Next door to us is a field with six sheep. They’re not part of a farm. They’re siblings, and each one belongs to somebody different in the village – don’t ask, haven’t a clue. They’ve taken to galloping up to me every time I pass, hoping for a snack. A couple of times a week they get lucky. A cabbage leaf or two. Some chunks of celeriac or carrot. Broad bean pods (yum!). They never fail to live in hope, sometimes as often as four times day. I call them my Fan Club.
Yesterday, out for a local walk, I passed another nearby field, with perhaps a hundred sheep. A few of them noticed me, and just like their sheepy cousins next door to us, they set up a baa-ing announcement. ‘Possible food alert! Come on guys!’ And every one of them turned towards me and galloped to see what I had. Which was nothing.
The baas turned to complaints, but still they followed me. Noisily.
On I walked. Oh look! Lambs! The first I’ve seen this year.
And my walk took me slap through the centre of their field. Lambs and mothers normally skitter away. But no. They followed me. They chased me.
I tried to video this thrilling event, but dropped my phone. So that tiny clip is all you’re getting.
I went on. I was quite relieved that the next field was filled with a young crop of winter wheat, silently doing its thing and taking no notice of me. And that’s how it went on. Another field of sheep. They ignored me. A riverside walk along the Ure which took no notice either, but prattled and chattered its way along to the next village. A quiet woodland path where snowdrops are slowly being succeeded by wild garlic and bluebell shoots pushing their way through the soil, preparing for a fine show next month. Then home, choosing the path that wouldn’t take me past our demanding sheepy neighbours.
Today, instead of a Monday Portrait, I offer you a Monday Anecdote, first told on November 26th, 2011.It dates back to the days when we lived in Laroque d’Olmes in the French Pyrenees.
Little Donkey: An Everyday Story of Country Folk
Every now and then, in among all the banns of marriage and planning notices on the information board at the town hall here in Laroque, there’s a poster about a stray dog that’s been found. Not cats or hamsters. Just dogs.
Last week, though, my eye was caught by this:
How does anyone lose a donkey? And what do you do with it whilst you put out an appeal for the owner? ‘Oh he’s fine’, said Thierry, our Community Copper, ‘We’ve put him to work in the office at the Mairie’. I decided against saying the obvious, that he would be bound to be doing a far better job than the current Mayor.
It took a week for his owner to show up. He – the donkey that is – had an exciting time. First of all he was rounded up by the three blokes who first spotted him in the road just outside town, but who had no idea how to set about the job. Then he was frisked for tattoos or identity chips. None. Next he was sent to stay with our friend Henri’s donkeys (Thierry was fibbing about the office work). That had to stop when Henri’s female donkey got all excited at the new arrival and came on heat. Then he went to stay with the vet’s partner. He escaped. Amateur detectives all over Laroque and Lavelanet tried to find out where he came from. Eventually, after a week, his owner showed up, really rather cross. ‘Why didn’t anyone think to get in touch with me?’
There we are. That’s our excitement for November over.
Unaccountably, I have no donkey photos. These are from Unsplash.
It’s not been a great week, has it? The American election has come and gone, and anxious nail-biting has been replaced by the new reality. I’m going to distract myself by looking through an old blog post, first posted in November 2009 – gosh – 15 years ago, when I was a fairly new blogger, recording our day-to-day life in the French Pyrenees.
Down on the Farm
Well, I mentioned Patrimoine in my last post. Yesterday we had Our Farming Heritage, an event organised by Pays d’art et d’histoire des Pyrénées Cathares. 20 or so of us turned up at a nearby village, Troye d’Ariège, to have a look round a traditionally run sheep farm.
The event was immediately hi-jacked by an unscheduled event – the birth of a lamb. Out in a field, a mother sheep heaved herself up, plonked herself down, then up again, baahing loudly, until suddenly, quite suddenly, there was the front half of a lamb hanging out of her. A bit more wriggling and fussing, and there was the lamb, out on the grass, while the mother flopped beside it. A few minutes later, both were standing again. No shelter, no farmer in attendance – no need to worry apparently. These sheep are Tarasconnais, ‘The 2 CV of the sheep world’ said the farmer: rough and ready sheep who can turn their hooves to anything – wool production, milk and meat production, surviving on their own: molly-coddling is not required. They even get on with delivering their lambs regularly all the year round, somehow producing between them a steady crop of young, without human intervention.
