by Amanda Owen
George and Nip had the special relationship that comes from being in each other’s company and developing an understanding of each other. A good shepherd can ‘make’ a dog, but a good dog can also ‘make’ a shepherd. At sheepdog trialling events there will be a variety of competitors: farmers, shepherds and other enthusiasts who keep a few sheep, solely for the purpose of training a dog. Our friend Alec has his own small flock of sheep but also likes to come and work his dogs at Ravenseat, which makes him a very good friend to have. After spending his weekends travelling to various dog trials held in fields on farms all over the North of England, he tells us all the news on the dog front, and whose dogs are on form. (It’s usually his.) Sitting in the kitchen at Ravenseat supping tea, his tales are so vivid it sometimes feels like we’ve been there with him.
‘I sent ’er left-handed, she mebbe got in a bit too close,’ he’ll say. ‘An’ when we were comin’ back down t’field yan o’ em brock away, then I sent mi dog reet . . .’
Sometimes I drift off and don’t give his story my full attention. But there was one tale that did make me prick up my ears. He was talking about a trial he’d been at where one of the dog handlers, a chap of considerable age, had died whilst running his dog.
‘What ’appened?’ I said, a little intrigued at this tale of woe.
The competition was in full swing, each handler waiting their turn to run their dog on the sheep. As usual, the judge watched from a distance and awarded marks based on the dog’s performance.
The old chap’s turn came and he walked out to the post in the field, sent his dog left-handed on the outrun to the back of the sheep, brought them back towards him, then round behind him, a tight turn. Then the dog executed a perfect cross drive, taking the sheep from one side of the field to the other. Guiding the sheep through the hurdles, he didn’t put a foot wrong. Finally, all that remained was to put the sheep in the pen. Things were going extremely well, it was poetry in motion, a sure winning run. Man and dog were working together in perfect harmony: the sheep were moving towards the pen, the dog guiding them in slowly and under perfect control. All that remained was for the handler to close the gate behind them.
Suddenly, without warning, he dropped to the ground. At first the spectators couldn’t understand what had happened; it took a moment or two for them to grasp that there was something wrong. Rushing across, they found the poor man had died.
‘Bloody ’ell, Alec,’ I said. ‘That’s awful.’
‘Aye, ’e’d ’ad a bloody good run,’ said Alec. ‘’Appen, best run o’ t’day.’
‘Well, at least ’is poor widow would get ’is winning trophy posthumously,’ I said.
Alec dunked his biscuit in his tea and, looking up with a deadpan expression on his face, said, ‘Nah, ’e’d nivver getten gate shut, he were disqualified.’
No room for sentimentality.
8
August
Traditionally the school summer holidays were timed to allow children to help their families bring in the harvest, and that’s how it still works at Ravenseat. We grow grass for hay in about a dozen meadows, covering around a hundred acres, and we hope to make approximately 5,000 small bales. The meadows have names that have been passed down for centuries, but which you won’t find on modern maps: Peggy Breas, Far Ings, Beck Stack, Black Howe, Hill Top, West End and the Hogg Hills. Some are named after their original owners, others are more to do with their locations. Placed along the drystone walls, which themselves tell of times long ago, are narrow stiles that allowed farmers on foot to get to their outlying barns, perhaps laden with a backcan to carry the milk from a cow tied up in a boose (stall). The smout-holes, square gaps in the bottom of the walls, were built to allow sheep to move freely between fields, but not cattle. Nowadays they are usually kept closed, with flagstones acting as doors.
In one of the meadows there is a fifteen-foot-square stone pen that can only be accessed through smout-holes, and we think this must have been made for sheep to shelter in when there’s a blizzard, as there’s no gate or stile for a person to enter by.
Many of the remoter, steeper fields that we now class as pastures, and use only for the grazing of animals, have barns still standing. They would once have been mown for hay with a scythe, but are not accessible or safe to negotiate with a tractor and mower. We still use some of the barns, keeping cows in Miles’s cow’as and tup hoggs in the Beck Stack. These barns have water available, and are reasonably easy to muck out. Centuries have gone by, but the view remains largely unchanged and the aim is still the same: to harvest as much of the summer grass as possible to feed our animals with through the long winter.
