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The Old Farm Cart

This is a book in the series Language in Action designed to develop listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. The story is about Mark who often went to Parker's Farm to see Mr Barlow where he finds an old cart in a barn. A name plate on the card reads: Arthur Barlow, Farmer, Carlton Miniott. This is the village in Yorkshire, just outside Thirsk, where Carr was born. In the story Mark and his friends remove weeds from a white horse cut into a hill side on Target Hill. The Kilburn White Horse is about 10 miles from Carlton Miniott. It can be seen from the village of Kilburn

The Carrs - Jim and Raymond - had different views of the horse, which they both had visited on Sunday school outings during their childhood.

Carr described such an outing in 'A Month in the Country' (pp 82-85, Harvester edition).

For me that always will be the summer day of summer days - a cloudless sky, ditches and roadside deep in grass, poppies, cuckoo pint, trees heavy with leaf, orchards bulging over hedge briars. And we rumbled along through it, turning away from a finger-post to Sutton-under-Whitestone Cliff and made for the pantile roofs of Kilburn where a joiner in his yard called to and was answered by an acquaintance in the cavalcade.

Look yonder, Mr Birkin

Where

There

And, strolling mildly across a steep grassy escarpment, an immense White Horse, a gigantic enlargement of the sort of horse journeyman painters used to knock out for a couple of sovereigns apiece for proud owners up for the Great Ebor Handicap or the Beverley Selling Plate. Its overlong back and swan neck perpetuated horses of an antique world.

Raymond Carr recorded a different view of these Sunday school outings in his Journal:

At Kilburn we would scramble up the white horse, but I was disillusioned by its shapelessness and ugliness when seen at close quarters. I have never been impressed with it since those days and think the scenery there would be improved if it were allowed to be blotted out by encroaching vegetation.

The title was translated into Dutch and published in 1979 by Dijkstra, Zeist. It is shown below for interest's sake.

(Last updated on 30/11/2020)

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Front cover

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Front cover of Dutch edition

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