Over the Farmer's Gate (10 page)

We move our own conversation on, thankfully, and it gets a bit competitive with, ‘Have you seen this?’ and ‘Have you ever seen that?’

I can compete quite well until they tell me they have often seen otters. I’m quite envious, I’ve never seen an otter in the wild
– lots of people who spend their lives in the countryside never do. It’s often down to chance, right place, right time sort of stuff. My son David was coming to work once and found two dead on the road, which was a real shame.

My bed and my book are calling and I get up to go, but they haven’t quite finished. ‘I tell you what we haven’t seen for years and years,’ one of them says. ‘A brown hare.’

I turn in the doorway and reply, ‘I can show you a hare.’

I arrange to collect them at the front door next morning, to take them to see a hare.

Next day I look inside my truck and decide it will take longer to make it clean than I have time to do it, so I borrow David’s. Mert, my dog, has to come which is a bit of a treat for him, but he can’t see as much out of the front window because there are two rows of seats in this vehicle, so he’s not so pleased as he thought he would be. The first field we go in is the one we have to leave in stubble for 12 months for the ground-nesting birds. It starts off as a clean stubble but, come the spring, everything grows, be it weeds or seed from previous crops.

So now we have a waist-high jungle of wheat, barley, oilseed rape, grasses, docks, thistles and nettles. It’s perfect cover for ground-nesting birds because the height of the growth is cover from aerial predators. The keeper tells me a fox has been living there for two months, which isn’t quite so perfect.

I drive slowly through the field and wonder if the hares will turn up. It’s getting quite hot now and they may have sought some shade.

Fifty yards away I see the grasses move suddenly and a glimpse of a brown body. The movement continues and I suspect we’ve found the fox. I drive up closer in to a clearer space and we find two hares fighting and playing.

I switch the engine off and they play round and round us for
about five minutes. My guests are in raptures and camcorders and cameras are kept busy. It’s almost like a safari where the big cats come up to the vehicles.

We and the hares move on and I drive around the fields we have recently cut for silage. The regrown grass is almost 6in tall now, about up to a reclining hare’s shoulders, and we can see brown hares everywhere. We started counting them, but gave up when we reached 20.

As we continue our short journey, we meet hares coming towards us, hares running away, and hares up on their haunches, watching us watching them. Hares to the right of us, hares to the left of us.

As if on cue, all the birds turn up as well – lots of different species and, to be fair, my guests are very knowledgeable. Our journey done, we return home. It’s not taken an hour, but their thanks are profuse. ‘What you’ve just shown us is priceless,’ says the woman. ‘No, it isn’t,’ I reply, ‘we charge £3 a hare and Ann will put it on your bill.’

I don’t get £3 a hare, but I do get a very nice bottle of red wine.

I OFTEN fill my car up with petrol on Sunday mornings on my way to see my daughter and her children.

It doesn’t seem long ago that a full tank would cost £50. Last Sunday it was £72!

This comes particularly hard for someone of a generation who, at one time, would have thought nothing of taking five gallons of red diesel down the fields to light a bonfire and if there were a couple of gallons left in the tin, throwing that on the fire as well, to save carrying it back.

THUS FAR this season we’ve been lucky enough to take our two silage cuts in good order, and most importantly, in good weather. Those in the neighbourhood who farm beef and sheep, work to a different timescale.

They tend to graze their grass fields in the winter and spring and take just one cut of silage and much of that is round bales.

They probably number in the majority around here, so while we are watching the hot sun and very heavy showers speed the growth of our third cut of silage, they are in the throes of what must be quite a difficult season.

Round bales wrapped in plastic were among the best things that ever happened as far as livestock are concerned. It took them from a diet that in many years was very bad hay to a palatable, nutritious feed of silage that could be made very simply in a 24-hour window.

Once it was wrapped it was safe and the bales could be carted at leisure, whatever the weather, and stacked outside to feed during the winter as required.

Even in a season like this it is possible to make good,
round-bale
silage. But one or two of my neighbours have still been tempted to try and make hay.

I’ve never made much hay in my farming career. I’ve never had much luck in my life, certainly not enough spare to try
haymaking
.

What these neighbours have been tempted to do is save the cost of the plastic wrap.

