Over the past fortnight I’ve passed many harvested fields, straw bales and wrapped haylage. But this, in a Hampshire field near Basingstoke, made me stop.
The gentle, rolling landscape made the towering, temporary construction of baled straw all the more striking. It looked, to me, like a fortified wall around a medieval city.
I imagined legendary landscape painter John Constable seeing this after completing ‘The Haywain’ and musing, ‘Yes, I should do a straw one now… and skip the water.’
Mind you, they didn’t have the machinery back then to make giant straw stacks like this. And we don’t need landscape painters to capture them… we’ve all got iPhones now.
Soon it’ll disappear into a barn. I’m glad I saw it before it does.
Andrew Greenhalgh 