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Full Description
The Summer People: Life on the Somerset Levels is a charming memoir of life and work in a Somerset village as experienced by a boy in the 1940s and '50s, a time when children could roam freely and safely over fields, farms and workshops of the secret countryside of the Somerset Levels. For centuries the fertile Somerset Levels flooded each winter, forcing the people to migrate to surrounding hills; hence the county name, Somerset, meaning 'land of the summer people'. The author introduces local customs and festivals, the impact of the war, the rich variety of characters who passed along the village street in those days, how vestiges of the annual migrations still linger, how he learned traditional farming skills as he grew older, and the fascinating histories of the ingenious machines used in haymaking and harvesting, now obsolete and unfamiliar. While expressing the interest, satisfaction and beauty of rural life, the author is realistic about the hard labour involved, the ever present danger from water and floods and the impact of mechanisation on the rhythms of life.
Contents
1 Roads and Festivals 9
2 Floods and Waterways 43
3 Wagons and Crafts 55
4 Mowers and Mowing 85
5 Haymaking and Ingenious Machines 119
6 Ricks and Rick Building 159
7 Cows and Milking 183
8 Wheat and Threshing 207
Postscript: Dialect and the Summer People 232
Acknowledgements 240
