Rural Relics: Milkmaid’s Yokes and Root Choppers

Jo Roberts looks at what our rural relics can tell us about the early days of farming.

By Josephine Roberts
Published on March 4, 2022
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by Josephine Roberts
Walls like these, common throughout Wales, are a visual reminder of early agricultural practices there. Most are at least 200 years old but remain highly functional. Other relics endure as cherished antiques.

Here in the U.K., older tractors are always cherished by collectors. These machines as seen as artifacts of our early days of farming, and there is an overwhelming feeling that they must be preserved for future generations. It’s wonderful that such passion for vintage tractors exists. It would be a sad world if we failed to appreciate and learn from past technologies, but all the same, tractors are relative newcomers on the farming scene. Many far older farming artifacts often go largely unnoticed. Rural relics that pre-date mechanization can be found all around us, and often these old objects tell us far more about our farming history than tractors do.

On my travels (which I must admit are not big travels, for I rarely journey outside of North Wales) I try to photograph any interesting rural artifacts that I see. Conversations about farming relics often lead to someone saying, “Come and see what I’ve got.”

Older people enjoy asking a younger person to guess at a relic’s identify, hoping the item will baffle and generate head scratching. I’m becoming better at this game, as by now I’ve been shown a lot of curiosities from the past. If I didn’t know what they were at the time, I made a point of learning about them since.

So, when an old friend showed me two old wooden farming relics recently, I knew instantly what they both were. The first was a yoke (or a milkmaid’s yoke). This simple tool allowed a person to carry a load, usually two buckets of water or milk, without having to carry it in the hands. When using a yoke, the weight of the load is evenly distributed across the bearer’s shoulders and back, and the hands are only used to steady the load and are free to open gates.

red root chopper
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