Acquisitions: Milking stool and yoke
.
Among the agricultural objects that a local museum should have in its collection are two that were very common in the dairy, but somehow they had not come to Bradford on Avon Museum until now.
The milking stool is low, to get down to the level of a cow’s udders and is three-legged, because that is more stable on uneven ground than four. The yoke -for carrying two buckets from the shoulders- is carved from ash wood with chains and hooks that could have been made by a blacksmith, like Ken Lailey in Bridge Street. Popular imagination associates articles like this with milkmaids, but these were used by Ernie Chard, the farmer at Barton Farm until the 1960s.
The Museum is keen to collect other locally-used farming implements. We cannot, sadly, cope with large items of machinery, but photographs of tractors, carts and threshing machines would be very welcome.