Category Archives: Hill Farming

Hill Farming, Sheep, Wales

Square Sheep

Eighteen sheep jostle me as I try to count them again, ‘Stand still!  Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen.’ There should be nineteen – nineteen beautiful (well to me they are), pregnant ewes of the hardy Welsh Mountain variety.  ‘One of you is missing – what’s happened?  What’s going on?’  No one answers.  Well, they all do, they baa but they are looking curiously at me.

?????????????????????????????‘What’s the hold up!  Get the nut’s out!’ that is what they are baa-ing.

?????????????????????????????Sheep always stick together.  I scan the hillside.  On the crest of the hill, only just visible, by the edge of the field where the oak trees overhang there is something ominously wool coloured.

‘Oh no!  I can’t bare it!’ only the day before I had boasted about our low mortality.  I had tempted fate…  Pride comes before a fall…  Axioms jostle truisms in my head as I stride up the hill pursued by baas.

By the time I reach the gate of the top field I can see the large, motionless body of a sheep, with its legs in the air, like an upturned coffee table,  ‘Please God,  not a dead sheep.’  At that moment one leg gives a twitch – I run the last hundred yards up hill.  Is she sick – in her death throws or is she cast?

Cast is when a sheep gets onto her back – for some reason sheep don’t work very well when they are upside down.  It’s quite an advantage for the shepherd – if you want to do something to one you can turn it over and it won’t struggle – it’s not such an advantage to the sheep.  Once they get onto their backs they can just lie there with just a few little kicks until they die.

This sheep isn’t dead.  She is hugely pregnant.  I check her ear tag:  9229.  She is Square Sheep, that is her name – they are not supposed to have names but she is one of our oldest and cleverest (though not today) and she has a magnificently heavy fleece which makes her look almost as wide as she is long – hence Square Sheep.

I gently and slowly roll her downhill until she is the right way up and she struggles to her feet, staggers sideways, falls over and rolls onto her back again, straight back to inverted coffee table.

This time I roll her to nearly the right way up and hold her there for a few minutes talking to her encouragingly and thinking about twin-lamb-disease and the staggers and all the other falling-over conditions that can afflict a sheep.  Once she has calmed down I loosen my grip and move away.  She struggles slowly to her feet and stands for a while before moving away unsteadily, tacking and with splayed legs, like a sailor back on land after a long voyage.

In the distance a quad bike revs, the cavalry is coming, and below the other sheep stand, an ovine smear across the field, watching us walk slowly down.  All eyes are fixed on the old ewe as her confidence increases and her dignity returns.

?????????????????????????????Square Sheep — Fully recovered

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Hill Farming

Abi’s Odyssey

What an adventure: today she has led the daughters of the chosen out of peril,  defied a mighty king, travelled the length of the known world, faced alien hordes, unperturbed, and tasted the fruits of a promised land and it’s not even lunchtime.

Everything is relative.

Seven years ago (a biblical period) I probably wouldn’t even have noticed, I wouldn’t have spotted those white dots on the farthest hill, wouldn’t have wondered about the gender of the dots.  Wouldn’t have rushed up the valley, binoculars in hand.

But as I approach our boundary I need no binoculars to see that our neighbour’s tenant has loosed a ram and 20 breeding ewes into the adjacent field; the one with the dodgy fence posts that falter and play dead when challenged.  Through that very fence his randy tup is sniffing at our precocious theave lamb (see Raddle-Dazzle); she makes me think of Anne Boleyn, she is running daintily up and down by the fence baa-ing prettily but surprisingly loudly and each time as she turns, she stamps her little feet, the old king, on the far side of the fence is transfixed — enchanted.  Meanwhile his ladies gather around his number-one-wife, the dominant ewe and whisper, looking accusingly at that Boleyn girl ( she has a streak of mud on her back, they are questioning her virginity — well, perhaps not)).

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I run back to the house. opening and shutting various gates on the way and fetch my magic bucket which has mysteriously been tampered with; it has been used for chain-saw oil, which smells bad; its power lies in its mystical maltiness; I chant appropriate expletives as I clean it and refresh its ewe-nut rattle and scent.  A moment later I have my sergeant at arms, my witch’s peculiar, my familiar; she hurtles to my call, not a swooping, weaving bat, nor an owl, blinking in the light of day, but a clomping old ewe who is trained to my bidding and I to hers, we set off, Abi and I and the dog, armour glinting in the morning light.

Odyssey

Ten minutes later and two of us breathing heavily, we have reached the farthest outpost of our kingdom, it has not yet laid down under the weight of conjugal bliss, I rattle my magic bucket, Anne Boleyn tosses a dismissive glance over her shoulder but her maids come and have a sniff and when the sergeant and I turn and walk away they follow.  Anne looks at us, then at the king, then back at us, she is deserted by all her people…  She fears nothing more than being alone, she is, after all, a sheep.  It’s too much, she turns away from the king and runs down the field and we all walk steadily back towards the farmstead.

As we draw farther away the foolish virgins look back, I know that with every step we take the pull of the king is less so we keep walking but then there is a scream on the opposite bank, a hollering and the unmistakable call of a hunting horn (really — not just another escaped metaphor),  there is baying of hounds directly ahead.  My foolish virgins stop dead, so does the sergeant at arms, they start to turn, I shake the bucket, the sergeant advances towards it, Good Old Abi.  Our dog who has been following aimlessly sniffing for rabbits, suddenly hears the threat and runs to take up a position at the head of our column, as he overtakes the sheep he turns them and provides a little push and they again follow us.

