The GTX of its day, this farm cart, a one horse Somerset Tipping Putt, worked on a single farm, Horsey Farm, Bridgwater for some seventy-five years. It was sold in the Farm Sale in the early 1990s and has rested in an Exmoor barn for over two decades.

The day I bought it I was told by its farmer owner Percy Adams, then in his nineties, that as a seventeen year old he had walked his horse from his farm to the village of Thurloxton to take delivery of the Putt from its maker, the wheelwright Jim Porter. As his horse settled into the shafts St Giles Church bells rang out to celebrate the Armistice, Monday the eleventh of November in 1918.

This week the Putt has returned to Thurloxton, the place where it was built, to be held in Village Ownership and to be part of the village’s Armistice Centenary Exhibition in November.

The Putt shows some scars from its years of farm work, but the inherent strength of its design and its fitness for purpose, still in its original, now somewhat faded, paintwork, is witness to the skill of yesterday’s craftsmen – Jim Porter, the wheelwright and Walter Winslade, the blacksmith who made all the ironwork fittings.