by Sally Urwin
You can’t blame the knacker man either. He’s under pressure to pick up fallen stock within a certain time frame, and normal farms don’t tend to hold big society weddings in their front yards.
Ben is bubbling over about all the dead animals he’s seen.
‘There was a big red cow. Did you see it Mum?’ he says. ‘And did you see all those lambs? He didn’t use the winch this time though,’ he says, looking disappointed. He loves it when the knacker driver uses the long chain to haul a big beast into the back of his lorry.
Saturday 14th July
Candy is in disgrace. Again. She spent yesterday rolling in the run-off from the septic tank, and is covered in black, stinking mud from her ears to her hooves. She was very pleased with herself, and happily marched into her stable, while everyone recoiled from the stench.
Monday 16th July
Steve is filling the fertiliser spreader with a mix of white phosphorus and potassium grains. It’s a dry day and there’s no wind, which is ideal weather to spread the little fertiliser granules onto our grass fields. We use a mix of the two chemicals instead of straight ammonia, as ammonia is too strong for our land and tends to ‘sicken’ the ground.
I have a less exciting job. I’m mucking out a month’s worth of manure from the pet lamb shed. It’s too small and awkward a space to use the loader and scoop, so I have no choice but to do it by hand. After half an hour I’m wheezing like a pair of bellows and absolutely dripping in sweat.
Dad turns up for a chat with a thermos full of tea.
‘You’re holding the fork wrong,’ he says, looking at me over the rim of his cup.
‘Bugger off,’ I say quietly.
‘Hold the fork handle with your left hand on the top, not underneath. Otherwise you’ll give yourself a rupture.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Dad! I’m knackered. You have a go.’
I thrust the rusted fork at him, and he sets to, heaving up great forkfuls of smelly straw and sheep poo.
Between us, we manage to clear the shed of wet straw and pile it all into the bucket of the scoop, ready to tip on the manure pile down the road.
I sit on an old tyre and share another cup of thermos tea with him, while watching a starling flit in and out of the barn, catching flies to stuff into her nest of babies.
I could sit like this for hours. Dad and I talk about everything, from the Battle of Britain to the walks we used to take around the hills of Cheviot. Days like this are absolutely golden.
Tuesday 17th July
The pneumonia lamb and his mother look much better, and we turf them out in the sunshine of the paddock. His mother takes some persuading to leave the lovely warm shed, but once she tastes the grass she doesn’t lift her head for the next hour, while her baby skips around her and eventually lies down to sleep on a warm molehill.
Allan’s mole traps seem to have done the job. He’s caught an incredible total of thirty-eight little beasties. As tradition dictates, he carefully shows us the pile of bodies, so that we know he’s telling the truth and not trying to declare more moles than he actually trapped.
To people unused to country life, it looks like a massacre, but culling of any out-of-control species is essential to ensure the health of the carefully balanced ecosystem of our fields, wildlife and animals. In the old days mole men used to hang up each tiny animal on the fence as an advertisement, and to show off their skill. They don’t do this any more, and I’m glad, as I don’t like seeing the desiccated corpses swaying in the wind.
Like all well-run farms, we have a company that comes out to deal with any other pests, such as mice and rats. They place little trays of poisoned bait out to stop infestations, which could cause disease.
Having said that, yesterday, when forking through that pile of manure, a rat shot vertically out of the straw and scuttered off up the wall into the rafters, almost giving me a heart attack. They move so fast they make me shudder. I don’t mind tame rats; in fact after I’ve watched a few videos online they seem to me to be clever little animals. Wild rats are something different though. I make a mental note for Steve to contact our pest control guy again. Maybe we need some more traps put down.
Wednesday 18th July
This week it’s been warm and bright, and today I take a minute to sit on our bedroom windowsill and watch the birds outside.
