Till the Cows Come Home
Page 35
Shetland cattle, ref1
Shields, Alexander, ref1
Shinner family, ref1
Shorthorn cattle, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12
Siberia, ref1
Sidhe, ref1
silverweed, ref1
Sinclair, John, ref1
Single Gloucester cheese, ref1, ref2, ref3
sirloin, ref1
Slow Food movement, ref1
smallpox, ref1, ref2
Smith, Adam, ref1
Smith, Samuel, ref1, ref2
Snowdon, George, ref1
sodium citrate, ref1
solids, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
somatotrophin, ref1
Sørensen, Eduard, ref1
South Africa, ref1, ref2
South America, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9
South Devon cattle, ref1, ref2, ref3
South Hams cattle, ref1
Southesk, Earl of, see Carnegie, James
Soviet Union (1922–91), ref1, ref2, ref3
soya beans, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Spain, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12
Spallanzani, Lazzaro, ref1
Spencer, John, 3rd Earl Spencer, Viscount Althorp, ref1
Spiegel, Der, ref1
Stalin, Joseph, ref1
stampedes, ref1
Stewart, James, ref1
Stilton cheese, ref1
Stinking Bishop cheese, ref1, ref2
storms, ref1, ref2
Strauss, Nathan, ref1
streptomycin, ref1
Strutt family, ref1
sulphur springs, ref1
Sumer, ref1
Survey of Londonderry, ref1
Swaledale cattle, ref1
Sweden, ref1
Tacitus, ref1
Taft, William Howard, ref1
Táin Bó Cúailnge, ref1
tallow, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
taming, ref1
tanning, ref1
Teasdale family, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Ten Bears, ref1
Tew, Edmund, ref1
Texas Longhorn cattle, ref1, ref2, ref3
Theseus, ref1
Thistle Mechanical Milking Machine, ref1
Thomas Bates and the Kirklevington Shorthorns (Bates), ref1, ref2
Thracians, ref1
Throckmorton family, ref1
Thrower, W. R., ref1
thyroid gland, ref1
ticks, ref1, ref2
Times, The, ref1
Tomkins, Benjamin, ref1
topsman, ref1
Tripes, ref1
triple-purpose cattle, ref1, ref2
triticale, ref1, ref2
Trow-Smith, Robert, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
tuberculosis, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
Tunstall, Marmaduke, ref1
Twining, Kurt and Glenda, ref1
typhus, ref1, ref2
UHT (ultra-high temperature) milk, ref1, ref2
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), ref1, ref2
United States, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
‘Up-Hill’ (Rossetti), ref1
vaccination, ref1
Valentino, ref1
van Leeuwenhoek, Antony, ref1
Vane-Tempest, Henry, ref1
vaqueros, ref1
variolation, ref1
Varro, ref1
Vaynol cattle, ref1
Vázquez de Coronado, Francisco, ref1, ref2
veganism, ref1
venereal diseases, ref1
Veragua cattle, ref1
Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom, ref1, ref2
Vikings, ref1, ref2
de Villalobos, Gregorio, ref1
Virgil, ref1
Visigoths, ref1
Vistahermosa-Parladé cattle, ref1
vitalism, ref1
vitamins, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
vomeronasal organ, ref1
Voronov, Serge, ref1
Waistell, Robert, ref1
Wales, ref1, ref2, ref3
Wallace and Gromit, ref1
Wampler, Rebecca, ref1
Watson, Hugh, ref1
Wales, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9
wheat, ref1
whey, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
whisky, ref1, ref2
White Galloway cattle, ref1
White Goddess, The (Graves), ref1
White House, Washington, DC, ref1
White Park cattle, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Whitebred Shorthorn cattle, ref1, ref2
Whole Art of Husbandry, The (Mortimer), ref1
Wichita Mountains
Wildlife Refuge, ref1, ref2
Wild Bull, The (Bewick), ref1
Wild Cattle of Chillingham (Landseer), ref1
wild flowers, ref1
Wilde, William, ref1
Wildlife and Countryside Act (1981), ref1
William I, King of England, ref1
William the Lion, King of Scots, ref1
Williamson, George, ref1
Willowbank Dairy, Glasgow, ref1, ref2
Wiltshire, England, ref1
Windsor Forest, ref1
Wisconsin, United States, ref1, ref2
wisents, ref1
wolves, ref1
Woodford, Keith, ref1
wool, ref1, ref2
Wunderlich, Hans Georg, ref1
Yegerlehner family, ref1
yoghurt, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Youatt, William, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14
Young, Arthur, ref1, ref2
yucca plants, ref1
Zagros Mountains, ref1
zebu, ref1, ref2
zero grazing, ref1
zoonotic diseases, ref1
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Philip Walling started out farming in Cumbria, then trained as a barrister and practised for twenty-five years, before turning to writing. From the law e brings learning and rigour, while his roots in the land give him a passion for and deep understanding of the landscape and people of rural England – a combination which lends a unique perspective to his work. He now lives in Northumberland. His first book, Counting Sheep, was a Sunday Times bestseller.
