Although I live in a fairly rural area, with several farms nearby, I would say that I’m still fairly isolated from the whole ‘process’ of farming - the day-to-day activities required to ensure that we have our meat and veg and our bread and milk etc.

So I enjoyed the fact that in the farmer’s field next to our holiday house in Tolpuddle, we were able to watch a week’s worth of activity by the hard-working farmer in preparing the ground and then, by the end of the week, planting the seeds for this summer’s crop.

Almost every day he was out there, sometimes very early, sometimes until quite late into the evening, using various implements fitted to his tractor to get the soil ready for the planting (which I didn’t manage to photograph).

I find something quite fascinating about lines in the countryside, whether man-made or natural. It struck me that it would be very appropriate to call these lifelines, for in these lines the seeds are planted and crops grown to provide food for us to eat. In our day the tractor makes the furrow-making process so fast. Turn the clock back to the agricultural labourers of Tolpuddle in the 1830s - the famed ‘martyrs’ known, at least in Trade Union circles, the whole world over - and this sort of work would have taken much longer and involved far more physical effort, for far less pay. No wonder they formed a union and pushed for higher wages!