We mow with a small rear-mounted mower on the back of a tractor. None of our fields can be cut completely because of the steep banks and gutters, but this grass is not wasted, as it is grazed by the newly speaned lambs in September. The children sometimes claim some of these uncuttable areas as their own hayfields, using a pair of garden shears, then turning the grass by hand to dry it and finally tying it into small sheaves with baler twine and then storing it in the loft of the woodshed. These tiny bales can be used as rabbit feed during the winter.
We get plenty of offers at hay time from would-be tractor drivers who fancy the idea of cruising around the fields, cocooned in an air-conditioned cab, with a front-end loader equipped with a flat eight to pick up the neatly arranged bales, never leaving the well-sprung seat to physically lift a bale. They imagine the bales stacked high on a large trailer and transported smoothly back to the farmyard. The reality is gripping the steering wheel with sweaty hands while trying to negotiate an impossible gradient, checking whether you are on wet ground by looking through the rust holes in the footwell of the cab at the earth below. Inevitably there will be an annoying buzzing insect in the cab, and on one occasion I had a small nest of chirruping chicks in the space that a radio had formerly occupied. That’s if you are lucky enough to have a cab in the first place: our vintage tractors don’t have them.
On a hot day you’ll get sunburn, and on other days windburn, and after a typically long haytiming day there are other potential afflictions, like a crick in the neck from constant checking behind in case you have shed your cargo of bales coming up a hill, or even to check that your trailer is still attached. Then there is ‘tractor-seat arse’, which won’t be found in any medical books but is well known to anyone who has spent a day bouncing up and down on a metal seat with no suspension. The symptoms include walking like John Wayne, and an outbreak of pimples on your backside. And if the weather is hot I have to choose between keeping covered up and overheating, or wearing a short dress and bare arms and being attacked by klegs (horseflies).
Luckily, because we are hill farmers, grass is our only crop, so we spend limited time in a driving seat. This means that we don’t invest in new, high-tech machinery. ‘Make do and mend’ are the Ravenseat watchwords, and we choose simpler, old-fashioned machines that are repairable with a crowbar and a hammer over anything electrical or digital. When you have broken down at 3.30 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon with rain imminent and a field of hay to bale, you don’t want to be ringing a helpline that tells you to reboot the operating system, or that a vital part will have to be ordered from Hong Kong.
Once the hay is cut, the next job is time-consuming and mind-numbingly boring. ‘Strawing out’ to dry the grass is done with a haybob attached to the back of the tractor, a simple contraption that tosses the grass into the air and spreads it out. How often we need to do this depends on if the weather gods are looking favourably upon us. Clear skies, hot sun and a gentle summer breeze mean a couple of circuits will crisp the hay, but a ‘slow’ day means you can listen to the entire Queen back catalogue on your headphones and it still won’t be dry.
‘Wanna ga for a drink?’
‘Wanna ga to t’chippy?’
The answer is always the same. ‘Can’t, I’ve got some ’ay down.’
It means there will be no relaxation until the hay has b
een baled and mewed into the barn. All the time it lies in the field, we fret about the weather. A few years ago it all hinged upon the Sunday dinner-time weather forecast on Countryfile. That gave a guide to whether we were going to bring in good hay, or get rained on and end up with big round bales of silage. Nowadays the weather forecasts come from many sources: the phone, the computer and there’s even a TV channel totally dedicated to it. I think I preferred it before, when it was decisively and consistently wrong . . .
Now it’s: ‘Mand, just watched t’forecast on t’BBC an’ it’s gonna rain this aft,’ says a perturbed Clive, looking at the sky.
‘Naw, Met Office says it’s gonna be dry,’ I reply, looking at the iPad.
Then Alec will interject: ‘It’s gonna rain this mornin’, boy,’ he says. ‘’Eard it on t’wireless.’
