Country diary: Signs of bygone farm workers, turned up by the plough | Derek Niemann

Sandy, Bedfordshire: I've cleared out the insides of the pipe, and now have a compulsion to suck on it, becoming the first person to draw on it in over a centuryAt the age of seven I roamed the gutters of Hamilton, near Glasgow, looking for spent matches, returning home with filthy fingers and bags full of blackened sticks. I couldn't fathom then why my mum should be cross with me. Decades later, I'm still looking for smokers' discards, only these days out alongside the open fields.Here in such long-established arable land we can find what may be the sole physical legacy left by generations of farm workers. Those who scattered seed, tilled, raked and hoed, clenched a tobacco pipe in their mouths, and, when it snapped, they tossed the broken parts away, clay into clay. Continue reading...