Ploughs and pasties

St Winnow, Cornwall near Fowey. Where else, at the end of a gorgeously remote lane would you find a roadside caravan dispensing exquisite food and providing a diversion in the form of a farming bygones and miscellany museum? The weather was kind as we sat and munched our way through homemade pasties, farm-reared pork and South Devon beef rolls of such ample proportions that we were fair tuckered by the end. The museum (or large shed as it should better be described) is educational in its diversity, covering such miscellany as wheelwrights tools, primus stoves, gas masks and what can only be described as a devotional to David Brown tractors. These red prime-movers are scattered throughout the place, poking out from under sacks, standing in dusty formation and in one unlikely pairing, hitched to an old fashioned threshing drum. I say 'unlikely' for the tractor concerned is one of those airfield jobs which used to tow bombs and aircraft around the bases of Britain - all nicely faired-in and streamlined,surely only to satisfy the designers eye, as no possible aero-dynamic advantage could be gained. The building in which this lot is housed has a familiar construct about it; telegraph poles with their id. numbers still attached and clad in that perennial favourite, corrugated iron. The smell is delicious and well known to those of us who enjoy visiting such places...oil, grease, paraffin, diesel fuel and grain, with a mixture of old sacking and hay. A short walk down to the river brings you to St Winnow Church where episodes of Poldark were filmed...which applies to most of Cornwall...but it is a fabulous building with a barrel vaulted roof and wonderful carved pew ends. The day for us was rounded off nicely with a few pints at the admirable New Inn at Tywardreath - no food, just 'salt and vinegar' or 'plain' - and a great bunch of regulars.