#scything

Fucking hell guys get yourself a scythe, it’s amazing

″The Veteran in a New Field” (1865)

Ross Poldark, Book Two, Chapter 26

He put the scythe on his shoulder and tramped over to the hay field, which lay on the northeast side of the valley beyond the apple trees and stretching up to Wheal Grace. A large field unenclosed by walls or hedges, and the hay in it was a good crop, better than the previous year, yellowed and dried by the last week of sun. He took off his coat and hung it over a stone at the corner of the field. He was bareheaded and could feel the warmth of the climbing sun on his hair and open neck. Natural enough that in the old days men were sun worshippers; especially in England, where the sun was elusive and fitful and always welcome, in a land of mists and cloud and drifting rain. He began to cut, bent a little forward and using the body as a pivot, swinging in a wide semicircle. The grass toppled reluctantly, long sheaves of it bending over and sinking slowly to the earth. ... His forearms and back were aching with the exercise, but he had worked some dissatisfaction out of himself. The regularity of the sweeping scythe, the pivoting movement of the body, the steady advance around the edge of the field, eating into the grass and gradually approaching the center, had helped to lay the uncomfortable ghosts of his discontent.

Ross Poldark, Book Two, Chapter 25

Hay ripens. I sharpen my tapering scythe blade and chamfer its wafer of paper-thin steel with stone swoops; it’s hooked like a peregrine’s talon. The snaking shaft sweeps and the first swathe is side-laid beside me, clean slain. As I swing I can feel the gravid field yielding. Sheaves kneel and then fall in the breeze in formation. Their early seeds dance there like next April’s rain-showers…