Autumn seems to have arrived early this year, but the harvest is slightly later. Usually by the time schools go back fields are filling with hay bales, discs of gold lying around as if on a giant’s draughts board. Where I live in the Borders, however, it’s only in the past fortnight that the combine harvesters, balers and tractors have been out in force, bringing in the crops before the next storm.

At midnight earlier this week I lay listening to the mechanical whine of machines at the end of the village, working by the beam of their headlights. Last night activity had shifted to the land beyond our back garden, the air thrumming as the mammoth blades scythed through waist-high wheat.

So much for the fabled tranquillity of the countryside. While city folk assume we yokels are slumbering, untroubled by sirens and rowdy clubbers, we are in fact frequently woken as the agricultural schedule goes into overdrive. I find it a reassuring sound, a welcome sign that despite a year of ceaseless rain and too little sun, there is something worth gathering in.

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As the harvest gets underway, high-tech machines pass our windows at all hours of day and night. Trailers that rattled by minutes ago return heaped high with yellow grain. That sight won’t have changed much in centuries, and it’s strange how satisfying it is to observe, as if awareness of the need to have a good store of food to see us through the colder months is an inborn instinct.

Some tractors are so enormous........

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