There is a corner of a field on my usual route where the nettles come up to my chest by June, and somewhere in the middle of them is a wheel. Iron, spoked, taller than my knee, tipped over at an angle. I walked past it for a year and a half before I noticed it, and I only noticed then because the hedge cutter had been through and knocked the nettles back.
Once I had seen the wheel I started seeing the rest of it. There is a frame under there, and a row of curved tines, and a seat. An actual metal seat with a dish shape and holes in it. I have no idea what the machine is. I have looked at it several times since and I am no closer.
Something under the nettles
What struck me first was how completely the ground had taken it. This was not something parked in a corner. It was something the corner had grown around. There was elder coming up through the frame and a bramble had gone right through where a wheel would have turned.
Field corners are where this stuff ends up, and once you notice the pattern you see it everywhere. Corners are awkward. They are the bit a plough cannot square off neatly, they are often the low wet bit, and they are out of the way of everything. If you had a broken implement in 1962 and no particular use for the corner, that is where it went.
I could not tell you what it was, and I still cannot
I want to be straight about this, because there is a version of this kind of writing where the walker identifies the machine, dates it, and tells you about the family who farmed there. I cannot do any of that. I looked at pictures online and got about as far as thinking it might be something for turning hay, based on nothing more than the tines being curved.
It could equally be something else entirely. I have not asked anyone, mostly because the field is not one I have ever seen a person in, and partly because there is something I quite like about not knowing. My honest position is that there is a rusted machine in a field corner and I do not know what it is.
What I have learned to look at instead is the wear. Which parts are worn smooth and which are just corroded. Where the paint has survived, usually under a lip or inside a curve. Whether there are any bolt heads left or whether it is all seized into one lump. You can read something from that even without a name.
Why it never left
The obvious question is why nobody has taken it away, and I think the answer is mostly arithmetic. Getting a heavy seized lump of iron out of a nettle patch at the far corner of a field means machinery, time, and a reason. The corner is not being used for anything else. The thing is not in anybody’s way. Every year it becomes slightly more difficult to move and slightly less worth moving.
There is a second thing going on too, which is that scrap value comes and goes. I have noticed on my walks that some old iron does disappear, usually in a spell when prices are up, and then years pass with nothing shifting at all. There was a pile of old sheeting and rail behind a barn on another route that vanished over one winter. The machine in the nettles has never moved an inch.
The collapsed barn on the other side of the valley
Half an hour further along there is a stone building that has lost its roof. Not recently. The timbers are down inside it and there is a young ash growing where the middle of the floor would have been. Three walls stand, the fourth has come down in a spill of stone that has grassed over.
It is a much more dramatic thing than the machine and I find it less interesting, which surprised me. I think it is because a roofless building reads immediately as a ruin and your brain files it as scenery. The machine in the nettles does not look like scenery. It looks like something somebody put down.
What I do like about the barn is that you can see how it was built. Where the roof timbers sat, how thick the walls actually are, where a door was blocked up at some point with different stone. It is a building with its coat off. And the stone spill on the fallen side tells you which way the weather comes from, because it is always the same side that goes first on the ones I have seen.
Look, do not touch, and do not climb
This is the part I take seriously. Old machinery is tetanus and lockjaw territory, and it is full of edges that are sharp in a way that new metal is not, because corrosion leaves flakes and points. I have caught the back of my hand on a rusted edge reaching in to move a bramble and it opened the skin instantly with almost no pressure.
Collapsed buildings are worse. A wall standing on its own with no roof to tie it is holding itself up and nothing else is helping. Timbers on the floor of a roofless barn can be rotten right through under a sound looking surface. I have a simple rule now, which is that I stay outside the footprint of any building that has lost its roof, and I do not step onto anything I cannot see the underside of.
The other obvious point is that none of this is mine. It is in somebody’s field. Looking from a path is fine. Wandering in to have a proper poke around is not, whatever the state of it.
Rust as a way of reading the land
What all this has actually done is change how I read a farm. The machine in the nettles is not much use as history because I cannot date it. But the pattern of what gets left where tells you plenty about how a place is worked now. Corners that are full of junk are corners nobody needs. Yards that are tidy belong to a working operation. A barn with a new roof next to a barn with no roof tells you which building still earns its keep.
I go past that field corner most weeks. In winter, with the nettles down, you can see the whole frame of the thing. In July it is gone completely, and if you did not know it was there you would walk past a patch of nettles. I like that a walk contains something that is only visible half the year.