ABSTRACT
As a boy my family would go ‘up the Douro’ where the port vineyards were. I loved these trips. One of the most familiar sounds was the deep grinding of the wheels of the ox-carts as they made their way up narrow rocks and dust-strewn paths. They deliberatedly did not oil the wheels so that another ox-cart at the bottom or top of the path, which might be round a bend in the mountain, would know that another such vehicle was on the path so would wait until it had finished its journey. This might have taken as much as an hour and a half. Life was not so hectic in those days. To-day ordinary trucks wend their way up and down these mountain tracks and the poem was written watching one of them but with an eye to the past.