I hear the falling liquid notes of a blackbird, the metallic ‘chink, chink’ of chaffinches, and the good-natured wheezy squawks of a starling that has made its nest under the eaves of our roof. Our farm hedges are carefully trimmed so they grow thick and sturdy, and the blue tits love to nest in them. They fight and chatter and fly down to dust-bathe in the cracked mud at the base of the branches.
I hear the velvety ‘coo-coo’ of a wood pigeon and the raspy ‘chuck, chuck’ from jackdaws gathering in the old ash tree at the bottom of the front field. There’s a flash of yellow as a yellowhammer flits into the pine trees lining the road, and everywhere you look there’s a babble of sparrows, gossiping and arguing and flitting from branch to branch.
We used to have red squirrels that lived in the pine trees, but over the past five years they’ve died out. We see a lot of grey squirrels scampering up and down the bark, and they grow bold enough to visit the bird feeders we put out over the winter.
All the birds are busy and preoccupied, either building nests or feeding young. From the window I see a solitary heron standing, one leg tucked, next to the Sparrow’s Letch at the bottom of the front field. He lives at the nearby reservoir but likes to visit our farm to feed on the minnows in the stream. Suddenly he takes off, legs trailing behind him as he lumbers into the sky.
Thursday 19th July
It’s shearing day. It’s hot and humid when John the shearer turns up, driving his truck and trailer into the yard.
John sets up a large folding wooden platform that looks a bit like a stage. The sheep are gathered into the shed, then shooed, one at a time, up a sheep race to the top of the platform. One sheep is penned in at the top to tempt the others up – sheepy psychology!
Mrs Snuff the Suffolk is the sheep at the top, and she seems quite comfy – she lies down and baas continually at everyone throughout the whole of the shearing. We feed her sheep nuts to keep her happy.
The rest of the sheep run up towards Mrs Snuff and John grabs them one at a time through a trapdoor set into the side of the platform, and sets them on the wooden boards ready to be sheared.
He sticks some loud dance music on and starts. It’s amazing watching him – he wears moccasin slippers so he can grip on the wooden floor, and balances the sheep on their left hip on top of his shoes so they can’t get traction on the ground to twist away. The first cut of the wool is down the belly, then you ‘open out’ the fleece from the back leg, right up to the neck so that it falls cleanly away, and then up and over the back and finish at the rump. It’s so smooth and fast. When John’s finished with a ewe it looks so clean, and its cropped fleece is almost blindingly white.
He drinks a four-litre tub of water every hour to keep hydrated, as it’s such hard work. I want to have a go, but can’t get the hang of positioning them on one hip bone.
Fatty the sheep gets stuck in the crush. She’s so fat she’s shaped exactly like a rugby ball, but we discovered a lot of the roundness comes from her thick and springy fleece. Once sheared she looks like all the rest – a slightly startled but very clean goat sheep shape.
The lambs aren’t sure which sheep is their mum without their coats on – so there is a lot of shouting and baa-ing and general mayhem until they are sorted out. You can see the lambs sniffing each ewe that comes off the platform until they find ‘their’ mum, and then they trot off quite happily.
Dad and I wrap the fleeces, and this year Lucy helps to catch the fleeces and pack them tightly to send to the Wool Marketing Board. The Wool Board ‘sheet’ is like a massive plastic pillowcase that is open along one side. When each sheet is jammed full of wrapped fleeces I take a huge cur
ved needle threaded with baler twine and sew the sheets tightly closed. We then mark on each sheet how many fleeces it contains and whether they come from hoggs or ewes (hogg fleeces command higher prices as they’re from an animal that has never been sheared before, and the wool is softer).
We get around £1.60 a fleece from the Board. But of course we need to pay John to shear each sheep, so we hardly break even. In the ‘old days’ it was said you could pay your yearly rent with your wool payments. Not any more. Some farmers are selling direct to the customer – to weavers and spinners who work with the raw wool. But there just isn’t the demand for our rougher Texel and Mule fleeces. It’s a pity, as it’s a gorgeous product. When the fleece has just been sheared it’s thick and heavy with lanolin (a natural type of waterproof oil, often found in soap), but once washed, carded, brushed and spun the wool is soft as silk.
