Over the Farmer's Gate (17 page)

WE WERE one of the first to finish our silage around here and everyone is now catching up with the season and the delay caused by the wet weeks in May. Everywhere I look fields are being stripped of grass and sheep are being stripped of wool. We don’t keep sheep anymore. I miss them but I don’t miss the shearing. We never kept many sheep until I was about 50 years old, when we moved up to about 400 ewes. I thought it appropriate to learn to shear, which was quite late in life, but I did, and even sheared for other people occasionally.

We used to shear our ewes in the field and, unfortunately for me, the field was next to the pub. Two friends used to help me and, besides being paid to shear, my helpers used to think it appropriate that I took them to the pub for sausage and chips at lunchtime, plus a couple of pints. Large quantities of coke and lemonade were carried back in the afternoon and ‘naturally’ I would want to buy them a couple of pints when we finished in the evening. It used to be two hard days’ work, plus wages, plus my tab at the pub.

One year, for various reasons, my help wasn’t available and so I employed ‘professional’ shearers. We were finished by 3pm on day
one. All I had done was sit on a bale and watched and then put a blue E on each ewe’s backside as it was finished. It cost me about half of what it was costing before, I hadn’t broken sweat and my back didn’t feel as if it was about to break in two!

After that salutary experience I used to use some young shearers from the rugby club. It was a Saturday job, again we were finished by 3pm, their wives and girlfriends knew all this but struggled to understand why their partners were still not home by midnight. There’s something satisfying about being in a pub on Saturday evening, filthy with sheep grease and smell when everyone else is dressed up. They used to look down their noses at us, and turn their noses up at us when they smelt us, but as we’d been in the pub two or three hours by then we didn’t care. It reminded them that they were drinking in a rural area.

A friend of mine went to shear two sheep that were owned by some ‘newcomers’ who had bought the two sheep to keep the grass down in a small orchard. The sheep were called Mary and Ivy. Mary had a little lamb, but then she always did, didn’t she? My friend sheared Ivy first. ‘Ivy hasn’t had a lamb yet, Mr Jones.’ ‘No, I can see that.’ ‘Do you think she will have one this time?’ ‘No I don’t. In fact, I don’t think she ever will.’ ‘Oh dear, why ever not?’ ‘Well you see this little swelling in the middle of ‘her’ belly; well that’s where ‘she’ pees. If a sheep pees there it isn’t a female sheep, it’s a male.’ Ivy quickly became Ivor and as far as I know he’s still alive and well and keeping the grass down in the orchard.

I WAS reminiscing about the passing of our village blacksmith recently and inevitably my mind doesn’t just stop there, it goes on and remembers stories of long ago that were passed down.

They were quite remarkable in the fun involved, given that
all those years ago the life of a farm labourer and his family must have been so difficult and the farmer employer would have a huge hold over a man, as almost all of them lived in a cottage that was tied to the job.

Step over the line and job and home could be gone in two weeks’ time. But despite that, they did have fun and here is one of the stories.

At the other end of the village to the blacksmith was a cottage that had with it three acres or so of ground. For the time, that ground was, compared with the lot of the farm worker, riches beyond belief.

If life was hard, and it was, there would be some envy and resentment – and the lucky man who had the bit of ground wasn’t particularly nice anyway.

Every year this man would watch the progress of the hay harvest on the farms around the village. Most of these farms were of 400 or 500 acres and might employ five men.

As the hay harvest was drawing to a close he would get someone to mow his hay crop and over the following days he would turn it twice a day by hand. With immaculate timing it would be ready just as everyone else had finished, so it had become traditional for most of the men in the village to go to his field after tea with pitch forks, they called them pickles around here, and gather it up by hand and carry it forkful by forkful to the barn and put it safely into the dry.

It might sound an impossible job in today’s mechanical world but there might be 10 or 12 of them and in three or four hours of very hard work they would have the job done.

They would all be paid on the night and it became tradition for them all to walk the mile or so to the nearest pub and no doubt they would drink all the money they had earned that evening. But why not? And good luck to them.

But one year things didn’t turn out as expected. When they lined up to be paid, the pay was less than the year before. The resentment and envy festered to the surface and harsh words were exchanged. The man with the field wasn’t to be moved – he had all sorts of excuses and it wasn’t the usual jolly crowd that made its way to the pub that night.

Instead of the drink and the company lifting their mood, they became more morose and when they walked back down the lane at 10pm, revenge was in the air.

