Museum Pieces

On our walk down the river through the lanes OldestBestFriend, the boys and I passed her parents old farmhouse and yard.  The house was rented, then finally sold, after Tom built Mary a brand new bungalow on the hill above in the 1960s.

OBF and I spent a lot of time playing in and around the farm buildings so we naturally stopped and reminisced.

The big Dutch hay barn where we played amongst the bales is gone, and the lean-to where Tom kept and maintained various vehicles and equipment.  The silage clamp and cow-sheds were gone but the milking parlour Tom built still stands, possibly put to another use. It’s sobering to see a building you can remember when it was just two layers of breeze-blocks looking ancient and covered in ivy.

Before the milking parlour the cows were milked in the two cowsheds using some sort of pneumatic system.  A tube was attached to an overhead pneumatic pipe, a cluster of teats to the cow’s udder and the milk went into a ‘dumpy bucket’.  When the bucket was full, or the cow empty, the milk was carried to coolouse (or "cool house" - believe me it was quite some time from first hearing it that I realised it was two words).

“I can remember my mother carrying the dumpy buckets from that far shed to the coolouse” said OBF. I suddenly had a mental image of Mary coming past the farmhouse with a bucket in each hand, wearing wellies and an old navy raincoat with her hair covered with a scarf.

In the coolouse the buckets were emptied into a hopper and the milk trickled down over a cooler and through a funnel into the churn.  An eye had to be kept on things so that the churns were changed when they were full, but not overflowing.   

The full churns were put out onto the stand, where the creamery lorry would pick them up and leave empties; or any that had been rejected at the milk factory the previous day.

The milking parlour made things a lot less laborious.  The milk went through pipes straight from the cow into a large tank and the milk tanker called each day to empty it.

Llandovery’s Tourist Information Centre (sadly closed due to the present unpleasantness) doubles as a local history museum. 

I was passing it a couple of days later and stopped dead at what was on display in the windows.

The hopper, cooler, funnel and churn system we’d been talking about.

And in the next window a dumpy bucket resplendent with teat clusters.

It made me feel very very old.