Marching for my heritage
Farming life
by Tom Martin
ILLUSTRATIONS BY CLARA NICOLL
There was something unusual about my train journey to London on the grim morning of Tuesday 19th November. It wasn’t just the smell of waxed jackets or the abundance of green wellies in a carriage normally filled with brogue-clod commuters. It was the conversation. Travelling with my wife and septuagenarian father, I spoke to farmers from across the country, from the neighbours whom I bumped into at the turnstile, to the whole farming family sitting on the row next to us: a father, mother and grown-up daughter from near Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire. And there was Guy, a tenant farmer from near Hull in north Yorkshire. Farmers were moving, and today they were moving in numbers.