Over the Farmer's Gate (25 page)

The cows, for example, are well used to going off for their ‘holiday’ when they are not milking and stroll into the trailer quite readily. When it’s time to bring them back we can usually load them easily in the corner of a field somewhere. Part of making sure that they don’t injure themselves is to drive very gently round corners and when we stop and start. Inevitably, this causes a queue of traffic to build up behind you that usually includes some very aggressive, impatient drivers. So we become quite unpopular and, because of this, we very rarely move cattle on the road on foot, but two weeks ago we had to.

We had a group of 22 cows in a field. Two of them had calved
and five others needed to come home. As this was quite a big ‘sortout’ we walked them down the road to a neighbour’s yard where we could manage the job a lot easier. There were two calves, two mothers and 20 doting ‘aunties’, so progress was fairly slow as each cow in turn took the opportunity to eat some of the roadside grass before dashing back to check on the welfare of the calves.

After 100 yards we acquired a car following us. It was a narrow lane, two cars can’t pass on it without getting on the verge, but nevertheless he made several attempts to try to pass us, eventually giving up and turning round and roaring off the way he had come. It’s one of the downsides to being a farmer as you go about your business: if you put cattle in a trailer it’s wrong; if you move cattle on the road it’s wrong.

People have been moving cattle on roads for hundreds of years; you would think that by now we would have established some sort of right. If you are patient, and occasionally I am, life will reward you, because half an hour later when we were returning the 15 cows we didn’t need to their field, who should get stuck behind us, but the impatient driver of earlier on? He stuck it out this time and as the cattle turned into their field I gave a very friendly wave and ‘thank-you’. I’m no lip-reader but I’ve got a good idea what he said. I won’t share it with you because I know you are all much too nice to upset by profanity.

FUNNY THINGS peacocks; who would think such a beautiful bird could make such an awful noise? We used to keep them and I could never get over how hardy they were. Percy and his pea-wives used to live about 30ft up in a tree next to the house. It can be no mean feat to hang on to a branch all night, with about 6ft of tail hanging down behind you.

You’d have to roost facing the wind, that’s for sure.

The strange thing was that if we had a bad spell of snowy weather, Percy and his wives would transfer to the small henhouse we had.

They might sleep there for several days if it was really cold and windy, but one night you’d go to shut the hens up and the peacocks wouldn’t be there, they’d be back up their tree. Sure enough, next day a thaw would have set in: how did they know that? I miss Percy, but I don’t miss the terrible noise he would make if someone put a light on in the night to go to the bathroom. We do farmhouse bed and breakfast here and you’d hear guests say: ‘Oh look at that beautiful peacock.’ Next day, you’d hear them say, angrily: ‘Did you hear that peacock in the night?’

OVER THE last few weeks, thousands and thousands of sheep have moved homes about the country. Autumn is the time of year when, traditionally, young yearling ewes, bred to produce future lambs, would move from the upland areas to better land in lowland areas to produce prime lambs for the table. It has always been good practice to go to higher land to buy your ewe replacements so we have had our hill ewes, wherever they lived, crossed with rams of a lowland breed to produce a ewe that would produce a good crop of lambs. It is all quite simple. The hill ewe would usually produce just one lamb, but because that lamb had a lowland father it would hopefully produce lots of twins. I think there are more than 30 native breeds in the UK, so there are a huge range of crosses available and within that, crosses within crosses.

There are fashions in sheep as well. Forty years ago, the two most popular breeding ewes came from the Welsh borders. They happened to be pure breeds, the Clun Forest and the Kerry Hill. Both breeds would come close to the rare breed category today. I always thought the Kerry to be a particularly attractive sheep with
its white face and distinctive black nose. The Clun has a woolly head and legs, loathed by some shearers because they take longer to shear and for which they may charge an extra 50p.

There’s something compelling about sheep. There is huge pride in ownership and visits to the great sheep sales can be compulsive. When I kept sheep I would often get a phone call to say: ‘I was thinking of going to such and such sheep sale. Do you fancy coming for a ride?’ You bet I did, and off we would go, not intending to buy anything, but we often did. A local friend of mine used to breed Welsh half-breeds, which were the result of a cross between a Border Leicester (a white-faced sheep with a Roman nose) on his Welsh mountain ewes. It used to be a big important day in his farming year, particularly from a financial point of view. A few of us would go to ‘help’ him and inevitably we would end up in the market bar. If there had been a good trade there would often be some singing going on by 5 o’clock.

