Hill Farming, Sheep, Uncategorized

The Worrying Case of the Good Friday Lamb

Considering it was born just after dawn with cloud resting on the hilltop and rain dripping from the trees, our first lamb seemed reasonably robust — it was standing but, ‘It looks a bit torpid,’ Alan said as he handed me the binoculas.

We watched — it had done the two most important things — it had breathed and it was on its feet but it would not suckle. Our most skittish ewe had delivered it onto the moist leaf litter behind the hedge and it teetered around under its mother’s belly looking for something (it did not know what) but it tired and slumped down onto the wet grass when its mother pawed at it ominously with her foot. It stood again and she nudged it backwards along her side. Half heartedly it butted the ewe’s back leg, missing her udder, failing to let down any milk and not sensing the teat at all. Again it flopped down in the mud. This happened over and over and the ewe looked pitiful — uncharacteristically she let me come very close.

Something would have to be done — the lamb was getting weaker, the ewe was pawing at it more roughly, more desperately.

Worried ewe — over 2 hours and the lamb has not fed

A makeshift pen was constructed nearby and I carried the lamb into it, it was female, her mother followed without any fuss — even human mothers comply with their attendant’ suggestions when at their wit’s end.

Makeshift pen

The lamb didn’t like being picked up and a little surge of adrenaline probably did it good. As I placed it on its feet, it ran to its mother (now restrained by a hurdle) it butted her udder, which is what they do when they run home for safety, and I squeezed the teat which squirted the lambs face with milk — she latched on immediately and fed.

Full stomach, ears up, baa working, bowels working, bladder working, numbered like Mum (number 12, on the other side) and tummy sprayed with iodine, she is ready for a healthy sleep and not the engulfing drowsiness of hypoglycaemia that can carry off even a healthy lamb if she cannot achieve all three gaols of her birthday — breathing, standing and feeding.

Now she can do them all!

Ecology, Hill Farming

The Midwife has arrived…

in her black and white uniform.

Who called her? Nobody knows. But she knows: she knows exactly when every baby is due and she moves in a day or so before to watch over the mother.

Unlike her human counterpart she has no concern for the mother, she is here to collect the placenta and the membranes. There’ll be no rotting flesh on our fields to attract predators. All will be whisked away by the midwife bird.

She, or he, has been working up the valley following the wave of lambing which creeps up with the warming air and the growth of the grass. The first sign of her presence is a smear of wool on the field; she has taken the liberty of pulling some wool from a ewe’s back to line her own nest and leaves a little on the grass, alarming as she chose the wool marked with red marker — does the colour of blood attracts her?

Magpies are hated by most farmers because of their partiality to another delicacy: they will peck the eyes from dead sheep and sometimes from not-quite-dead sheep and even from the head of a partially born lamb.

This upsets farmers (not surprisingly) but the flash of this bold and watchful bird will often alert him to a miscarriage, premature lambing or a fallen ewe and you can see magpies on occasions, perched on the back of a sheep, patiently picking out maggots from soiled wool which, if left, would attack the skin and eat into the sheep’s flesh causing rapid septicaemia from fly-strike and death if untreated.

Magpie looking for parasites and maggots

The midwife bird is here to warn you that lambing is nigh — ovine tempers are frayed but the fields are drying out nicely so

brace yourselves for an avalanche of lambs.

Astronomy

Grass-Root Astronomy

What do you do when you are caught out by a 95% lunar eclipse of the sun — you watch it as Galileo might have and as your granny did — projected onto the wall of the house through her colander!

Hover over images for explanation or click for a slide show —

See the moon passing over the sun

The image is inverted but clear

Multiple images of the eclipse

Afterwards its just a colander again

But that’s not all — other shadows are temporarily weirded —

Nature taking artistic liberties during the eclipse

The camera, without a view finder, gave a image without damage to the retina

Solar Eclipse 20/03/2015 seen in Wales

Art

The Soul of the Soulless City

It stopped me in my tracks, that image, with a gasp
(I turned to see if anyone had noticed).
It had reached out from the wall and grabbed me.
Like a snake in the grass – really, not a metaphor,
but a primitive reaction.
As I passed, the picture had crept un-noticed through the corner of my eye, into my brain, and hit a trigger – KAZAM and spinning round, amazed,
I recognised the view —
the exact view from my earliest childhood, or so it seemed —
though I’ve never been to New York.

Soul of the Soulless City by CRW Nevinson ()

Soul of the Soulless City-CRW Nevinson

Wide-eyed and gripped by New York in 1920 and never so moved before by art, I was perplexed.

Even more so when I found this!

