Much as I love haggis and the famous Burns poem, I have often wondered why this part of the meal receives all the glory. This is an attempt to redress the balance. Today’s farm folk may have cool drinks in the fridge in their air-conditioned tractor cabs to slake their thirst, but we would make do with hopping into the neep park and cutting a refreshing slice off a big swede with a pocketknife. Our children still talk fondly of ‘Granny’s neeps’, when my mother would put the swedes on to boil perhaps a little earlier than necessary. The result was a steaming bowl of soup-like red sweetness — delicious.
At Burns Night dinners, the haggis is traditionally carried into the dining room accompanied by a piper and some whisky — like at this one at the Savoy Hotel in London, in 1959.
An ode to the swede
The Haggis, michty dish o’ state,
Proclaims its place upon oor plate.
And by its side, its prood richt hand,
Anither product o’ oor land.
Chappit, creamy, sweet and reid,
Faa is like the noble Swede?
This reid neep’s a crop o’ note,
Alangside barley, grass and oat.
A buxom, shapely, earthy root,
That we should haud in high repute.
We tak in tons fae aff the soil,
Wi’ mony months o’ sweat and toil.
As seen’s we’ve heard the Selkirk Grace,
It’s time for Rabbie’s fine address.
It rants and raves and fires the bleed,
Driving patriotic deed,
But moist and buttery, silky smooth,
The decent swede oor passions soothe.
Olio, fricassee, ragout,
Are aeten noo by ulkie mou’.
But a’ their flavours you can keep,
If I can get some chappit neep.
An wi’ haggis, tatties and a dram,
My stamach I will sit and cram.
There is a place for swunky maet,
And much o’ it I’ve even ate.
I’ve perused menus, oh so vain,
When I should have chosen something plain.
The kitchen’s funcies I dinna need
When I can get an honest Swede.
* With apologies to Robert Burns
The swede, until relatively recently a significant winter fodder crop in the north-east of Scotland, was extremely labour intensive pre-1970s. As a youngster, I dreaded the ‘neep barra’ being put onto a tractor in the spring. This basic implement would lay out masses of seeds along the drills in the field and I knew that in a few weeks we would have to knock out 990,000 of every million plants as they were singled, 7in–8in apart, in the ‘first hyow’. Every able-bodied person on the farm would arm themselves with a hoe and, taking adjacent drills, walk up and down, drill by drill, for days on end. Us younger boys soon fell behind and had to choose between working the long drills by ourselves or moving over to where the drills shortened into the corners of the field.
The ‘second hyow’ was to knock out weeds between the now established plants. The invention of the precision seeder, which placed one seed the exact distance apart from its neighbours, plus a pre-emergence herbicide called Ramrod, meant I could hang up my hoe, but those summer chores meant that the hard labour to harvest the crop through the winter never seemed so bad in comparison.
When I first started winter-root harvesting, everything was done by hand. The roots were ‘pu’ed’, or pulled, by hand, using a tapner, a long, thin billhook. We would grab the swede with the hook at the end, pull it from the ground and hold the stalk with our other hand. Then, three swipes with the tapner: two to clean off the tap root and any soil, the third to cut off the stalk. This third blow was delivered with the swede in mid-air free fall; our tapners were into the next swede before the last hit the ground. We eventually bought a machine that would do the lifting and putting into rows for us, and finally, joy of joys, a harvester that lifted them and put them straight into the trailer. This meant that my brother and I, on two tractors, could fill the shed in half a morning, instead of in two to three days.
It wasn’t only sitting in a warm, dry tractor cab that made the job so satisfying. Harvested crops sound different. Even high-yielding grain only ‘swishes’ into a trailer; potatoes must be handled gently and so ‘tipple’ in. Turnips and swedes, however, ‘rumble’ and ‘tumble’ like a loud, proud bass drummer in a canyon, so you know a crop as satisfying as the sound is coming in.
This feature originally appeared in the January 21, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.'