I loved your description of tattie howking, Maisie. Fortunately, I didn't have to do it but, as a child, I do remember seeing the howkers in the fields. I now live in rural France where people are still very closely connected to the land and most people have a 'potager' where they grow their own veges. Some of these gardens can be as big as several hundred - even thousand - square metres and in the late summer whole families turn out to dig and collect potatoes. Admittedly, there are no horses to push the pace but you can often see several cars parked beside large fields and several generations of adults and children working alongside each other to fork and collect their 'potats'. At the end of the day, just as at the end of the grape harvest , they all sit at one large table have a meal together in the open or in a barn. Does anyone else remember collecting rosehips? As school children in the autumns of mid fifties we used to be paid to collect rosehips from the roadside. Someone from 'the authorities' would come on a specified morning to weigh and collect them. I think we were paid 2d a pound (about 1 'new' penny per half kilo). I believe is was for the vitamin C content to help boost our diets after the rationing during the war. Jose