Roofs of New York CRW Nevinson in my grandparent's flat circa 1955

My Mum and Dad with the Roofs of New York by
CRW Nevinson, in my grandparent’s flat circa 1955

You see — it’s not the same image at all — just an essence, the blowing steam, the style, and I was a child when I last saw that picture. But still I spun round when I saw through the same eyes, sixty years later — the eyes of CRW Nevinson. What does this tell us about art?

Here I am looking the other way!

Essentially unchanged

P.S The artist renamed the picture which is now on show at the Tate Britain when he fell out with American critics years later, it had been New York — an abstraction, it became The Soul of a Soulless City. This explains the disparity between the positivity of the image and the negativity of the title, I don’t believe he thought the city soulless when he painted it!

My grand-parents picture was sold many years ago — perhaps to a conciliatory American.

Ecology, Humour

Eye shine — you shine but I don’t

I spend a lot of my time with individuals who see the world through very different eyes.

For a start their eyes shine at night, not with avarice or the holy spirit but with any light that they catch in their eye —

Eyeshine in Welsh Mountain Sheep

You see they are a prey species and they stand out all night in the darkest fields uneasily looking out for wolves and rustlers so they need to see in the dark. One of the adaptions that many nocturnal mammals have made is to acquire a tapetum lucidum, a biological mirror behind their translucent retina, so that light stimulates the retina as it falls upon it and stimulates the retina’s photosensitive cells again as it bounces off the mirror layer heading back the way it came — this helps them to see in the dark.

So when you go out in the field at night with your torch and all the sheep turn to look at you because they think you are something spooky, all their eyes light up with intense pale green light, all directed at you, which is definitely spooky.

Dogs have a tapetum lucidum too — this one shines bright green.

There’s a sheep behind him. Foxes have eyes that glow green, different species have variation in their tapetum lucidum and glow differently — hunters who went out lamping for rabbits and foxes (I think it’s illegal so they don’t do it anymore) will tell you they can tell what they are shooting by the shade of the eyeshine, as they charge around in a truck with a lamp on top picking up eye glow and shooting things — very fortunately humans do not have a tapetum lucidum, otherwise more of them would get shot.

Cats are famous for their glowing eyes and that is where I got into trouble. I spent a happy evening flashing and snapping at our cats, trying to demonstrate their eyeshine and their strange lozenge shaped pupils that constrict down to a tight vertical slit in bright light — you see one of the problems for these creatures, who are adapted for the dark, is managing bright light. Mainly they shut their eyes.

Cat dealing with bright light

Partially dilated pupil

Mid-position pupil, not round nor slit

Wistful in bright sunlight – pupils narrow vertical slits

Minutes after this unsuccessful photo-shoot, Midnight (our short haired black cat) started doing something very strange and alarming, kicking his right foot out then grabbing at his mouth with both his paws as if trying to pull something out of his mouth — he did this repeatedly making a peculiar slavvery noise. There wasn’t anything in his mouth or throat, he wasn’t salivating or retching and there was no sign of a bite or sting on his lips. The other cat and the dog looked worried and followed him round fussing as he repeated his odd stereotyped gestures, like non-verbal Tourette’s Syndrome. OMG he’s been out and got a head injury, or a brain tumour… Or epilepsy due to flashing lights.

There then ensued a period of research on the internet. While the cat twitched, quietly now, on its chair by the fire, the other two animals sat upright on the floor next to him watching anxiously.

By the time my husband had got home I had cracked it — Feline Hyperaesthsia Syndrome… Can be provoked by stress ( like being chased around the house with a flashlight). This is a diagnosis of exclusion and mindful of vet’s bills we adopted an expectant policy — we’ll watch and expect it will get better.

It did — for twelve hours or so he looked spaced-out between twitches that gradually got less complicated and with longer gaps between them– first the kicking disappeared, than the grabbing at his mouth, then the licking of his lips gradually stopped and he had a long sleep. Then he woke up and had a large breakfast and has been fine since. We didn’t photograph any of this — we thought I had done enough harm.

Returning to the great mysteries of the mammalian eyes that follow me daily —

Horizontal rectangular pupil and fetching eyeshade of pale lashes

Why do cats have vertical pupils and sheep horizontal ones?

They both need to be able to restrict the bright light of the mid-day sun. Cats need very sharp vision, right in front of them and the potential to use a whole cross section of their lens (this has complicated optic reasons to do with putting back together the spectrum that bending light tends to produce), thus they need a vertical slit because they are predators and they pounce on little creatures right in front of them.

Sheep need a more global view of the world, they live on grassland and need to be able to spot movement all around.

