Our best-known Irish Celtic goddess is Brigid, sacred to water, spring, fertility and healing. She is the goddess whom Irish poets adore. Brigid is celebrated in rural Ireland by many communities on the first day of February when a cross is woven from rushes, reeds or straw. This botanical cross recalls the ancient Irish pagan festival of Imbolc that marks the end of midwinter and the beginning of spring. Pagan Imbolc evolved into contemporary Candlemas and Groundhog (Marmot) Day, which celebrate midwinter and the early hope of the coming of spring. It’s thought that Saint Brigid’s cross stems from pre-Christian origins and relates to the legendary symbolic Sun Cross that many think represents the four seasons.
February is also the month when we wish winter to end, but she still has some weather surprises stored for us. When Storm Darwin blasted our island on the edge of the Atlantic in February 2014, I simply curled up cosily against the Aga, not a bit worried about anything, but The Shepherd worked hard all the previous day, securing everything and anything that Darwin might blow away. She brought horses and sheep into stables and sheds. The egg-makers were locked in their house the night before. Everybody had food, water and safe shelter, since we’d had adequate warning that Storm Darwin was going to be ferocious. And so it more than proved as we had thirty trees blown down around the farm, crushing fences and sending old stone walls tumbling. Luckily, only the corner of the farmhouse was hit by a falling tree, so the damage there was just the loss of a few slates and a twisted rain gutter that we hammered back into its useful shape. The storm meant lots of repair work to fences and walls. Cutting up the fallen trees gave us firewood for years to come. The Shepherd still refers to that pile of firewood as, ‘Thanks to Storm Darwin’.
However, on many days, winter still grips us in her icy fist as I make my morning rounds with The Shepherd between and over ‘snow bones’ scattered across the hillside’s shaded runnels or rolling dips in the land. Snow bones are the white-striped remnants of snow splayed like ribs across the field. I follow The Shepherd with all our trailing canines towards this winter’s feed station. We check the hay in the ring feeder to assess when a new bale needs to be brought in for resupply. As the sun fades on our still-wintry day, it seems that we will have to move a big round bale to feed sheep in the morning.
One February evening at sunset, under a rising crescent moon, a lone pen swan, as we call the females of that species, flew up our river valley. Her whiteness was painted a soft warm pink by the setting sun’s last rays of light. Her wings whistled as she wound her way upriver while we watched. She called for her lost lover, but only silence greeted her. The high trill of her voice echoed across our river valley as we paused in our hillside pasture to watch her flight path above the river. The canines and I had sat to observe her airborne route from the height of our hill, so the course of her flight matched our eye-level perfectly. The Shepherd was absolutely transfixed by the beauty of this poignant tragic moment. She told us that she had heard earlier that the swan’s mate, or cob, had been found killed by a fox or stray dog in a field further upriver.
As the cold air bit deeper, The Shepherd moved us back across the field towards home. When we were still some distance away from the farmhouse, all of us could detect a tantalising warm aroma of hot stew emanating from the Aga. Its scent wafted towards us through the frozen air from our kitchen chimney.
A major attribute of our Aga cooker at this time of year, besides its ability to warm and revive cold newborn lambs and take the chill off feline, canine and human bodies just in from freezing outdoors, is how its chimney draws up whatever is cooking so that those delectable scents perfume the icy outdoor air. The aroma wafts and curls its way into yards and nearby fields to wrap around anyone nearby and entice all in for our evening meal, a delicious stew of Zwartbles lamb chops. The Shepherd has insisted that I include the recipe here:
4–6 tbsp olive oil
2–3 red onions, diced
pinch sea salt
1 tbsp coarse black pepper
4 Zwartbles lamb chops (or 2lb lamb shoulder chops)
2–3 pears, peeled, cored and sliced
2–3 apples, peeled, cored and sliced
2 tbsp fresh sage (or 1 tsp rubbed sage or 2 tsp whole-leaf sage)
1 butternut squash, peeled, cored and diced
5 large carrots, peeled and sliced
Heat 2–3 tbsp. olive oil over medium heat. Add the onions, sea salt and pepper. Cook until the onions are soft, stirring often. Add 2–3 tablespoons more olive oil. Add the lamb chops and brown on each side, about 4 minutes per side. Add the pears, apples and sage. Add the squash and carrots. Cover and place in the Aga at 150°C/300°F/Gas 2 and cook for 5 hours. Remove from the oven and stir. Turn the Aga up to 180°C/350°F/Gas 4. Return the stew to the oven and cook for 45 minutes. Remove the bones before serving. Yum …
This particular evening, however, turned into something strikingly unusual. The Shepherd was greeted as we all arrived at the kitchen door by her hysterical mother. ‘A bat!! A bat!! It’s loose in the house. Quick, quick, catch it before it gets lost in the curtains and dies there.’
No, I hadn’t a clue what was taking place, but I carried on dining from my food dish, which The Shepherd had just filled. She began to feed the Big Fellow, Bear, Pepper and the Puddlemaker.
‘You can do that after you’ve caught the bat,’ insisted The Shepherd’s mother.
