This is a record of the last generation of men who knew, at first hand, traditions of farming and animal husbandry dating back to Saxon times. It includes stories of runaway horses, of carts deep in the mire of January lanes, of winter nights in great candlelit houses and storytelling by great log fires, of the massive shire horses of East Anglia, and of farmsteads and hamlets virtually unchanged since Domesday. The author travelled the length and breadth of the country to talk to men such as Will Constance, who remembers scything Norfolk fields by hand; Reg Dobson of Warwickshire, who had to milk more than 100 cows each day on his own, and whose best friend once ate a whole calf for a bet; and Joe White, who still farms as his forebears did in a rich Devon landscape of tiny fields and well-grown hedges.