by Sally Urwin
Sunday 29th July
I’m out at the sheep pens the next day. We’ve kept a handful of ewes and lambs that need a little extra care and attention in one of our smaller sheds. When I go and do my morning check I find them in the farmyard, munching happily on the grass that pokes up through the cobbles. The door to the shed is standing wide open.
One of the wedding party must have ignored the clear ‘NO ENTRY’ signs and gone into the shed, then forgotten or been unable to close the gates behind them.
Was it deliberate? We decide that it was probably a couple trying to find a dark place for some after-hours shenanigans. I don’t think the sheep shed would be a very romantic place for any illicit goings-on, as our sheep would probably stand round in a tight circle, breathing heavily and watching you extra carefully.
I shoo the ewes and lambs back into the shed and push the gate bolt back into place.
Tuesday 31st July
A couple of months ago we agreed to a Caravan and Camping Club from down south who wanted to spend a weekend at our farm.
It’s been organised by a couple of ladies, and today they’ve turned up with lots of friends and family. As we have no facilities like showers or toilets or even electricity they have hired a porta-shower and three porta-toilets.
They’d expected 140 people to camp, but we counted at least 250 that drove in on the day. They’ve camped in the paddock next to the brewery and when the kids start running around and the music cranks up it looks like a small, happy festival.
They seem organised, and one of the ladies has a big list of camping rules on the campsite (no fires, no loose dogs). And there are proper recycling bins, dog-poo toilets, pretty tents, fluttering flags and whatnot.
I watch a parade stomp around the field, with people banging drums and singing and everyone waving rainbow banners. It all looks good fun.
Eventually, I catch a reluctant Candy and haul her into the camping field so that the kids can pat her and ask questions. Many haven’t been on a farm before and are really interested in the sheep and chickens and crops and want to know why the chickens are peering into their tents, and if they can take a pet lamb back home.
But there are lots and lots of kids, and without being all judgemental, I don’t think the campers realise that a farm isn’t somewhere you can just let your kids run free like the wind, while you drink two litres of cider and get hammered in your tent.
I find a group of enormous teenagers playing football and bouncing the ball off the ancient drystone walls, which knocks out huge great chunks of stone.
Then I see a little kid perched on top of one of the hemmel roofs – and I go completely nuclear. Steve said I’m like a very small, very angry tornado. The roofs are not safe – and if he had fallen through and hurt himself can you imagine the health and safety nightmare? We’d be tarred and feathered and paraded through Hexham.
I scream at the kids, ‘If I catch you little sods on top of the roof again you will be going home tonight!’ and stomp off to tell the parents.
‘Oh dear,’ they say, while drinking cans of lager and burping happily.
I’ve gone to bed with a headache, accompanied by sounds of banging drums and screaming kids.
Wednesday 1st August
Today Steve has discovered that someone has jumped up and down on one of the metal gates and snapped a huge stone gatepost right the way through. The post was a foot wide, dates from 1840 and costs at least a thousand pounds to replace.
The kids have also been sneaking into the horse field, chasing round an alarmed Candy and daring each other to grab the electric fence, thereby shorting out the whole system and draining the battery.
I went, po-faced and furious, to tell the organisers who were terribly apologetic – but of course don’t have the money to pay for a beautiful 170-year-old gate post.
So that’s the end of the camping, and after a short breakfast, everyone starts wending their way home, cars loaded up to the gunnels with hastily pulled-up tents and sleeping bags wrapped haphazardly around wailing children.
One amusing postscript comes from the poor porta-potty man who had to come twice to empty the loos during the weekend. He said they should have had at least six toilets to cope with the number of people using them, and he’d ‘never been twice over one weekend to empty them before’. He was kitted out in every hygenic protection device known to mankind, but even he reeled with the smell when he opened the toilet doors. …
Thursday 2nd August
I have the fattest horse in Northumberland. The farrier came to trim her feet, and Candy is so embarrassingly rotund that she can’t lift her front foot past knee height. (I have the same problem.) Joe my lovely (and rather handsome) blacksmith managed to winch her knee high enough to do her feet, but it was a bit mortifying. However, Candy could not give a tiny stuff.
She’s been belly-rolling under the electric fence to get at the good grass in the next field and has been discovered ears-deep in a sheep lick in the adjoining paddock. I’m paranoid about laminitis (a condition that small, fat ponies are prone to in the summer) so she’s now on a strict diet and has hardly any grass at all – just barley straw to eat.
What she needs is a couple hours of work every day, but down to kids, work and everything else, Candy hasn’t been ridden since May. She hangs sadly over her stable door, a strand of straw drooping from her lips, and whinnies pathetically at anyone who walks past.
Friday 3rd August
I take a walk down into the wheat and barley fields. The plant stalks are swaying in the wind and the fields look like rippling oceans of green under the hot sunshine. It won’t be long before they start to ripen in this weather.
I’ve learnt to tell the difference between the crops: the barley stems are a slightly lighter green, and the plants have long feathery spikes (awns) that stick up from the hard grain. The wheat plants are shorter, darker green and don’t have any bristles.
