The Barrow Load offers a charming glimpse into the working life of one of his most endearing countryside characters, capturing a smartly dressed mouse pushing a well-laden wheelbarrow along a tunnel of warm, earthen tones, his determined gaze fixed straight ahead as he goes about his important business. There is a delightful play of scale at work in Walker's title here. The Barrow Load sounds straightforward enough, the familiar term used by any gardener or smallholder for a single trip's worth of cargo, yet in the hands of a mouse it becomes something altogether more heroic, the great undertaking of a small creature shouldering a task that looks several times his own size. Walker captures the gentle comedy of the situation without ever undermining the mouse's evident sense of purpose.

The mouse is dressed in the manner of a thoroughly respectable working countryman, wearing a soft blue jacket over a yellow waistcoat patterned with fine vertical stripes, finished with a red and white spotted neckerchief tied jauntily at the throat. His large rounded ears are alert and forward-facing, his whiskers fanning out around a delicately painted face, and his long pink tail curls behind him as he leans into the handles of the barrow with the practised stance of one who has made this journey many times before. The wooden wheelbarrow itself is painted in soft greens and warm umbers, piled high with a generous load of soft white blossom or gathered cotton, the delicate whites and pale blues of the heaped material contrasting beautifully with the deep earthy tones that surround the figure. The setting suggests a passageway or tunnel of some kind, perhaps the curved interior of a burrow or an old brick archway, framed in rich russets, ochres and burnt umbers with hints of cool blue catching the light overhead, lending the scene a wonderfully atmospheric depth.