With her protruding eyes and wide pupils, she can see from right in front and to right back along her flanks. Provided she walks in a slight zig-zag, which they do, she can see all around herself, even in bright weather when her pupils are constricted — she couldn’t do this with a vertical pupil.

Dogs have round pupils like us but can see in the dark — they have reflectors at the back of their eyes which shine but are not so sensitive to the light that they need slit pupils to protect themselves by day — I suspect this is because at night they see mainly with their noses!

Ecology, Humour

Kissing Frogs

Now is the time to look for signs of Spring and here, where there is still snow in the shadow of the hedges, we haven’t seen a bulging bud. But the birds know something’s up! They have a sense of anticipation and an irritable awareness of their territory — the robins are scrapping and the chaffinches have started to sing and me? Well, I go out every morning to look for frogspawn and on the morning after Valentine’s night — there it is!

Something for our newts to eat.

Otherwise things look quite wintery though the moss is strangely spruced up and vibrant.

It’s making the most of the early sunlight before being caste into shadow by the burgeoning verdure that will soon overwhelm it — the uncurling fronds of the ferns and bracken and the canopy of oak leaves.

And the lichens are looking shaggy after a winter unfettered by the competition and unbroken by the resting bottoms of weary ramblers.

The wild unicorn on Van Hill still has his winter coat and hasn’t started yet to get his new horn when he will hide in the woods like the moss.

Ecology, Hill Farming, Humour, lifestyle

Hearts of Oak

‘The measure of a man’s importance is the size and number of his woodpiles’.

I was told this fact many years ago in rural France — it made a great impression — so contradictory was it to the progressive philosophies of my young French friends that I found it oddly reassuring — and still do!

We have woodpiles — burning wood when you have lots of trees is great but trees need cutting down and they don’t go quietly, they have a lot of stored energy and can lash out ferociously. They need logging and drying and wood burns amazingly quickly so you need loads and plenty of room for storage. We have an old barn, thirty feet by twenty feet already full of timber.

Last back end (as they say in Lancashire) we culled a Leylandii hedge, grown 40 feet high in a blink of Mother Nature’s eye. We cut off the branches and burned the brush-wood —

— but when the exalting roar of the chain saw had stalled for the last time we were left with a daunting amount of timber — a mountain where our new workshop was waiting to be built.

There it lay until last week when we were taken in hand!

Not by the Forestry Commission or the satellite snooperage of Rural Affairs, Wales (it was nothing to do with illicit romance in the hills) — it wasn’t even our very grown-up children who, though they never tidied their rooms, now worry about the state of their decrepit parents. No, it was a young neighbour (well relatively young) who knew that all we needed was a tiny push, a little encouragement.

‘I’ll come and help you on Tuesday — I’ve nothing much on this time of the year — I’ll be with you at midday.’

We refused, we protested, we were tempted, we said he’d have to have lunch (would there be meat? — Yes), he accepted, we capitulated, it was arranged and, in the intervening few days, we got on with what we should have been doing for months!

By the time Tuesday came we had started two new woodpiles and that day something strange happened — tree trunks scudded over the ground, whizzed through the air, crashed into trailers, flattened the saw trestle and just about spifflicated two pensioners temporarily under vigorous new management.

Chainsaws started willingly and logs marched to the music of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice jumping happily onto the new woodpiles.

By evening, by some miracle of effort and teamwork, well mainly one man’s effort (we helped as hard as we could and tried not to get in the way) we had uncovered the bare earth where our new workshop is to be sited.

Temporarily repaired trestle on the almost cleared site — Digger just watched and didn’t help at all.

It’s a miracle. Just another of the miracles of living here — Thank you David!

New Woodpile

Birds, Poetry, Welsh culture

‘I am a man like you,’ but was he? R.S.Thomas (1913-2000)

Yesterday was one of those days that can’t be wasted — bright winter sunshine, long shadows on crisp all-day frost — a day for adventure.
We have been reading the poems and the entertaining biography, by Byron Rogers, of the Welsh poet, R S Thomas, referred to by Philip Larkin as Arsewipe Thomas whose personality was as fascinating as his poetry which was, though marvellously constructed, at times, patronising and judgemental of the Welsh ‘peasant’ (a strange concept in itself in the second half of the twentieth century).
Thomas’s enigmatic personality has intrigued me since I saw him speak in an interview on the television about Wales and the Welsh language, never had I seen someone’s subject so at odds with his delivery! His words were contradicted by all the non-verbal elements of his speech.