Sheep sale anecdotes are endless. The same friend and I went in his car one Saturday to a small local sheep sale where he encouraged me to buy three Suffolk ram lambs because they were cheap. He also had no problem with putting them in the back of his car to get them home.

‘It isn’t far, they won’t have time to make a mess’, but they did, and when we let them out of the back door of his Cortina ten minutes later he didn’t think it was such a good idea.

Another friend of mine decided he wanted to try a bunch of ewes called Llanwenogs, native to West Wales. There were five of us in the car and, as we got nearer to the sale, the friend who wanted the ewes confessed that he had always envied the aura of the big sheep buyers who came to our own area and today’s journey was the closest he would ever get to that.

In order to look the part we had to stop at a garage to buy him some cigars. When we got to the sale, he went first to the
auctioneers and told them he was looking to buy a lot of sheep that day (he actually wanted 20-30) and would there be enough lorries available to take them home? The auctioneers made frantic phone calls to local hauliers while he leaned on their office counter and puffed nonchalantly on his cigar. Then we went to see the sheep. There were thousands there, but we couldn’t find any Llanewenogs. In the end we had to ask.

‘There aren’t any here today, their big sale is next week.’

It was a disappointment, it was an open-air market, it was pouring with rain and by 11am we were in the pub. We spent several hours in there, stopped in a couple on the way home and got back to our local by 10 o’clock. We were thrown out by a quarter past 10 and that was as close as any of us actually got to buying that particular breed of sheep. Next morning, while milking, I wondered how many hauliers actually turned up looking for these so-called big sheep buyers that were in the area.

Winter

LAST YEAR, a lady arrived here in a new Audi to stay for a couple of nights’ bed and breakfast. She was immaculately turned out – smart suit, new hair-do, perfect make-up. Not all, in itself, that remarkable, except that she was in her mid-80s. I thought at the time: if that’s growing old, I’ll have some of that.

What had brought her to our front door was the fact that she was researching her family tree, and she had discovered that her ancestors had lived in this area in the 1500s and, in fact, some of them had lived and farmed on this farm. She had a copy of the family tree with her, a huge piece of research, about three pieces of A3, and for 200 years her relatives had lived, worked and bred in this area.

People obviously didn’t travel as far to meet people in those days – no foreign holidays to meet people from wherever, no favourite daughters going a couple of hundred miles to university and coming back with a scruffy, layabout boyfriend who lived a couple of hundred miles in the opposite direction (who, in stories with happy endings, probably smartened himself up eventually,
got a good job and proved to be a good husband and father – I like stories to have happy endings).

What was particularly remarkable was the fact that one of her relatives who lived on this farm had successfully reared 16 children, because all of their marriages were chronicled as well.

Last week, two brothers turned up here to stay who were on the same quest. They had the same surname as last year’s lady but didn’t know of her. For people researching their history, as they were, the copy of last year’s family tree, which she had left, was like winning the lottery. They had with them a map of our farm dated 1820 which we had not seen before, a copy of which we now have and which we will duly frame.

The fields are largely unchanged but bear names, some of which we use today, and some I’ve not heard of. I’m very tempted to try to reintroduce the old names as substitutes for what we use now. How long that would take I don’t know. Upper and lower cow pasture sounds better than roadside field, but disappointingly, in some cases – six, in fact – the fields are just called by their acreages. Contrary to the widespread views held of farmers, we actually have more fields now than when we came here, on the same acreage, because I split one very large field into three. In 40-odd years I’ve never pushed a hedge out and I’ve only cut down one live tree, and that was because it was so close to the house I couldn’t get any insurance.

The lady who came last year even had the farming diary of her ancestor. It was quite clear from that, that in the order of things as they were at the time, the last thing to be was a ‘day labourer’. Day labourer must have been another description for peasant. Horses apparently came higher up the social scale of the time. For example, Captain pulled the mower all day in the Great Clover Piece, but a day labourer, who apparently didn’t have a name, cleared the ditch around New Leasowes.

IT’S HALF past four on a Saturday morning. The milking machine pump has been going for 10 minutes now. Calves are being fed, some by torchlight. The old tractor that goes around the buildings twice a day gathering up all the ‘number twos’ that the cows have done in the night has coughed into life. It stands there in tickover mode still coughing and belching, wreaths of blue smoke spread through the shed. It’s a bit like an old man having his first cigarette of the day. It’s a scene you would find on our farm every morning in the winter, only the activity would be nearer to five o’clock.

This morning there’s a bit of urgency about everything. The two of us are going out for the day. We’ve about four hours work to do apiece before we go but on our way home tonight, we’ll probably think we’ve had a day off.