‘Forecast not too bad, those showers might not affect us, we’ll make hay of those two fields,’ I’ve been told.

Now there are several fields around here that come into that category. They’ve been cut several days, successively soaked and dried several times, and they look brown and worthless.

My wife’s late father used to be philosophical about making some bad hay. He used to keep a herd of Hereford suckler cows that were out-wintered and calved in the spring. If he had a bay or two of poor hay it was always considered good enough for the cows. Which was fair enough, but if he made all his hay perfectly he would worry about what he would give the cows, as good hay was considered too good for them! They would probably end up having to eat straw and swedes.

I could never quite get my head around that. Probably he thought that some bales of good hay would keep until the next year, when he might not get much good hay at all but plenty that was good enough for the cows.

I often used to help him feed them on Sunday mornings and wondered, as I threw wads of mouldy hay off the trailer, white with mould they would be, how the cows survived on their diet. But they did.

I ALWAYS drive slowly through the small village where my daughter lives. It’s more of a hamlet, really – no shop, no pub – and the road through it doesn’t go anywhere in particular, so traffic is minimal and children can play in the road and adults can
stand and chat in it.

I often think that bypasses around most villages would be the making of them, taking traffic away and restoring peace and calm. I might put that in my manifesto.

On the last occasion I drove through there was a man standing in the middle of the road with his arm outstretched, so I slowed down even more.

Purposeful border collies then appeared from all directions, fully intent on their work. They popped out of this gate, over the garden wall. I hadn’t seen them but I knew there were sheep about.

I recognised the collies. There were five of them and they travel with their owner everywhere in his Land Rover.

He rarely lets them all out at the same time, as he explained to me: ‘Some of them like to eat sheep, some like to eat people, some like to do both.’

They are known locally to be very fierce and if ever I go to his yard I will never get out of the Discovery. They have been known to bite holes in vehicle tyres. But I let them get on with it – better a tyre than my leg and to be fair, Brian will always help you to change the wheel.

Brian came down the village in his Land Rover, looking hot and flustered. He got out and told the man in the road that it was OK, the sheep had forced their way through the fence in so-and-so’s garden.

He came to speak to me, too: ‘It took us over an hour to bring these sheep half-a-mile to dip them. They’re in the pen now but I think I’ll get them back out, they’ve been in everyone’s garden except one so they might as well go in there while we’re at it.’ And off he went to his dipping.

It is a huge problem moving stock if they have to go through a village. Forty years ago, village gardens would be stock-proof
because villagers would know that from time to time stock would be on the road, either on purpose or strayed. These days it never occurs to them.

Brian would have had 300-400 sheep in this particular group and it would be a huge job to transfer them from field to dipping pen in a lorry or trailer. The sheep themselves would much prefer the short dash down the road, especially if it includes nipping around a few gardens on the way.

It’s years and years since we kept sheep but their grazing land was on one side of the village and we live on the other and we ended up taking the sheep through the village several times a year. In some ways sheep are worse than cattle, because with cattle I can put lengths of bale string in appropriate places and the cattle, thinking it to be electric fence, stay on the straight and narrow, usually.

One day we were moving the sheep, probably 300 ewes, plus their lambs, and once they were started on their journey, I went on in front in the van to shut what garden gates there still were in the village. I was getting on quite well and was just shutting one gate when a voice accosted me: ‘What the hell do you think you are doing?’

‘I’m shutting your garden gate.’

‘I don’t want my garden gate shut.’

‘But the sheep are coming, I’ll open it afterwards.’

‘Leave my gate alone.’

And he stalked back into the house.

Never liked the man, really: ex-army, newcomer, thought he owned the whole village, sang in the church choir so he thought he was the vicar as well.

My daughter has solemnly promised me that she won’t allow him to sing in the choir at my funeral, she being in charge of all arrangements.

There’s always been an unfortunate side to my character that can’t resist situations like this. We had at the time a most remarkable bearded collie working dog. She was without doubt the cleverest dog I have ever had. Mert’s quite clever but if they’d been at school he would have been in the D stream and she in the A.

I waited for the sheep to arrive and stood on the opposite side of the road to the open garden gate. Poppy (terrible name, good dog) came to me when she saw me on the footpath.