Thomas’s identity seemed caught between two cultures and isolated by ‘intellect’, education and calling. He was ordained in the Church of Wales, the Welsh branch of the Episcopal Church, essentially the Church of England, viewed with suspicion by many Welsh, the majority of whom attended Non-conformist Chapels.

He was an Anglican priest who had adopted an affected upper class accent though he was born in Cardiff and brought up in Holyhead, North Wales, but he felt Welsh to his core, learned Welsh as an adult and was an outspoken nationalist.

Yesterday in the sunshine, we went in search of clues to his persona, not with much expectation.
We visited his church in Manafon, not far from here —

St Michael’s Church, Manafon, Powys

St Michael’s Church(Eglwys Mihangel Sant) Manafon, Powys

R.S.Thomas’ rectory at Manafon

He was not the first poet to have had the living, the heritage board listed a whole bibliography of bardic priests — R.S. was only the last of many — did that egg him on to write in Welsh — his poetry in the Welsh language never seems to have made the grade which must have frustrated him.

The church was locked but the situation was idyllic with its rectory on the riverside, surrounded by meadows and tall trees.

R.S. Thomas wanted to see the beauty of this landscape reflected in the true Welsh people but they disappointed him seeming brutalised by the harshness of their lives.

You failed me, farmer. I was afraid you would

The day I saw you loitering with the cows.

Yourself one of them but for the smile, […]

For this I leave you

Alone in your harsh acres, herding pennies […] (Valediction)

Apart from poetry, Welshness and a preoccupation with the darkness of other people’s minds, oafs and yokels (The Country Clergyman), R.S. Thomas was a bird watcher — I suspect like an old boss of mine who expressed interest in a trapped bird, flapping itself to a frenzy against a closed sky-light — when I asked if he would like me to get the pole and open the window, he said, ‘Oh no, I shouldn’t bother, I can see now, it’s only a starling!’

The starlings yesterday in Manafon were making their presence felt if only by weight of number. A vast murmuration had settled on tall trees near the church, the wide valley thronged with their chatter. You could have swept them up from the ground.

Starlings — a cloud resting in the trees —

–and on the ground

We drove in a wide arch through the Banwy valley, skirting snow capped Snowdonia, to Eglwys Fach (Little Church) Thomas’s next parish, arriving at dusk, another church dedicated to St Michael and I am reminded of the lines

A little aside from the main road,

becalmed in a last-century greyness, (The Chapel)

Memorial Gate, Eglwys Fach.

Church of St Michael, Eglwys Fach.

This was a Welsh speaking area close to the bird reserve at Ynys Hir but a lot of the parishioners were middle class English ex-pats. In the church yard there are stones inscribed with names that are not Welsh —

Come to Wales

To be buried: the undertaker

Will arrange it for you. We have

The sites and a long line

Of clients going back….

It ends… Dirt cheap, a place where

It is lovely to lie. (Welcome to Wales)

The church was locked — whether to keep God in or keep him out — one cannot tell.

They laid a stone trap

for him, enticing him with candles,

and thought he would come like some huge moth

out of the darkness to beat there… (The Empty Church)

R.S. Thomas spent a lot of time waiting for God, but then… The meaning is in the waiting. (Kneeling) Possibly he was looking in the wrong place. In his quest he moved ever Westward.

On the next irresistible day perhaps we will follow him to the far west and the Lleyn peninsula.

Trees behind the church at Eglwys Fach in the last of the sun.

Birds, Hill Farming, lifestyle, Wales

Aerial Dog Fights

We are not in a war zone but over the undulating landscape of Mid-Wales fighter aircraft of the Royal Air Force rent the sky and intertwine their parabolas as they pass behind the hills to emerge and cross, one with the other with micro-second clearance — they travel in pairs, weaving like mating dragonflies on amphetamine, never quite making contact, thankfully — so far.

Photo: Cpl Paul Oldfield RAF/MOD [OGL (http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/1/)]

2 Hawk TMk2 Aircraft courtesy of Cpl Paul Oldfield RAF/MOD (OGL v1.0)

They use this area for low level training (I don’t think it’s a secret) and use our house as a landmark or perhaps we are located exactly on the intersection of the invisible lines of the virtual grid that is projected onto the land by a NASA satellite (the eyes in the sky). When we were slating our new roof the eyes in the sky were obviously interested, sending fighters to make pass after pass over our house, lower and lower in the sky, trying to topple the large khaki penguin, wrapped up against the elements (it was winter — we do everything late). Were we part of a secret military exercise — a pretend enemy missile installation under construction — subject to constant aerial monitoring and due for annihilation when we fixed the last ridge tile? Or was the intelligence officer just keen on DIY, trying to see how we feathered and leaded the valley of our new roof?

