A world preserved in sugar. This is the mill for the Wales sugar estate in Demerara (Guyana). The factory is about a hundred years old, and looks like an ancient tramp-steamer, puffing away in the mud.
Around it, the landscape has hardly changed since the 17th century. It's like stepping into a painting by Koninck or van Ruisdael. The view is mostly of sky but, along the bottom, there's a strip of flatness, busy with people and oxen and barges full of greens.
Occasionally, huge brick kokers and sluices loom up out of the ditches, and then – beyond them – stretches the cross-canals and ‘Dutch beds’, and endless miles of ‘Middle Walk’. The factory foreman told me that modern machines would never survive in this, and would just vanish in the mud. ‘So it’s all still cut by hand. Four thousand hectares by two hundred men!’