Plough Music

Plough Music includes songs and poems, drawings and anecdotes David Medcalf has gathered from people involved with ploughing. This book relates the ancient act of ploughing to the modern world in often humorous ways, ensuring this nostalgic book will appeal to everybody, and not just those with an active interest in ploughing. The art and science of ploughing has helped put food on the tables of millions of people in Ireland and across the world for thousands of years. The fascinating world of ploughing has it all: amazing people, beautiful horses, mesmerizing machinery, and stars such as Harry Ferguson from County Down and his enemy (and later friend) Henry Ford.

Plough Music covers the whole gamut of ploughing, from the hills of Ballycullane to the banks of the Brahmatputra, and from the near-miraculous role played by the humble earthworm in aerating the soil, attempting to create plough-free farming. Why do 150,000 people attend the national ploughing championships each year? Why do hundreds of old-boy racers regularly take their vintage tractors out on the roads? And why do multimillionaires forsake their yachts and foreign holidays to take to the plough?

Now, for the first time, writer and journalist David Medcalf, a lifetime observer of rural families and their way of life, sheds light on these and other burning questions. His miscellany of musings will fascinate, educate, intrigue and illuminate both the dedicated ploughman (or woman) and the armchair follower of this ancient art. It is a feast for both the mind and the soul; it is music for tired souls, inextricably intwined with our national identity.