Anyway we enjoyed the attention.

We’re not paranoid, not even when a massive Hercules transport plane hoves over the horizon which, in these hills, can be just yards ahead. Motorists on the mountain road swerve to avoid the huge alien craft that rears up as they approach the crest of a hill!

The remains of a fuel tank from such a plane was in our barn for years, jettisoned by a pilot who misjudged the height of our hill, and quickly squirreled away by conspirators to fill the oil lamps of this valley for a generation — or so they say!

The aerial activity recently has been more pastoral. The crows that roost and build their nests in the wood do not like the buzzards, nor are they very keen on the red kites —

— that swoop down from great altitude to pick up the remains of pheasant carcasses left on the hillside for them by this lazy farmer’s wife who is fed up with making soup.

The buzzards are ever present,

mewing to each other and circling above the trees and crossing the valley. The crows are intelligent and social creatures and resent this invasion of their airspace so have formed an air force of their own. They climb up high in ones and twos and swoop down on the buzzard from above and behind and the buzzard will twist and roll to face the enemy with his talons outstretched and they will engage and drop and spin in the most aeronautically alarming way — a real dog-fight.

They recover and the buzzard continues to beat his Herculean way across the field of combat as the crows re-form to attack again.

Hovering buzzard

Crow about to swoop on much larger buzzard

Crow gives chase and will attack again

It’s hard not to sympathize with the plucky crows especially after the chicken incident — imagine our delight when a great bird of prey alights just under our bedroom window to consume its prey — we are honoured and watch and wait, enthralled, to photograph its every move and later rush out to examine the spot — only to discover the remains of our last bantam hen!

Note added 26.10.2023 — In my ignorance I failed to notice this is in fact a goshawk — aristocrat among hawks but still not entitled to eat our hen!

Photo of Hawk aircraft by Cpl Paul Oldfield RAF/MOD [OGL (http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/1/)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Hill Farming, lifestyle, Welsh language

Why Welsh is an up-hill business.

Getting around this time of the year is not always easy.

Winter near Staylittle.

My problem is that when I venture out alone it is usually dark so I can’t see the little icons on the second, magic gear knob — the one that engages the four-wheel-drive. So after I’ve had a little slide I have to stop and look for the light switch and maybe also my bifocals. But the problem is, for the occasional night driver, when you get your head in just the right position to see the hieroglyphics on the knob, your own shadow falls exactly on that very same knob — spooky?. You can drive one hundred miles at night in Wales and only see five other cars but when you are stopped on the back road to Staylittle, rummaging for your reading glasses, another car will blind you with its headlights and, finding you stationary on a mountain pass in the middle of the night, the driver will get out, or at least wind down his window, to ask you if you are alright and discern with his knife sharp perception that you are definitely not alright, but then, probably you never were.

I go to Delife to have my Welsh lesson. It is beyond Staylittle which used to be called Stay-a-little, a much better English name for such a friendly place, albeit a tad exposed and chilly in winter, on the west side of our hill where the weather comes in from the Atlantic, whistling up the Celtic Sea, carefully avoiding Ireland, to dump its full ferocity on the Cambrian Mountains where we live.

You wouldn’t think that language had anything to do with altitude but it has! In the sheltered valleys of Mid-Wales only the road signs are still bilingual; the indigenous population was long ago polluted by generations of English speaking in-comers, who passed by on their way to Ireland but dallied, drawn by the beauty of the place and the passion of the people and the strangeness… Nothing is more sexually enticing than strangeness (good old genetics, it just loves difference) so they stayed and fell in love and intermarried and, with the collusion of the government, bought up their children to speak English.

Farmers don’t marry for love; they marry for land, nothing is more alluring to a farmer than three hundred acres of prime pasture and so the farming families who are rooted in the land have not intermarried to the same extent. They live on the hills and they still, by and large, speak Welsh.

The frontier between these two foreign lands, with their amazingly different languages, runs around the edges of the hills at about 200M and that is why I go to Delife for my Welsh lessons. Although the Government pays lip-service to the promotion of the Welsh language, with the recent round of cuts, my previous class folded. But, up in the hills where neighbours still chat in Welsh and the sort of folk who settle there want to join in, a kindly lady minister is running a class in a pub, without training (I assume), or vetting, or funding, or overheads, or fees, or forms, or appraisals, or even cake — it is the only class that I have ever come across that is not struggling for numbers.

Dyna beth od — Tybed pam

That’s odd — I wonder why!

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	dianaashworth on What I learned in 2025…
	Mary Jane Glass on What I learned in 2025…
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	Evan S on Snapshot in the wind

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