English Longhorn cows at Calke Abbey. Until the eighteenth-century agriculturalist Robert Bakewell ruined their milking capacity in the search for a beef carcase, Longhorns were the quintessential triple-purpose English cattle – traction, milk and meat – and found in nearly every part of the kingdom. Despite their formidable appearance, they were docile and gave a respectable yield of rich milk, ideal for cheese-making. They could turn almost any vegetation to their advantage over a long life, at the end of which they readily finished for the butcher.
Gloucester cow and calf showing the characteristic finching along the belly, up the tail and halfway along the back. It resembles the Kerry with its lyre-shaped horns and delicate dairy frame.
Gillray’s 1802 cartoon, ‘Vaccine-Pock hot from ye cow’, lampooning the widely held fear that introducing bovine tissue into human bodies would cause them to grow body-parts of cattle. Note the painting of the Golden Calf on the wall.
The Baynes’s pedigree Shorthorn and Ayrshire dairy cows in their spacious, comfortable, airy quarters at Marleycote Walls in Hexhamshire. Note the slats in the concrete floor through which the muck and urine falls, thereby keeping the wide passageways clean. The muck is stored in underground tanks for spreading as fertilizer on the cropping fields. Here the cows are inside for the night having been out to graze during the day; they move around as they please, making their way to one of the milking robots when they feel the need to be milked, or fancy a feed of cake.
The eighteenth-century sculpture built into the outside wall of the east transept of Durha
m Cathedral. It records the legend of the founding of Dunholme – Durham as it now is – and shows the Dun Cow, her milkmaid and the woman who directed St Cuthbert’s entourage to the place where the saint’s body should lie.
The classic wedge shape of a superior dairy cow, with a capacious, well-shaped udder and medium-sized, well-spaced teats. Note the bulging milk-vein under her deep belly. She is from the Richardson’s Jersey herd at Wheelbirks in Hexhamshire.
Slender feminine Holstein maiden dairy heifers before they have had their first calf.
A Luing bull calf on his home territory on the Isle of Luing. Emanating from a cross between a Highland cow and a Beef Shorthorn bull, this breed is marvellously adapted to the climate and terrain of the north and west of Scotland, where its thick coat keeps out the cold and sheds the rain. It can extract energy from the poorest herbage to grow a superior beef carcase.
A classic type of Hereford bull, just like my errant bull Jason. Note the finching running under the belly, up the dewlap and neck, to the characteristic ‘bald’ white face, the hallmark which the Hereford stamps on every breed it is crossed with.
South Devon bull and cow. The Guernsey inheritance is evident in their creamy skin, while the beefy shape and docile temperament comes from their Devon ancestors.
A breed ‘beautiful in the highest degree’ and unspoiled by the eighteenth-century improvers because it was unimprovable. This young Ruby Red Devon bull is from William and Richard Dart’s herd at Great Champson, which is founded on some of the oldest and best Devon bloodlines.
This diagram from 1800 shows London butchers’ cutting names and proportionate prices of a West Country (Devon) ox, ‘supposed about Christmas as the fairest season for valuation’. It is addressed to Arthur Young ‘FRS etc. etc. etc’ for inclusion in the Annals of Agriculture.
A ‘vast plateau of roast beef’ with ‘beef to the root of the lug’. This Aberdeen Angus bull from Andrew Elliot’s herd at Blackhaugh, Clovenfords, Galashiels, shows the best of modern Scottish beef breeding. Note the small head relative to the deep, long, square body, with weight in the hind quarters where all the valuable cuts of meat are to be found.
