering and forming the stooks by hand.
Later, there were the ‘burnt cupcake’ haystacks of Monet, in shades of pink and blue, as well as more strawy colours. One year I discovered the upstairs floor in the National Gallery in Edinburgh, which has quite a collection of these.
Monet got a bit obsessed by these – as he did by waterlilies and a few other things – but it’s amazing the number of different colour combinations he comes with. Much of the time, though, the stacks remain the same shape.
I was going to say you can imagine my delight when… – and it wasn’t really as strong as that – we got to see loads more variants when on holiday in Poland this summer.
But really, when you’ve grown up with square bales, roly poly round bales, and perhaps the handgathered wigwam type, I was struck by how many other variants you could come up with, should you have the time, energy, and more importantly, enough straw needing drying.
What was more impressive was how many there were in a relatively small area. We had been staying in Warsaw and came down on the train to Zakopane, the main mountain resort in the south. After Krakow, the train meanders for a while, in and out of foothills, for a couple of hours.
In that time, we saw I think seven different variants, including ones with ‘ears’, ones that looked like double axles, etc. A couple of years further back, we saw another variant in Slovenia, where there are covered drying racks in many fields, something that seems to be distinctive to that country.
My question is: who teaches them how to do that? Is it set for the area, or is it up to the farmer’s own choice – and perhaps time?  It’s not that the hills are so high in that part of Poland that you are really cut off from other areas, as you could argue you might be elsewhere, as an explanation for why so many types remain.
Perhaps it’s also that in the UK, we’ve been told how mechanised farming has become, how industrialised, effectively.  Travelling up to Aberdeenshire in September to meet incoming students, where field after field was full of identifcal cotton reel bales, you had some sense of this.
Yes, it was quite pretty, but you also lost sense of how far you’d been travelling after a while. Which is why it was nice to see in contrast such variety, ingenuity – and personality.
Making hay while the sun shines eh? It’s a lifestyle thing.