[This is a slightly edited version of a posting on my Penygroes blog]

The photograph below may look like just a concrete platform in a hedge on a remote country lane.  Slightly surprising to chance upon, perhaps, but that is of course what it is.

For me however the bit of concrete is redolent of childhood memories.  This is no ordinary platform and its existence is a relic of an agricultural life that has changed completely since I first came down to deepest West Wales 60 years ago.

My grandparents’ farm, Llanferran, was heavily based on dairy cattle – for the production of milk and beef (veal too, no doubt).  Throughout my childhood summer holidays were spent on that farm; whilst the rest of the family had other priorities I wanted to do nothing more than to potter around the farm and be made to feel useful.  For farmers with dairy herds needing to be milked twice a day that was – and of course still is – a huge demand on the working day.

Milking machinery was noisy and complicated but a key part of the process was to place the suction cups on the cows’ teats; I have no recollection of ever being promoted to do this and it still sticks in my mind as evidently a task for men not boys!  My main contribution was to help bring the cows from the fields to the sheds; not an onerous task, as the cows always seemed to be more or less on autopilot when milking time came.  So my contribution was probably to chase a few stragglers and to encourage overall forward movement of the herd by making the strange guttural noises beloved by farmers and understood by cows.

The milk ended up in those wonderful churns that no doubt are now only available as ‘collectibles’.  These were the churns that must form part of everyone’s idea of a rural, steam-age railway platform.   Each morning the milk production from my grandparents’ farm had to be moved in their churns to the point where they could be picked up by the milk company’s truck.  I remember large brown labels – presumably to identify the source of the milk, since one churn looks very much like another – being attached to the churns.  We then loaded the churns onto a Massey-Ferguson tractor, which was specially fitted with its own small wooden platform to carry perhaps four churns.

By this stage I felt I was being useful (although I am sure I could not move a full churn without help).  I would stand on the side of the tractor and we would set off down the farm lane.  Health and safety rules were not a concern.  We were heading for a milk platform and here I have to be honest: until prompted by a friend or relation with a better memory, I am not sure whether Llanferran had its own platform or whether we went 50 or so yards down the road to the Trelimmin[1] platform; ‘Trelimmin’ because it is at the head of the lane leading to the farm with that name.

There was of course a time deadline to be met – the arrival of the milk company’s truck.  I remember one or two close shaves but do not believe we ever had to come back to the farm with the full churns, which would surely have had to drained and the milk wasted if we had missed the pick-up.  We did of course return with new, empty churns.  That was the daily routine.

What happens now?  Well, children, the supermarket plastic bottles full of milk do not grow on trees.  The farmers still have to bring their cattle in for milking morning and evening but now a tanker truck does the daily round of the farms.  I rather miss the churns; thank goodness we have more than just antique furnishings to remind us of how it once was.

As we are talking about farms I cannot resist including this picture of the lane leading to Trelimmin.

Those that know Welsh farmers – perhaps farmers from anywhere – will doubt that this is a lane leading to a farm.  Farmers are usually far too busy to maintain a lane so beautifully.  Trelimmin is no longer a working farm but home to a retired couple.

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[1] Should you happen to pass the platform you will notice a sign for ‘Trelimin’.  I have used the spelling to be found on the Ordnance Survey maps – and in my childhood the farm certainly was Trelimmin.  Perhaps there has been a slip of the pen at some point over the years or maybe the current owners prefer the shorter name.