Prize-winning young Cumberland White Shorthorn bull being made ready for sale at Carlisle market. The first cross with a Galloway cow produces the wonderful Blue-Grey, a superb hybrid suckler cow for marginal land. The breed is local to the hard moorland of the Scottish Borders and a testament to the instinctive skill of stock-breeders in the Border country.
Galloway cow with Blue-Grey calves, the offspring of a Cumberland White Shorthorn bull that appears in the photograph above. The heifers fetch a premium for their hardiness, longevity and capacity to rear a fine beef calf from some of the poorest land in Britain.
Black and Dun Belted Galloways doing what they are bred for, turning indifferent moorland herbage into milk and meat and cow muck, balm to the soil, without which our marginal grazing would be much the poorer.
A plucky little Kerry cow with the breed’s characteristic lyre-shaped horns with black tips.
The North American buffalo, ‘the finest grass-eating creature on four legs’. Over millennia its dung made the American prairies some of the most fertile soils on the planet and its grazing created the thick mat of vegetation that stabilised the soil and protected it from drought, tempest and frost. At their most numerous, there were estimated to be a hundred million buffalo ranging from the Atlantic seaboard to California, from the Great Bear Lake to the Gulf of Mexico.
A blasted cottonwood tree stands beside the remains of a nester’s sod-walled cabin, poignant witness to broken dreams in ‘an immensity of grass’ on the High Plains of Colorado in June. It is almost beyond imagination what the hundreds of thousands of people must have suffered who trekked into this wilderness in the hope of making a new life for themselves.
A ‘mama cow’ from Kit Pharo’s Red Angus herd. These cows live as naturally as possible, like their precursors the buffalo, from the grass that clothes the prairie. They calve when growth begins in spring and their calves are weaned as it declines in the autumn.
A Red Angus bull on Kit Pharo’s ranch. With a thicker, hairier pelt and small horns he could easily pass for a buffalo. The Red Angus absorbs less sunlight than his black cousin and so endures extreme heat better.
One of the feedlot pens at Burlington Feeders Inc. in early June, when the bare earth floors are hard and dry but the stink is still there.
Taken from 25,000 feet, crop circles in Kansas created by centre-pivot irrigation drawn from the Ogallala aquifer. Each big circle fits into a square section, with the smaller ones half- and quarter-sections.
The morning Longhorn cattle drive from Fort Worth Stockyards. A combination of ‘living history’ and religious rite, the twice-daily ritual keeps a perpetual memory of the myth of the cowboy, so potent in the American psyche.
An ‘80 inches TTT’ cow in the Wampler T-Bar-W herd. She has distinctive Longhorn marking, slightly down-sloping ears hinting at Bos indicus ancestry, and the hind quarters deficient in beef that caused ranchers to be so disdainful of the Longhorn breed.
Pippin Star, one of the Wampler’s young heifers.
The Wampler’s stock bull about to serve an impressively horned cow.
The Osborne bull, now a cultural symbol of Spain, looming over an evening hillside in Andalusia.
A young Miura bull in the dehesa in December. ‘Muy peligroso!’
A representative sample of the numerous bulls’ heads mounted on the walls of the Restaurant Postiguillo in Seville. Each bull has his name, date of death, his breeder and the matador who fought and killed him inscribed on the brass plaque below his dewlap.
White Park cattle in Jonathan Crump’s herd. Note the black ‘points’ on the feet, muzzle, ears, round the eyes and the tips of the horns. This breed is of ancient British origin and would once have been found in most parts of the British Isles.
Landseer’s well-known painting of white Chillingham cattle in a romantic Highland setting that bears no resemblance to their home domain at Chillingham. The affecting tableau represents the ideal family and played strongly to Victorian sentimentality: the bull watches over his cow, while she nurtures their calf with tender maternal care. This painting did much to fix in the popular mind the erroneous claim that these were the noble remnant of wild cattle that were once the ‘unlimited rangers of the great Caledonian and British forests’.
Also by Philip Walling
Counting Sheep
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Atlantic Books,
an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Philip Walling, 2018
The moral right of Philip Walling to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-78649-306-4
E-book ISBN: 978-1-78649-308-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-78649-307-1
The illustration credits on p.363 constitute an extension of this copyright page.
‘Fetching Cows’ by Norman MacCaig, copyright © the Estate of Norman MacCaig, reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.
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