It would make more financial sense to shear the sheep ourselves, but Steve has knackered his back, and I just don’t have the strength. I want to learn though. I wonder if you can shear a sheep that is standing up and tied to a fence?
Friday 20th July
I’m watching our flock out in the back field, and the ewes look so much happier without their heavy fleece. There’s now no risk of fly strike or maggots, and they’re much cooler and less itchy. Mabel still has her taupe-coloured legs and face, and stands out against the startling white of her sheared wool. Spotty Nose is saggy all over and has lopsided udders. She’s the oldest in the flock though, so you can excuse a bit of slippage in her old age.
Saturday 21st July
The school holidays are looming. When the kids were younger I found the holidays hard work, as they needed to be watched like a hawk, and trying to do that plus look after the farm and do office work was exhausting.
Now they’re older it’s much easier, as they wander off into the farm and entertain themselves. They’re sensible enough not to fall off hay bales or fall in the river or talk to any strange walkers on the public footpath. I kit Lucy out with a backpack containing her phone, a toilet roll (through bitter experience I’ve learnt that children always need a poo when miles away from the toilet), snacks, a drink and some sun cream. She dances off with Ben trailing behind her to do the things they love doing: building camps, climbing trees, fishing in the stream with a net, making secret treasure hunts and sitting with the pet lambs in the sun.
Two hours later they’re back. Ben has fallen in the stream and is squelching with every step. Lucy has stepped in some nettles and has stings up the back of her legs. But they’re very happy. I stick them in the bath and scrub off the mud, and then it’s pizza and chips for tea.
It sounds idyllic, and of course I hope the kids will look back when they’re older and see how lucky they were. At least I can give them the alternative of being outside and the freedom of having their own time and space in the fields and wood at High House.
Sunday 22nd July
The lambs are having races in the back field. I can see them while I’m sitting at my desk. They gather in a group under the beech trees, and then suddenly one dashes off to the top of the hill and the others stream behind him, bucking and jumping into the air. On cue they turn and happily race down the side of the hill right to the bottom, past their grazing mothers, and then curve around to gallop back up to the top again. They like to play in the evening or first thing in the morning. Even Titchy the tiny lamb is joining in. He’s half the size of his bigger flockmates, but he still races along as fast as he can, his tiny woolly legs a blur.
The lambs are also ‘stotting’, or jumping with all four feet, off the ground along the hard soil at the edge of the field. It’s a move peculiar to sheep and goats, and we have a theory that they do it on hard ground as they like to hear the ‘tock, tock’ sound their hooves make against the packed earth.
After they grow tired of racing, the little ones wander off to play ‘King of the Castle’ on the big stones in one corner. One lamb jumps up onto a rock, and the others try to push him off, lowering their heads and charging until he’s forced to jump to one side while another takes his place. The game goes on until one of the ewes raises her head to call for her lamb, which races across to duck its head under her belly, thumping upwards into her udders so that she releases her milk.
Monday 23rd July
This morning the first caravan of the year pulls up in our farmyard. I wander over to say hello. They’re a nice elderly couple from Yorkshire. The wife fries bacon on a camping stove while her husband asks me about the trees, birds and animals, and we have a good chat over the field gate. Mid-conversation, he suddenly pulls out a banjo from the back of his van and starts serenading a bemused fat pony.
We’re a member of a clever scheme called Brit Stops, where motorhomes or caravans can stop for free in our brewery car park so long as they buy breakfast or lunch from the tearoom. We get a lot of German, Austrian and Dutch people, who almost always speak perfect English.
I’m not sure I can cope with banjos this early in the morning, so I make my excuses to Yorkshire man and leave him singing away to Candy.
Wednesday 25th July
Summer is in full force.
