Fordson tractor front #1 - Limited Edition of 30 Photograph

My grandfather used Fordson tractors on the family farm up until my father took over in the mid-1960s. Descriptions of them formed much of the framework for the stories I was told of our farm from the 1940s and 1950s. Since a hot spark plug fired more rapidly, the oven my Grandmother’s Sunday roasts were cooked in was commandeered on weekdays for the heating of the Fordsons' oil smelling plugs. Stories of my grandfather running from the kitchen early in the morning, hands burning, with hot plugs wrapped in his cloth hat, to the shed where the tractor waited, made the whole business of starting the Fordson sound less than straight forward. He had two Fordsons at this time - the more benign of the two had rubber tyres, the other steel wheels to give traction. Its back wheels had bolt-on spuds, giving an uncomfortable and noisy ride on anything less than damp earth. It had a four-speed gearbox, a steering wheel, a choke, and a notched throttle for varying its speed. From Dad’s 6-year-old-boy's perspective - he was the assigned clutch operative - the clutch had an impossibly high travel, which meant he had to stand on it with two feet. It had to be raised gently, especially near the top of its travel. Too quick, and you risked a stalled tractor and a firm reprimand - little wonder that my father in those days preferred the cart horse, Sally. At lunchtimes, the Fordson became the homeward-bound method of transport of up to five persons, mostly clinging on for dear life. Invariably, it was Dad's elder brother John behind the wheel, who believed the Fordson only operated efficiently in top gear and full throttle. Thankfully, old Daryll the labourer didn't share this view, and every now and then a huge hairy arm with a sunburnt patch under its torn sleeve would steal quietly forward to push the throttle in. From as far back as I can remember, tractors have been a ubiquitous presence in my life. Although I chose not to follow in the farming family tradition, and my father left farming in the mid-80s, my farming childhood provided the foundations of my life. The tractor in this image is one of three old Fordsons which lay quietly rusting in my home village of Bowerchalke, not far from our old farm. Unused and forgotten, they've endured unloved in a hedge for forty years, under the trees on an overgrown bank of the River Chalke known as 'Sheep Wash'. Fordsons like these worked the fields long before I was born and to my younger self, these tractors seemed impossibly antiquated in comparison to the super-modern, angular 1970s tractors I was impressed by. Recently, a plan was hatched in the village to remove the tractors from their muddy resting place. Nearly half a century of English weather had given the machines a unique patina, one that I was keen to photograph. With this in mind, it was agreed that I would photograph them before they were stripped down for restoration. Once extracted and pulled from the bank, (the word 'tractor' was actually taken from the Latin word 'to pull') these once-staples of the English landscape, now reduced to rusting relics, were transported to a local engineer and then to large grain barn where I would photograph them. I wanted to record the tractors just as they came out of the hedge - with roots, soil, bird shit and ivy still attached to them. The story of these machines told in rust, dents and missing panels. It seemed to me that these tractors, once great sculptures of the landscape, were now, in turn, sculptured themselves by the wind and rain from that same landscape. This image makes up a small series of three tractors all shot in the same location from this viewpoint. It’ll be a long time before the tractors will look like this again, if ever...