The oilseed flowers have disappeared to leave a thick carpet of greyish plants, and the entire field now smells strongly of cabbage, as the seeds ripen ready for harvest. Visitors are already delicately mentioning the ‘bad smell’ when they come to the house, and I make a mental note to ask Steve if he can plant next year’s oilseed crop in a different field, away from our kitchen window.
Saturday 4th August
Another party of campers have come to set up tents at the farm. They’re staying over for a wedding on the Saturday night.
They seem to be a nice group of lads; I wander over to tell them about shutting the gates and apologise for the amount of sheep poo that’s in the field.
Everyone is very pleasant, and no one seems to mind Marjorie the chicken investigating each of their tents in turn. She carefully pecks through their things, searching under sleeping bags and poking her head into each tent. The pet lambs in the paddock are just as irritating, marching up to snuffle through the campers’ belongings. I remind everyone to keep their tents closed to prevent the animals moving in, climbing into sleeping bags and eating their food.
The next day I zoom past the paddock on the quad bike and find the pet lambs sunning themselves at the bottom of the paddock. Fuzzy seems to have a frill round his middle, and getting closer I realise that he’s managed to put his head into a plastic bag and is wearing it like a plastic tutu. The lamb looks quite proud of his stylish accessory, and while I disentangle him I search around the grass for any more rubbish. Apart from a few empty beer cans piled neatly in a bucket, there’s nothing at all. I like these campers.
They emerge, all bleary-eyed, about 10 a.m. I give them some fresh eggs from Marjorie and Ethel’s nesting box to apologise for the fact that the chickens have spent the hours since daylight poking their head under the tents and clucking loudly at the inhabitants.
I must remember next time to try and keep the chickens out of the camping paddock. I can just see them climbing into someone’s car and being bundled off by accident.
Monday 6th August
Maybe the past inhabitants of the farm threw their rubbish over the wall into the field? The land certainly rose up sharply at the point where I found the pottery, and the dry weather has made the soil so crumbly that it’s easy to spot anything poking out of the ground.
Calling the kids and dragging some gloves and spades we start excavating the area. Almost immediately my spade clinks against something hard, and I pull out a cream and brown jar. This is exciting; we start digging like demons. After an hour we’ve amassed a small pile of china, glass and pottery fragments. There are old green and blue bottles, a brown earthenware teapot, a tiny glass perfume bottle marked ‘Lavender’, some pretty blue-and-white china pieces and, best of all, a couple of stoneware jam pots stamped ‘Hartley’s Finest Marmalade’.
There’s also a huge collection of old batteries, bits of miscellaneous wire and metal, and huge pieces of pottery animal troughs.
This is brilliant. The kids and I feel like proper archaeologists. We must be digging through the old farm midden, where all the old broken plates and jars and bottles were thrown. We wash all the fragments in the horse trough and lay them out on the kitchen table. I spend a happy evening researching all the bits and find out that the jam jars are late 1880s and the Numol pot is from the 1920s.
‘Be careful you don’t stab yourself with something,’ says Steve when I show him my haul. ‘There’s some wicked pieces of old glass and iron in there.’
I make a mental note to buy the kids reinforced gloves and check that their tetanus injections are up to date …
Tuesday 7th August
I’m just not used to the heat. Steve and I crouch in our house every morning, slapping sun cream on our wizened, sun-baked bodies.
As Northumbrians, summer usually means a low-grade mix of rain, the odd spot of sunshine and howling winds. Constant sunshine is unnerving.
Steve has broken out his shorts. I check the sheep in a terrible floaty kaftan I’ve found in the back of the wardrobe. Only the kids are unaffected, and splash happily in the bug-infested paddling pool I’ve set up in the garden. They’re already brown as berries, and their hair has turned into spun gold.
Wednesday 8th August
Worming day. The entire flock needs to be brought in so that the ewes can be given a wormer plus a booster of minerals and vitamins, ready for the tupping in November. We start early to beat the heat, but it’s still stifling – very humid and muggy.
Poor Mavis is flagging in the sun, so we give her a drink and put her into Candy’s stable to cool down. We’ve seen collie dogs go into convulsions with heatstroke when the weather is hot.
I take her place and charge about the field, flapping my arms and uttering squeaky barks to try and move the flock up through the gate. The ewes are slow and sluggish, not wanting to move in the scorching sunshine. Eventually, Steve and I steer them up and through the gate and into the cool of the shed. I’m absolutely lathered with sweat and covered with tiny black harvest flies that look like flecks of dust and make me itch all over.
Each sheep is given a dose of wormer and a second measure of vitamin and minerals. Mabel is always first in the queue, checking my pockets for sheep nuts and demanding a neck rub. The older sheep are easier to handle, as they know what to expect and stand fairly patiently as we squirt wormer into their mouths. However, some of the younger ewes are fairly bonkers, throwing themselves against the metal bars of the pens while we struggle to hold them down to push the wormer gun in-between their jaws.
Finally we’re finished, and we lead the flock back to their field: Mabel and Spotty Nose in front, and Fatty bringing up the rear. Mavis emerges from her stable, yawns and trots along behind, stopping every now and then to investigate something interesting in the hedgerows before bounding up to Steve and me, tail wagging.
