The turn of the wheel

I made a return visit to the abandoned farm I blipped about here, here and here almost two years ago.
The house has lost some of its roof now and the ravages of water, mildew and rot make it look too wretched to photograph. It was never a very appealing place, to my mind, built in 1910 in an architectural style typical of that period which doesn't suit its setting.

So I had a poke around the outbuildings instead and found in a tumbledown shed this antiquated seed drill. Although the place was farmed until 15 years ago this machine must have been around since the middle of the the 20th century because it was made by a company called Kell of Gloucester that stopped producing agricultural implements in the early 50s. The drill had wooden spoked wheels with metal rims as made by wheelwrights long since vanished as traditional craftsmen. Probably the model was designed to be horse-drawn and in action would have looked something like this.

A seed drill consists of a lateral wooden hopper with holes at the bottom through which the grain drops down via these flexible tubes to coulters that cut through the earth as the machine moves along, depositing the seed in parallel lines. The rate and size could be controlled with levers and gears. Once it would have been a farmer's pride and joy, now it's forgotten as it rots and rusts.

Is it sad that this old place has given up the ghost? The last surviving member of the family may herself be still decaying in some institution but by all accounts the farm's former dwellers were haunted individuals even when they lived here (see my earlier stories about them). The house is no great loss but the land is in a sorry state, the small fields choked with weeds and brambles, the hedges unkempt and fences neglected. One day new life may arrive and the old be swept away, a new house built perhaps. I trust it will be a happier place.

Time, like an ever rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.