It’s so hot I’m lying on the lounge carpet with a wet tea towel on my head. Steve is repairing the back-field fence in the blazing sunshine – I can hear him thwacking in posts and grumbling about being dehydrated through lack of tea.
The pet lambs have overcome their agoraphobia and are now definitely enjoying their new freedom in the paddock. If you sit down on the grass, they like to come and chew their cud and have a neck scratch.
Fuzzy the lamb stretches out his chin so you can stroke behind his ears, and burps happily while staring lovingly into your eyes. The lambs fall asleep on you if you’re prepared to sit there for a while. It’s cute when they’re tiny but not so lovely when they grow into huge woolly ewes that still demand to sit on your lap.
I often have lunch outside. The avian flu restriction has lifted, and Marjorie and Ethel are now mooching happily round the farm. Marjorie the chicken can spot someone eating a sandwich from miles away. She extends her neck like a periscope, sees my sarnie and belts over, clucking frantically. She stomps around in a circle and pecks at my feet until I give in and feed her a crust or two.
Marjorie’s favourite thing to do is join in on weddings, either by strutting down the aisle in front of the bride and groom or by annexing the play area and terrorising small bridesmaids into feeding her crisps all evening. If you go to pick her up she crouches down shivering, pretending to be all frightened, or slips under the decking where no one can reach. She’s a law unto herself. No one has complained yet, but I reckon there must be many wedding photos out there with photobombing Marjorie posing for the camera.
Thursday 26th July
Still no rain. The streams are still running, but only just, and the ewes look thirsty. We open the fence between our front field and the horse field so that the sheep can drink from the mains-plumbed trough.
Candy watches grumpily as a long line of ewes and lambs march through her paddock to drink from her water trough. The flies are legion, and she’s started scrubbing her bum and neck against the wall, rubbing her skin raw in patches. I shove her inside her cool stable and she almost immediately falls asleep, grateful to be out of the hot sun and incessant biting flies.
Friday 27th July
I walk over the paddock and the grass feels crispy beneath my feet. It’s so blasted by the sun and lack of rain that already big sections have gone brown and died back. We only have one bale of hay left until the new crop is cut, but Steve decides that we’d better feed it to the ewes and lambs as the grass is so poor.
He digs out a huge circular ring feeder, sets it down in the field and fills it with our last precious bale of hay.
The ewes don’t take a lot of interest, but at least they have extra feed if they need it. We can’t afford to buy in extra forage, as the poor spring means there’s a UK-wide shortage of hay and straw, a
nd what little available costs a fortune.
The troughs are still running, but we can hear birds scratching in the gutters of the farm buildings, a thing they only do when it’s very dry. They must be looking for leftover pockets of moisture in the dead leaves.
Steve uses the pressure washer to make a big puddle of water in the yard. This will give the birds a drink, and they’ll be able to have a bath. Swallows immediately fly down and start digging in the muddy pool, and when we leave a female blackbird is having a good old splash and wallow in the water.
Saturday 28th July
This Saturday the brewery is hosting a pagan wedding.
I sit in the front garden to watch the bridal party drive past.
They’ve already asked our permission to go into our wood after their handfasting ceremony for a ‘personal ritual’ with an ash and oak tree. Which is fine by me. Communing with trees is high up on my list of ‘nice things to do’, so this rather lovely young couple is free to go and hug a tree, or whatever it is they’re planning.
The bride wears a circlet of fresh flowers and a long, flowing dress, and the groom wears a baggy white shirt and has a red handkerchief tied round his neck, making him look rather like he’s about to take part in morris dancing. After the civil ceremony the whole wedding party, including a priestess-type person in a long red cloak, marches down to the wood to carry on the celebrations.
The after-wedding party seems to go with a swing, and there’s a hog roast and a ceilidh in a marquee afterwards. We creep around the tents, checking on sheep and lambs while the drums and fiddle play on into the night.