There’s luck involved in making the right decision.
Clive has the final say on when the hay is dry enough for the haybob levers to be altered from ‘straw out’ to ‘row up’. Then it’s back and forth making neat little rows ready for the baler to pick up. This is usually when the problems start. Once upon a time, back in the sixties and seventies, everybody made small bales that were easy to pick up and carry, and everybody had a conventional baler to make these. Then things got bigger, farms became more mechanized and small bales were seen as time-consuming and even a bit olde-worlde twee. Bales became super-sized, balers too, and the little balers were pretty much consigned to the scrap heap – or to hill farms. Our baler is ancient and is seriously temperamental. It doesn’t like baling anything other than the driest of hay, clogging up the moment it encounters any damp hay. There’s nothing digital or electronic involved; everything is about chains and cogs, with a mechanical knotter to tie the bales using old-fashioned sisal twine.
It is not a case of if something breaks, it’s when. We have a ready supply of shear bolts which are designed to break when the baler clogs, to prevent the whole machine imploding. But real problems begin when something more complicated breaks. Spare parts can sometimes be found on Metal Mickey’s scrap heap, and occasionally we’ve driven past a field and seen a baler like ours abandoned in a bed of nettles, and the farmer has agreed to us robbing it for bits. We have tried to order parts from an agricultural machinery dealer, but it’s tricky.
‘I need a bit for mi baler,’ says Clive – and then there is a long-winded discussion about which bit he means, as we won’t know what it’s called. Whether our baler ever came with a manual I don’t know, but even if it did it would have been written in hieroglyphics.
‘And what make and model is it?’ asks the young lad on the phone.
‘A McCormick International B47.’
There’s a sigh at the other end of the line.
‘Could tek us a while to get that bit,’ he says, and you might even catch a hint of a snigger in his voice.
Our hay-making machines are only used once a year for a few days, so it’s hardly surprising that they are not exactly reliable. We now have a back-up round baler for when the weather does not allow us to get the hay dry or if the conventional baler gives up the ghost once and for all. Round silage bales are not ideal as they are not easily transported to our outlying heafs of sheep, but they are better than poor-quality damp hay. We learned about the perils of damp hay the hard way, watching our harvest go up in smoke after the stack spontaneously combusted.
No two years are the same. Sometimes we struggle all summer with changeable weather, and other years the barometer is set fair for weeks and we make hay under clear blue skies with no worry about rain.
The children love to be involved, and there’s no shortage of jobs. Raven likes to do the lunch rounds with one of the horses, attaching panniers to the rear of the saddle and loading them with sandwiches and flasks of tea. Depending on which fields we have cut she may end up doing a large circuit, but her horse, Josie or Meg, won’t mind because they can sample the goods along the way with a mouthful of hay here and there.
Reuben can usually be found mending something, or running back and forth to the tool shed for spanners and spare haybob tines. Miles, happiest when farming, rakes the hay. On blistering hot days you’ll see him as a lone faraway dot, only distinguishable by his red bandana. Slowly he makes his way round the perimeter of the field, raking back the cut grass from the edges. This grass can’t be reached by the haybob, and would be wasted if it were not for Miles and his rake. Others take their turn with the rake, but they don’t have his diligence. Edith, Violet, Annas and Sidney play amongst the drying hay, burying each other or sometimes making ‘pikes’ and ‘cocks’, sweeping the hay into big or smaller piles with their hands and then redistributing it when the fancy takes them. The children love running through and rolling around in the puffed-up, aerated hay, throwing it in the air and then whooping with joy as it showers down on them and Pippen the terrier, who shadows them everywhere.
The downside is that they soon encounter the dreaded klegs, which can bite before you’ve spotted them. I was bitten by one on the top lip only a few days after having Annas, when I was hanging the washing out on the line. My lip started to tingle and swell and within half an hour I had a trout pout like no other, and as my milk had just come in I had a pair of rock-hard gravity-defying boobs to complete the ‘cosmetic surgery gone wrong’ look. The only compensation is that the kleg becomes very sleepy while feeding on your blood, and with one slap you can squish the little blighter.
