The enduring magic of harvest

Though transformed by modern technology, this pivotal period in the farming calendar remains steeped in tradition, ritual and nostalgia

- Madeleine Silver

AS I WATCH the combine cross back and forth, I am struck by the simple truth that farmers have worked and shaped the land I'm looking at for thousands of years,’ writes the barrister-turned-Suffolk farmer and author Sarah Langford in Rooted: Stories of Life, Land and a Farming Revolution.

‘Beyond these fields it might feel as though the planet is beginning to fall apart. Our own small world may feel like it’s already fallen apart. But, as I stand and watch, I feel something reassuring in the thought that crops will be sown, crops will grow and crops will be harvested, no matter what chaos lies beyond them.’

There's a romantic timelessness to the rhythms of the land as summer reaches its peak and begins its slow demise, a time of year so defined by toil but doused in an air of something ritualistic, a little mythical even. On 15 July the rhyme ‘St Swithin’s day if thou be fair/For forty days ‘twill rain nae mair’ might be muttered in hope of a dry harvest; in East Anglia passing strangers were once encircled by reapers shouting “Holla Lar! Holla Lar! Holla Lar-Jess!” until money was given to help pay for their harvest supper; and in Cornwall there's the ‘Crying the Neck’ ceremony where the final handful of corn stalks is woven into a ‘corn dolly’ and ploughed into the first furrow of the new season.

Then consider the looming harvest moon: a full moon each September (‘The flame-red moon, the harvest moon/Rolls along the hills, gently bouncing/A vast balloon,’ wrote Ted Hughes in 1975) and the Feast of Michael and All Angels celebrated on 29 September to mark the end of harvest with its tradition of eating a goose that’s been fed on the stubble fields, said to protect against financial hardship for the year to come (‘Eat a goose on Michaelmas Day/Want not for money all the year,’ the saying goes).