Unfortunately for the man with the field, it was a beautiful moonlit night. The labourers paused at his gateway to collect their pitchforks, looking at the cleared field and smelling the new hay sweet and safe in the barn.

Into the field they went and over the next three hours they carried all the hay back out of the barn and put it back in the rows in the field just exactly as it had been when they arrived that evening.

You can only imagine the reaction of the man with the field when he went to the gate next morning. He must have done what is sometimes described as a double take. His mind must have gone through a rapid sequence: who did this; why did they do it; what am I going to do now; and more importantly, what’s the weather forecast?

He had to go from cottage to cottage seeking help. Everyone was expecting him but they made him grovel. And then there was the matter of payment to decide.

The hay was returned safely to the barn that night, none the worse for its adventures. The men had two nights in the pub that week, and a good story to tell, too.

ON ALTERNATE Fridays I have to take calves to market. I usually arrive at market by 11.15am for an 11.45am start but these
starts have been delayed recently because it’s the time of year when people sell ewes and where I go to market, the ewes are sold before the calves. It’s no good being impatient, so I lean on a gate and watch the sheep trade.

The market for sheep has never been better: driven by our currency that has helped exports, against the New Zealand currency that hasn’t helped their exports. If you spot a sheep farmer today it’s just about as close as you will ever get to seeing a happy farmer.

In today’s market place they take a trailer load of sheep to market and they can’t get all the money in the same trailer to get it home.

Yesterday I watched them selling the Clun Forest rams. Forty to 50 years ago, the Clun was the most popular breed of sheep in the UK. Now it’s something of a rarity on farms. Traditionally I think there were more than 30 breeds of sheep in the UK and on top of that, endless permutations of crosses. These days the most popular cross is called a North Country Mule, which is a cross between a Blue Faced Leicester ram and a Swaledale ewe, but there are Scots Mules, Welsh Mules and just about everything else you can think of.

When the champion Clun ram came into the ring yesterday I thought it would make about £300. It made £310. I thought to myself that I wasn’t involved in sheep but I was spot on as a sheep valuer!

I was reading a history of the Cluns recently. On one day in 1928, I think it was, there were 22,000 sold on one day in Craven Arms. Two days later a different firm of auctioneers had a similar large sale in the same town.

In those days, all the sheep were walked in to the sale and the historians noted that there were so many flocks of sheep being driven down the valley from the Clun Forest area to Craven
Arms that shepherds arriving at junctions to the main road would sometimes have to hold their sheep back for 20 minutes before there was a gap in the procession sufficient for them to join.

Years ago I was in the area and had a day shearing Clun ewes within sight and sound of Clun church. There’s not many of us left who can say that.

WE ARE not big on spraying on this farm, particularly on grassland, preferring not to do it at all. This is mainly because, in removing docks and thistles, you remove clover as well.

But eventually we have to go in with spray and in the following years we put some clover seed in with the fertiliser and hopefully put the clover back.

The only grass field we’ve had to spray this year is a seven-acre field on our boundary. Thankfully it’s on everyone else’s boundary as well, because it’s well out of sight from all directions.

Because we want the spray to work properly we can’t take the topper in there to trim it so when I had to go in there last week to fetch the cows I was ashamed of it. There were dead stalks of thistles everywhere and clumps of nettles in all their glory.

It’s a theory of mine that nettles will one day take over the world – the spray we use for thistles checks nettle but it only gives them a headache and in a couple of weeks they are back on full power.

So it was with great delight that I gave it a really good tidy up. I gave it the agricultural equivalent of the No.3 you would get at the hairdressers.

I don’t think there will be any thistles in there next year and I have plans for the nettles.

But it’s amazing what you see when you are on a tractor. After spraying I drove slowly back to the gate and there, sitting on the
top bar, also admiring what I’d done, was a hen turkey. I should add that I was nearly two miles away from where I see wild turkeys quite regularly and I’ve never seen one there before.

I turned the tractor off and sat and watched her and she, in turn, watched me. I watched for ten minutes and as far as I could see she was on her own. When I eventually drove on I wondered what a lonely life she must live, going about her business on her own with one eye looking for a fox.

I quite like the idea of turkeys being about and contemplated Christmas and taking my grandchildren out to find a Christmas tree and a turkey dinner on Christmas Eve. It’s a Christmas card vision but it’s not for here.

Our Christmas tree goes up in the middle of November and the state my wife gets in at Christmas, you’d have to shoot your turkey at least a week before if she was to feather it properly.