The children’s next port of call after the hayfields is the beck. The bigger ones plunge into the pool below the packhorse bridge, while the little ones paddle at the water’s edge or wade in until the water laps at the hems of their sundresses. During a dry spell when the river is shallow, the usually well-camouflaged tiny trout are clearly visible below the surface, facing upstream in the gentle current. They lie very still, only coming to life and rising when dusk falls and there’s a swarm of flies to tempt them. The children try to catch one, but the fish are too quick and dart away into the shadows of the riverbank. The nearest they’ve ever come was one year when Miles found a dead one. He was mighty pleased with his find, and he soon had a crowd around him, all vying to hold it and caress its scaly body.
‘Look at the pretty orange spots,’ I said. ‘What a beauty, such a shame he’s dead.’
‘Can we eat him?’ asked Edith.
‘He’s tiny, yer wouldn’t ’ave to be so ’ungry,’ I said. ‘An’ yer don’t knaw what ailed him.’
‘We’ll bury him, then,’ Edith decided.
I watched as Miles led the barefooted funeral procession across the rocks to a sandy patch, then the digging began. Down on their hands and knees, they scooped out the sand to make a grave for the fish, which they named Nemo. In the meantime the corpse lay in state on a small flat stone, awaiting the committal. It was nearly time for the ceremony when the funeral was gatecrashed by Pippen, who had been watching from a distance, waiting to pounce when the children’s backs were turned. She deftly picked up Nemo and set off at speed with the fish in her mouth. There was a huge commotion when the theft was discovered. Pippen realized that her fish supper was in jeopardy, so she swallowed it whole to shrieks of horror from the children.
They didn’t have long to mourn. The familiar clanking sound of the baler meant that everybody, both big and small, had to head back to the hayfields, where the trailers needed loading in order to get the crop in. As the tractor is driven around the field at a snail’s pace, we walk alongside picking up the bales and putting them up onto the large flat trailer. The smaller children hitch a ride in the pickup, into the back of which any misshapen, loose-stringed bales are thrown and taken to be rebaled.
Having spent the previous couple of weeks clipping the sheep, my hands are soft from the lanolin in the fleeces, and this means that the baler twine digs into my fingers when I lift the bales. The winding handle on the top of the baler can be slackened or tightened to determine how compact the bales are. There is a happy medium when it co
mes to the weight of a bale. Make them too light, and when you take them out to the sheep in the winter you’ll find that there’s not enough to feed them; make them too heavy and you’ll struggle to even get them onto the trailer and into the barn.
We don’t bale until the middle of the day, when the sun is at its hottest. If the heat is on, we’ll keep going all through the afternoon and into the evening, but we always have to stop before it gets too late. For even in the best summer weather, a dew settles, the hay becomes heavy with water and then you have to wait until the next day for it to be dry again. ‘Could do nowt till dinner time ’cos there was a gay bit of watter on,’ is a refrain you hear quite a lot round here. We start leading the bales down in the evening, hopefully getting the fields clear by bedtime. If any are left out overnight they will weigh a ton by the next morning, having drawn dampness up from the ground.
Then it’s a matter of mewing, or stacking, it. This is crucial: you need to get it right and pack the bales in as tight as possible. The more compact they are, the better they keep, though the bales that touch the beams or the stone walls will always spoil a bit, which can’t be helped. A human chain manhandles the bales off the trailers and towards the elevator, which is a sort of conveyor belt used to take bales of hay from ground level up to the top of the mew. We have a love–hate relationship with elevators: they are only as good as when they work. They are needed for about one week every year, so you wouldn’t think that was a big ask. We had an engine-driven one that was a pig to start, and had a chain that came off its track with annoying frequency. One hay time it jammed after a hay bale became wedged between the rungs at the top, and pressure started building up – not just in the elevator.