Scotland’s tractors: Poet and photographer salute trusty machines

They have helped shape our country and feed our nation for generations.

The tractor, the engine-­powered workhorse of Scottish farmers, has ploughed and harvested, pulled and dragged, for decades.

Now, as many lie rusting in peace after years of service, landscape photographer Allan Wright has toured the country to capture their retirement in a new book, Vintage Tractors.

He said: “When I was doing my normal photography I kept seeing these tractors in the landscape. I realised the vintage ones were dying out in a graceful way. I developed a mild obsession.

“When I started sharing the pictures on social media, I got an amazing interest that started me thinking of the potential for a book.”

Allan’s first tractor picture was taken back in 1983 and he’s photographed scores since, right across the country.

Some are derelict, relics slowly rusting away, others are very much integral to communities as they work the fields in small-scale, often remote, farms.

The machines featured are mostly models from the 1950s and 1960s.

And, although they have become a private passion, Allan, from Castle Douglas, insists he is not an expert by any means.

“I’m definitely not a tractor buff,” said Allan. “I know that Massey Fergusons are red or grey, David Browns are white and Fordsons are blue, but that’s about it really.”

The book has a specially penned poem by writer George Gunn and features an introduction by former farmer and self-confessed tractor aficionado Russell McNab.

Russell recalls buying his first tractor, a second-hand Massey Ferguson 3 Cylinder, and then moving on to more and more.

He sold them but, after retiring from farming, he started collecting vintage models and now has about 40. He is an active member of the thriving Ayrshire Vintage Tractor & Machinery Club and his fascination continues unabated.

“There has never been a time in my life when I was not involved with tractors and I feel a strange bond with them,” admitted Russell.

It’s a devotion that Allan has come to increasingly appreciate over the past 35 years.

And he says he can see an ­ongoing love for them in the farmers still using them.

“I think they are a living embodiment of a sustainable way of ­living and they have been dying out as modern machines are so much bigger,” said Allan.

“Sometimes farmers aren’t always that friendly to wandering photographers, but when I’ve told them what I’m doing, I’ve had some lovely encounters.”

Vintage Tractors is published by Lomond Books

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Taken from TRACTORS

By George Gunn

what is reality but a set of images

a chain of colour & place

this is a testament of tractors

a chronicle of working machines

witness a sheepdog ochre double rubber tyre

peatstack Fergie tilted

to salute a headland

its pink cousin being drowned by dockans

a grey sister by ferns

in a ceilidh of wrecks

they dance across the kyle

to the blue mountains & the flagstone sky

they are frozen under snow

snorted at by geese

possessed by a ferocious cat

unfazed by rainbows

or the magnetic burial pull of a beach

indifferent to the manic swarming

of plough-hypnotised herring gulls

or the inquisitive destruction of brambles

as the drunk slouching of corrugated iron

matches their oxidised axels & engine casings

as if Matisse has coloured their journey

back into the ground that gave them birth

these tractors re-cross the hill tracks of humanity

refined defined & skeletal

they swim in the earth-sea of their meaning

turning still the giving reluctant earth

hauling even in the twilight

peats potatoes hay & hopefulness

from shore to steading

creel-store to croft park

they will not easily surrender to the dust

they work the soft wreckage of their fate

defiant & handsome like rutting stags

they bellow in the agony of their rust

look kindly then on these hardy machines

these tractors that have given much

& ploughed the broad acreage of our dreams