Tomorrow morning it will be business as usual, but the ‘day off’ will have left us tired. When I was young, people used to tell me that you didn’t need as much sleep as you grew older. It was a lie.

THE LOCAL population of wild turkeys is growing. ‘My’ keeper had four of these North American turkeys on the shoot. Well, there’s a quiet lane that I take to get into town that passes another keeper’s cottage that is on the side of the lane.

He’s got three of these turkeys, a stag and two hens, and they are mostly to be found in the lane itself. It’s no good being in a hurry because as soon as the stag sees a vehicle coming he takes up a position in the middle of the road and starts his display. I drive right up to him but he doesn’t move.

He goes out of sight in front of the truck and I can hear him pecking away at the bumper. As his hens move on down the grass verge, he follows slowly and I can hear him as he pecks his way
down the side of my vehicle. I don’t move on until I can see him in the side mirrors and I know that he is safely past me.

To celebrate his triumph over this vehicular intruder into his territory, he usually mates with one or other of the hens. There’s not much chatting up involved, no foreplay that I can detect, and the hen doesn’t seem particularly distracted by the process.

Definitely a quickie.

WILDLIFE usually keeps its heads down in bad weather.

But this December, strangely enough, with plenty of bad weather about, there seems to be more activity than usual. I’ve seen hares about a lot more, and I hadn’t seen one for over a month.

One day, the fields were alive with fieldfares. There were thousands of them for about five days and then, just as suddenly, they were gone. I tell the keeper about them but inevitably he already knows and inevitably he’s always got a better story to tell.

He tells me that while out feeding early one morning in the dark, he put his lamp across a field and counted 62 woodcock out feeding. He reckons they feed out on the fields at night and go back into the woods in the daytime. Personally, I think 62 woodcock would take a bit of counting in the dark but I don’t question it.

I was always disappointed at how eager shooters were to bring down a woodcock and could never really understand the need to shoot such a lovely bird when there were already plenty of pheasants to shoot – now I hear of more and more shoots that leave woodcock alone.

The poor things have come a long way to get here, and they deserve a rest and some safety.

NEXT to one of my silage clamps is a patch of briars, about 20
yards by 20, and the briars are well established, offering plenty of cover.

It must be a warm, dry spot because most days there’s a large covey of partridge in there. I tell the keeper about them. ‘There should be 30 in that covey,’ he says.

As we all know by now, the keeper is big on counting things, although how he counts them goodness only knows. When I drive past in the truck they explode out of the briar patch like shrapnel from a hand grenade, and are impossible for me to count anyway. Still, he’s not to know that. ‘There were 31 there this morning,’ I reply, ‘they flew down into the wood.’

He thanks me for the information. I’ve no idea where they flew, I wasn’t watching, but he’s not to know that, either.

I’VE JUST spent ten minutes watching the goldfish. On a scale of sadness that comes up as quite sad, but for me, at least, I found it quite interesting.

He, she, or whatever, was moved from a long rectangular concrete cattle drinking trough to a round plastic one and I took the time and trouble to teach him to swim in circles after he had spent most of his life swimming lengths. The boys had wanted to move him back to where he was, but there’s more activity around the round trough and I think he enjoys it. He’s quite a fine fish, probably nine inches long, and the first thing I noticed during my observation was that when a cow goes to drink, he swims right up to the cow’s muzzle.

The cows usually go to drink just after they’ve been feeding and there are always some particles of food clinging to the hairs and whiskers around the muzzle. While she is drinking, the goldfish carefully picks this debris off to eat, even lifting his little head an inch or so out of the water for a particularly tasty morsel.

The cows that use this particular drinking trough are what we call our high-yielders. The diet that the fish shares with them is very high-calorie stuff, and I expect to see an increase in his size in a very short time. But there is a darker side to this goldfish (I can feel a name coming on for him, but I’m not quite there yet).

Part of the moulding of this plastic tank includes the recess where the ballcock sits. It’s set into the side of the tank where cows can’t rub it off. The plastic balls that float up and down, regulating the water level, are bright orange. Goldfish are bright orange as well. So where does our fish spend his time when he’s not feeding off cows’ muzzles? Rubbing himself up and down against this orange ball.

I can only assume that he has fallen in love with it. This has got to be a cry for help and next time I am in town I will get him a companion from a pet shop. This fish came from the fair, but I don’t think he should have to wait until May for the fair to turn up for a real companion.

I’ll be doing him a favour and I’ll probably be doing the new fish a favour as well. While I’m at it, I might as well buy three, one for the round trough for company and two for the long concrete trough, and then all the cows will be clean around the muzzle.