Mersea Island Web Portal

The Mersea ploughing match, Chapmans Lane, Mersea Island. Matt Bundock steering the Suffolk punches.

The Joy of Essex with Martin Newell

I’d been looking forward to the Mersea Island Ploughing Match for several weeks. In the past I have often hankered for the sight of fields being ploughed. It’s just how I am nowadays.

For a brief period during my youth, when I was a big girl’s blouse prancing about in pop groups, I lost touch with such matters. Then, in my late 20s, I returned once again to the soil, took on jobbing gardening work and began studying programmes like One Man and His Dog.

I also pored over books by George Ewart Evans, James Wentworth Day and others. I took to leaning on country gates in apppropriately manly fashion, in order to reconsider my own haphazard shuffle between the twin immensities of life and death.

Oddly enough, though, during all these decades, I never went birdwatching. Standing in a makeshift shelter all weekend with someone I hardly knew, might have been a bridge too far – even for an open-minded chap like me.

Now, there are certain things which a jaded old buccaneer may never tire of seeing; tax-rebate notifications for instance, or black and white 1960s portraits of Una Stubbs.

Call me peculiar if you wish, but another of them is the sight of a mob of seagulls trailing a plough. Seen from the top of the Alresford Road whilst upstairs on a Brightlingsea bus it’s pretty good. Witnessed from a bicycle, on a farm track, however, with the Colne estuary in the background, may possibly have the edge.

It’s just one of those timeless things; the type of image in fact, which always looks perfectly acceptable on the label of a jar of chutney, or a plastic two-litre bottle of supermarket beer. The plough, the ploughman, the field and the seagulls. Beat that.

Usually, however, with such a spectacle, unless it’s a very large field, it’ll only be one ploughman with one tractor which I’ll see. Invited to Mersea Island Ploughing Match I was unprepared for the scale of what was on display.

There was something in the order of 40 to 45 tractors and other odd-looking machines in attendance. The tractors ranged in age from the fairly modern to some of 1940s vintage. One or two of these beasts were industrial-sized with multiple plough blades. The majority, however, were relatively small – many not much bigger than modern garden tractors.

The instructions in the programme which I picked up were that all ploughmen were to be at their plots to start by 10am By 12.30, they had to be finished.

One by one, the ploughmen, many of them sat low in the seats of their vintage tractors, got to work.

You need quite a lot of room for a ploughing match and the event took place over a 56 acre ground. 56 acres, for those of you who are unused to visualising large tracts of land, is roughly, the size of 30 Wembley football pitches.

To stand on this vast flat stubble field, in the pale blue light of a fine autumn morning is unforgettable. Mersea – which, let us not forget, is an island – as you drive further into it, has vast skies and a singularly beautiful light which I would imagine a landscape artist would like.

Is this place really part of the much-derided county of Essex, which London columnists keep taking swipes at? They must be stupid..

Now, though, the tractors were at work. With each time I scanned the field, more of them had joined the activity. They chugged and droned slowly up and down their allocated plot in order to create the truest furrow.

So big was the field, that I was forced to telephone Mr Partridge the photographer in order to find out exactly where he was. When I finally located him and he waved at me I could barely make him out. Yet there he was, standing, as usual, in the riskiest spot he could in order to get the best shot.

In one corner, however, were the Suffolk Punch horses – and they were what I’d really come see. I’ve become a bit of a Suffolk Punch groupie recently. I’ve seen them at both Hollesley, and at Sutton Fairs this year.

One pair of plough horses came from Hollesley, whilst the other came from Banham Zoo. I stood and watched the patient creatures being dressed: collars, chains, brasses and blinkers. A couple of dogs had come down with the Suffolk team, a gregarious border collie and a large poodle. Both dogs only added colour to what was already turning out to be a perfect Saturday morning.

When, at about 11.30, the two teams of Punches and their ploughmen finally got going, the spectacle drew a predictably big crowd. The Hollesley team’s furrow, so far as I could see, was as straight as any one ploughed by the tractors.

Again, Mr Partridge risked becoming part of the new furrow, by taking a shot of a ploughman, from the front, between the two horses heads, only nipping out of the way once they were nearly upon him.

However this may sound, to be amongst horses, dogs, tractors, ploughs and people in a large field, seems to me to be infinitely superior to say, many other entertainments. It’s also incredibly relaxing, when I consider the many options open to the stressed and careworn.

You could, if you so wished take up meditation, or any number of costly oriental therapies designed to sort your chakras out. Or you could instead spend Saturday morning watching a ploughing match. For me, it’s tractors over chakras any day.