Thankfully, The Shepherd replied, ‘Please let me feed the dogs so they’re distracted before I chase a bat.’
This she did, and we all ate our fill before retiring to a cosy spot to sleep it off. That was when the ruckus started.
Miss Marley had been lazing in her large luxurious bowl on top of our tall kitchen press while Ovenmitt had been in his favourite spot curled up against the Aga to absorb all the heat he possibly could. When The Shepherd opened the door that connects our kitchen to the rest of the house’s interior, the next room’s lights were off, so it was pitch-dark. We heard The Shepherd telling a creature to please go towards the lights. Next thing I knew, the bat had flown into the kitchen – its arrival marked by the loud rattle from one of the big Mosse pottery bowls as Miss Marley launched herself through the air after it. Ovenmitt leapt with a thump onto the kitchen table. I galloped up the scullery steps to find Miss Marley and Ovenmitt in the midst of extraordinary aerial acrobatics trying to catch the bat. I, of course, joined in as the bat flapped, flew and circled around and around the kitchen. It darted wildly among our outstretched clawed extended paws, light bulbs hanging on electric cords from the ceiling and The Shepherd’s gloved hands.
The canines simply observed the chaos, each one looking on in that bemused fashion they had perfected over time. ‘Well, what do you expect me to do?’
Only the Puddlemaker, our newest canine, became excited and ran in circles. She tripped The Shepherd as she struggled to catch the spinning rotating bat while she tried to avoid treading on the Puddlemaker’s rat-sized body.
At this stage of our extremely muddled and chaotic hunt, I jumped on top of a tall stool near the sink, where I acquired additional height so that when the bat dived low behind the teapots on the window sill, I could leap and easily grab it. During my carefully calculated pursuit, I perceived a very cross shout to back off and end my chase. ’Twas The Shepherd! She had miraculously caught the bat in her gloved hands. As she shouted to her mother that the bat was caught, she and I inspected it closely. It was a very common bat that we often find in our neighbourhood, called a pipistrelle.
Bats shouldn’t come out of hibernation so early in such cold weather, so The Shepherd sensed something must be wrong with it. As she held it in her cupped palm with her thumb placed lightly on its body, I watched as she examined it. She noted quite quickly that it was very skinny, which is probably why it awoke too early from hibernation. It had burned up its supply of fat for the winter.
The Shepherd took one of her many one-millilitre syringes that she uses to medicate sheep whenever they might require treatm
ent. She filled it with a mixture of water and glucose and then gently drip fed the bat by mouth. The bat lapped at each drop thirstily and drank it as soon as it appeared.
Unfortunately, there was no way to obtain mealworms for bats from a local pet shop this late in the day. So with warm water, The Shepherd mushed up some of our dried biscuit feline food. After the bat had eaten the soggy biscuit and drunk its fill, she placed it in a cardboard box covered with a cloth tea towel on a warm kitchen shelf. This bat obviously needed generous further feeding before it would be safe to return it to the stage of hibernation.
Many bats reside all over our farm. They inhabit the attic under the slate roof of our house, hollows in our trees and holes in the stone walls around our fields and garden. Whenever we repair our walls in the summer months, we often spot small holes. When we do, we place a light bit of dry moss at its front entrance overnight. Then we look the next morning to see if the moss has been pushed aside. If it has, that means a bat lives inside. We mark the hole with a red arrow since we don’t wish to close the entrance to a bat’s lodging.
Bats make a huge smelly mess inside the roof attic beneath the slates where they live. Their messes spatter on all the windowpanes and sills below as they fly home to roost in the gloam of dawn’s half light. One evening I saw twenty bats flying inside the house. The Shepherd and her family had a house full of guests who were not in the least happy to go to bed with bats skimming above their heads in the dark and potentially tangling in their hair. This is when The Shepherd became a herder to a colony of bats. She had to move from room to room, shepherding bats out from each as quietly as possible so that our guests would not be terrified.
Bats may seem scary and ugly to you humans, but to us cats they are the most stupendous game – the chase makes me completely doolally. In fact, they are essential and useful to you because they keep the insect population down – and they’re a protected species. It is illegal to use any methods to discourage their habitation. The Shepherd thinks that the best way to manage our farm’s bat population is to build bat houses of a very specific design and choose special places in which to position them.
The Shepherd is not unique in her love of all creatures great and small. More and more farmers have returned to an awareness of how we need even the smallest of small micro insects, worms and fungi to be living and well fed in our soil. This helps to keep our creative food-producing practices alive and flourishing for generations to come. These minute organisms bring about a healthy bloom in our gardens and fields and reward us with a wealth of delicious food using this natural chemical enhancement, The Shepherd explained to me. By ‘chemically’, she means as nature had intended, not an added chemical mixture of man’s prideful inventions, which are sometimes harmful to nature’s natural chemistry.
The Shepherd believes that we as intelligent agrarians should respect what the American physicist Richard Feynman once said: ‘Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty – some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain. If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis that all things are made of atoms – little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.’