We stomp on confidently; they follow nervously.  I close the last gate behind them as the baying abates.  Typical!   We haven’t heard hounds for a year, hunting is illegal, and they don’t exist but they pass through the cutting by our gate just as we are moving timid sheep.

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Hill Farming

Raddle-dazzle

Autumn colours are appearing and our sheep are starting to show russet coloured bottoms; unlike the flurries of blowing leaves or the spiceyness in the damp air, this is not a natural phenomenom — not entirely.

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Our neighbour, out of a sense of humour or aesthetics, marked the ram that he lent to serve our ewes with rustic mellow autumnal paste, the colour of chestnuts and dying bracken.  He, the ram that is, is painted with a thick wadge of this sticky raddle, between his front legs, hidden under his deep masculine chest so that as he discretely does his job, the ewes turn brown and a flurry of them follow him and swirl around him like a gust of fallen leaves.

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Tupping is not what I had expected, with my human prejudices, when we started farming.  We have only one ram, there is no fighting, no rut, no competition for the ewes.  The ewes who live together all year, who are related and most of whom were born here are very welcoming to the ram each year.  Above, you can see them shepherding him around the fields politely showing him the shelter and the stream.

In turn, and nature is very clever with this, they introduce themselves, as each ovulates and comes into season.  For a few hours the chosen ewe will follow the ram closely, nuzzling his neck affectionately.  He sniffs the air and checks her out, mounting her tentatively at just the right moment.

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Meanwhile there may be one or two other ewes about to be ready, they form a guard of honour, bride’s maids, following closely, waiting patiently; something about the chosen ewe, probably her scent, makes the others hold back.

Soon after she has been marked she retreats a little although she may follow him for the rest of the day while he gets on with the job in his gentle, quite respectful way.

Next day the ewe is back to normal grazing with her other red-bottomed sisters.  Once all are red, some by then only very pale pink, the ram will settle down too.  He will graze with the ewes and still be larger and handsome but nothing in their behaviour will betray his presence.

But we have a problem!

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One of our pretty theave lambs (only 6 months old, precocious/foolish virgin) has developed a far-away look in her eyes and the ram is sniffing ominously at the gate of her field.  She must be moved out of his amazing nasal range.  But she has been fed on grass all summer, she does not follow my bucket and has no experience of the treats within.

I need help: come on Abi!

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Abi is our secret weapon, our dear old ewe who started life as an orphan in our shower-room and taught me nearly everything I know about sheep; she is my lieutenant or perhaps more of a sergeant.  She likes to walk around the farm with us, butts the dog for pride of place and the other sheep will follow her.

Sure enough, she comes running when I call and, having shut the breeding herd up in one of their fields she rapidly helps me lead the three foolish virgins across the other field, through the woods and up onto the hill, half a mile away from danger, on the other side of the trees.  Here they can sit under the hedge and wonder what it was that made them feel suddenly so strange.

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Hill Farming, Uncategorized

Autumn

Pale morning sunlight casts long shadows and the gateposts steam in the horizontal rays.  The grass fluoresces greedily gathering what energy it can, drawing in moisture from the wet fields which creek and seep.

?????????????????????????????The oak trees on the hill, always last to shed their leaves, are just beginning to turn russet while the scatty larch trees are aflame and the phlegmatic hazel has already loosed its leaves to drift aimlessly and lie on paths with the last of the rowan berries.

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Autumn is the beginning of our year, the sheep-farming year.  Our ewes are in the peak of their condition, replenished by summer grass of which, this year, there is plenty left to flush them as they go  to the tup.  They are impatient, occasionally butting each other as the younger ones readjust the pecking order in anticipation of something…  The neighbour’s ram will arrive tomorrow.

?????????????????????????????Look into their eyes and tell me they are not intelligent and excited!

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Hill Farming

Where do you start?

We have been heeding the Welsh Assembly Government’s injunction to farmers to renovate traditional farm buildings.

Traditionally a hill farmer with twelve children and as many useful acres built with what was available: stone from the river bed, oak and hazel from the woods and rushes or bracken to thatch, all lashed down with honeysuckle twine or tiled with flat pieces of the local flat stone (almost slate).  In the last 100 years the philosophy hasn’t changed but available materials have.  Here is our traditional barn.

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Welsh nouns have gender and she, the barn, is made of scavenged telegraph poles, tree trunks, branches, corrugated iron, galvanized sheets, draining boards, old doors (wooden,fridge and car), fencing panels and bits of garden shed (or the old privy), tarpaulins, a First World War great coat and carpet (not on the floor, of course, but stapled into the walls) with sacks made of plastic, hessian and paper and all held together with wire and baler twine of plastic and hemp.

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It is a basic timber frame construction, clad inside and out with the aforementioned materials and the cavity filled with balls of twine, sheep’s wool, oily rags, empty jam-jars, fag packets (that’s cigarettes if you are American) and a mummified rat.

The whole thing is reinforced by forty years of incorporated tree growth and drained by various burrows.

At the rear is a concrete plinth presumably for the generator that produced the electricity before 1964 and was protected by a steel door with a rusty padlock still hanging open in the hasp and, believe it or not, a brass key, hanging nearby on a nail and still operating the smooth action of the lock without so much as a squirt of penetrating oil; the brand new padlock we put on the field gate last year had seized by November.

SONY DSCWe discovered all this as we lovingly unpicked it and sorted what we found – into metal scrap (£!!!), firewood for next winter and burn now!  Even  though latterly it had been a health and safety nightmare, demolishing it was a sacrilege – an insult to those who built this monument to ingenuity, inspired in poverty and an antidote to materialism.

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