I go home, peel off my sheep-shit-encrusted leggings and stand under a cold shower until my body temperature reaches normal levels.
Thursday 9th August
My lovely mum is 72 years old today. We’ve organised a family barbecue in our shearing shed to celebrate. It’s still full of sheep dung and clipped wool, but we pull out buckets to sit on, stick some sausages on a cheap disposable barbecue and sit back in the shade.
Lucy and Ben ride their bikes up and down the empty shed while Mum sits on a sheep lick bucket and carefully disentangles a thread of wool from her hot dog. Steve has made a sponge cake with strawberries and cream, and after belting out an enthusiastic Happy Birthday, we sit with disposable plates and spoons, scraping up the cream and swigging cups of tepid tea.
We’ve decided to camp out in the front paddock as an extra birthday celebration. We’ve got two tents – a one-man pop-up shelter and a much bigger round bell tent that I’ve borrowed from a friend.
As dark falls the bats flit in and out of the shadows, and we sit round a camp fire, all talking at once, laughing and joking and telling stories.
Dad has had a bottle of beer and is telling Steve the story (now in family folklore) of when he went to Iran in ’76 and had such bad diarrhoea he had to do a poo in the desert.
‘The trick is,’ he says, waving his bottle around, ‘to kick it about in the sand a bit until it all disintegrates.’ Ben’s eyes are like saucers.
The children are terribly excited at the fact that we’re all going to camp, and they run in and out of the tents, squeaking with excitement.
Steve commandeers the one-man shelter and happily settles down in his sleeping bag. The rest of us, Mum, Dad, Lucy, Ben and I, are on sleeping mats arranged star fashion around the central pole in the big, echoey space of the bell tent.
The kids quickly settle down, scooting into their thick sleeping bags. I’ve layered an extra double duvet on top.
Mum’s sleeping bag seems very tight.
‘I can’t seem to turn around,’ she says faintly, with the drawstring hood pulled firmly around her head and down to her nose. All I can see is a tuft of grey hair protruding from the top of the bag.
Dad is grumbling that he’s lying on the thinnest ground mat in the world, but before long he falls fast asleep, his snores echoing inside the dusty interior of the tent.
Night draws on and I am absolutely frozen. I’ve never been so cold. My ground mat is bumpy and my sleeping bag is too thin. Everyone else is now peacefully asleep but I can’t get to sleep as my feet are like blocks of ice.
I try wrapping my feet in a black bin liner to keep warm but that doesn’t seem to help, and I just rustle every time I turn over. I now need the toilet, so I tiptoe out of the tent in the pitch black, fall over a chair that someone has left in the path, and accidentally wee on a guy rope.
Back inside I fall into a fitful sleep, huddling down next to a peacefully breathing Lucy, while trying to tuck my legs under her layers of duvet.
Friday 10th August
I woke up stiff and cold this morning. Dad is already awake and begins to disentangle himself from the duvet, slowly hauling himself from his prone position, complaining about a bad back and a sore neck.
Ben and Lucy are as fresh as daisies. Mum’s sleeping bag had been so tight that she hadn’t been able to turn over all night, and her hair has swirled itself into a point on top of her head, like an ice cream cone.
Steve bounces out of his tent, rubbing his hands together, ‘I slept really well last night!’ he says, unpacking the breakfast things and fiddling with the paraffin stove to get it to light.
I ignore him. I feel damp and grubby and have a bright red nose. Mum and I sit on either side of the stove, her surreptiously rubbing the marks made by an overtight sleeping bag and me rubbing my feet to get the circulation going.
The next time I camp I want it to be on some
luxurious tented safari, with butler service and hot and cold running water.
Sunday 12th August
We’re in the front field counting our sheep. Mavis doesn’t like sitting out in the hot sunshine, so she carefully makes her way over to the water trough, jumps over the edge and lowers herself into it with a sigh. All you can see is a pair of brown eyes and a black nose and her curly tail poking out of the water like a flag. Steve whistles and she splashes out, shaking her whole body, throwing a shower of water droplets over us and any nearby sheep.
Monday 13th August
I’m mooching through our wood, absent-mindedly swinging my thumb stick at the brambles on the side of the path. I’m here to see if the stream is still running.
Welton Burn has slowed to a tiny trickle, and the left-hand stream branch where it splits around the base of an oak tree is completely dry. I walk along the dry riverbed, slipping a little over the damp rocks and stepping over all the dead branches and twigs littering the bottom. A dead ash tree has fallen across this section of the stream, and I sit down to watch a teeny bank vole scurry along the wet soil at the base. He has a very white tummy, a brown furry back and long luxuriant whiskers. He stops occasionally and sits on his hindquarters to clean his face with his two front paws. He’s on the hunt for worms or beetles.
The brambles and nettles are too high to walk back on top of the bank so I return via the oak tree along the damp pebbles and rocks. Underneath the tree there’s a well-trodden path over the riverbank where animals have been drinking. I spot a badger print (five distinct toes and claws) in the mud. Their sett is close by, and I wonder how they’re managing to dig for food in the dry ground.