The Shepherd says, ‘Seeds of doubt should always be sown so thoughts can naturally grow to broaden minds and to help us to learn and experience new things every day.’
Of course, all of this fuss over bats does not deter any of us farm felines from our favourite sport whenever a bat comes inside the house. Just as I can hear the distinctive sound of an eggshell cracking from far across the fields, or Miss Marley leaps up when she hears a tin can opened, all three of us find it impossible to remain still whenever a bat flies into the house.
Often in February we’ll take a walk in the wood while rain falls to see green fingers of daffodils and bluebells push up through winter-worn leaf litter. Crows will crowd crowns of winter trees. Stirred, they will lift swirling upwards like a flame of black feathers cackling in disturbed annoyance. As we walk among hazel trees with their catkins dangling, our coats will get dusted in pollen. It gets right up one’s nose when licking it clean off one’s fur, and sets off a few sneezes. Another storm will come howling up our valley and the winter trees will hum with the sound of its approach. Beating rain will pummel my back as I help feed meal to fields of sheep. Weather-weary, with mucky mud, thankful for my warm coat and with the knowledge that The Shepherd will soon go in for tea, I will then follow and enter the kitchen, where I’ll shake off excess water and curl up next to the Aga.
Afterword
There is a lovely natural silence as I sit high on a grassy hill. I hear no tractor, car or human voice; no sound vibrates in my furry ear. Yes, trees rustle, birds sing, a grey squirrel scolds, crows call, a distant hawk screams, a buzzard mews, a cow bellows, but the ground beneath me breathes in the thawing warmth of a southern breeze. As I sit still in silence, my busy mind works. I can hear the soil inhale. Drip by drip, it pops, sucks and squelches as ice crystals melt and moisture soaks back into the soil.
As frost melts, rich earth wafts a fresh perfume of grass, leaves and weeds. Mellowed manure, decomposed and digested by worms and the network of fungi and moulds, belches bacteria back into the warming air with help from the morning breeze. In much of the land on our planet Earth, the richness of our six inches of fertile soil are what feed us, what we are made of, where we came from and where we will return.
As The Shepherd says, ‘Blessed are those who recognise, feed, mind, tend and understand the soil for the benefit of others. Those who abuse soil, use it, plunder it, poison it and worship many materials drawn or mined from deep beneath – they still have to eat.’
The Shepherd tells me she senses a shift in the world, a hunger from those whose lives are surrounded by concrete to return to the soil and to respect it, even venerate it, and esteem those who care for and live by it. The cultural transition of respect for those who work the land to provide food began to change long ago when small communities traded food as a commodity for material things. Before oil became the substance by which the human world is fuelled, clothed, fertilised and heated, the soil’s enriched health was able to feed, clothe and heat everyone.
She is right, I suppose. In my years roaming the fields of Black Sheep Farm, I have learned how important our soil is, and how good it feels beneath my spread paws. Well-tended and looked-after earth is good for you and to you. When next you sit down to a meal, thank the earth and whatever God you praise for your existence. Healthy soil permits you to survive on our beautiful blue planetary marble that floats through our space in the universe.
I am forever grateful that The Shepherd took up Jaszia’s suggestion to go and look at a cat in the exotic novelty toilet-seat shop all those many years ago and brought me to Black Sheep Farm. I have enjoyed learning the conversion from urban ignorance to rural knowledge. I think it’s fair to say nothing compares to the adventures I’ve experienced and the work that I’ve endured while living on Black Sheep Farm.
Picture Section
I am Bodacious. This is my regular work crew. From left to right: Pepper, Bear and the Big Fellow. I’m the Boss – no messing around!
My apprentice, Ovenmitt, learning the art of lamb footcare. But he’s desperate to know when he can return to the warm kitchen for a snooze.
Miss Marley evaluates the wool of a fresh fleece.
Introducing our newest recruit! Inca the tiny Puddlemaker.
The Shepherd lazing about – sometimes I think I’m the only one who does any real work around here, and I tell her so! (© Julia Crampton)
Why did you close the gate in our faces?
Keeping an eye on one of my egg-makers.
All this work for what? I think I deserve my egg now and I know there are plenty in the egg bucket. Let me at ’em!
Sit … Stay … Purrrrrrfect cat control.
Counting sheep can bring on the snoozes!
Top shepherding tip: never be afraid to stand your ground and show them who’s boss. Even if they’re twice your size …
Stop fraternising with the employees. You’re undermining my authority! (© Susan Wilde)
Soil testing must be done so I may as well enjoy the job …
Sometimes you can’t help but fight with your co-workers. And yes, I have a scratch on my nose, but you shoulda seen the other guy!
Sometimes trying to teach a horse manners is impossible. I try, I tell you, I do try.
Feeding windfall apples to my lambs.
I have been told I have charismatic eyes, which command with just one look.
Bringing in the hay before the rain comes. It’s all about teamwork and planning.
Ovenmitt loves babysitting delicate, newborn lambs as they dry and warm up in the Aga.
What you looking at? I’m just working on my book and no one gets to see my prose until I’ve finished, understand?
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