Very pregnant sheep out in the fields.
Over to the lambing sheds then, where the mothers, having delivered, come inside for a while with their lambs. The noise! Dozens of lambs constantly baahing in their high-pitched tones, while the mothers hit more melodious lower notes. Hopeless to try to follow all that the farmer, Marcel, was telling us.
Supper time.
Marcel runs his farm of 800 sheep by himself, helped only by an apprentice (who has to go to College in among, of course) and occasional visits from a retired farm hand. He grows their feed – hay, beets & maize, keeps the animals fed and watered, dips them against insects monthly, de-parasites them every 3 months, regularly cuts 800 sets of hooves (he’s devised various metal narrow bus-shelter-style contraptions to make it easier to queue the animals up take their turns for these various procedures). He’s not organic, but many of his practices are, and he certainly usually chooses, for example, organic treatments if his beasts fall ill, believing them to be better.
View from the ‘treatment shed’.
Every summer, about 400 of his sheep go off to the mountains with a shepherd, following the ancient tradition of transhumance. The old, the young and the weak remain behind.
This maize is a winter treat. And here’s the cage where it is dried and stored.
As the sun went down, it got colder and colder. Time for the next part of the evening, an Apéritif dinatoire. What this meant was that everyone from the farm walk and most of the village inhabitants got together to choose and share plates of local sausage, hams, pâtés, cheeses, bread, wine, apple croustades and fruit, mainly sourced from no more than 10 miles away.
Apéritif dinatoire over, time to clear the tables.
The atmosphere got merrier and merrier, and yet, come half past eight, the tables were cleared, and we all sat down for a lecture (this is Saturday evening we’re talking about…..). Eric Fabre, a university lecturer specialising in the farming history of our area painted a picture of 19th century life in which most people farmed tiny patches of land: only the Church and a very few landowners had substantial holdings. People grew what they and their few animals needed, and the sheep they had were valued for the manure they produced, and secondly for their wool. The meat got eaten, of course, but it only became a marketable product following urbanisation, when town based workers no longer had land of their own. The farmers listening to all this were even more interested then we were, and question time was lively. But it was late and we were tired, and in the end, we were glad to go. 11 o’clock seems well past bedtime when you’ve had a day down on the farm.
Today’s so chilly: it feels like the first day of winter. Let’s have a goat cheer us up. She can also serve to introduce next week’s Monochrome Madness, whose theme will be Bridges. And of course to feature in Seven for September. How many tyres can you see?
This week, for the Lens-Artists Challenge, Donna asks us to look for the connections we make in our lives. I’m going short and fairly light-hearted by looking at some of our connections with animal life. That feature photo, for instance, shows two children delighted by their squirrel companion in Málaga, while he is equally pleased about the free sunflower seeds.
Less pleased are these birds: an Arctic tern and a greylag goose. Both are warning me – or any other pesky human in the area – to leave well alone as far as their young chicks or goslings are concerned.
All my other images come from Down at the Farm.
Here are three curious creatures – two pigs and a cow – wanting to know if those human have anything to offer …
… while this small boy is pleased that the cow is willing to accept a mouthful of hay from him.
We have sheep living next door. Unusually, they’re rather fond of human company, and canter across to the fence hopefully whenever they see me pass. It’s all Cupboard Love of course, but I’m daft enough to fall for it and try to have a few cabbage stalks or something about my person to give to them.
And here’s a young girl desperately trying to make a friend of a hen. Who isn’t quite so sure.
For my last image, we’ll leave the farmyard in favour of the deer park at Studley Royal. The deer are as likely to be watching us as we are them. You can never quite trust humans, they think.
You live in a town – maybe even a big city. And on a nice Sunday afternoon, you fancy a ride out to the country to see what you can see. What do you want to find?
Maybe a barn, or even better barns, dotted round the pastureland.
In Yorkshire, or ‘up north’ at any rate, a drystone wall wouldn’t go amiss.
You have to see a flock of sheep, a few cows. A gaggle of geese too maybe?
And a farmer at work – yes, even on a Sunday …
And a rusting old tractor in a tumbledown barn?
And you need to drive along ‘the rolling English road‘, made, according to GK Chesterton, by ‘the rolling English drunkard‘.
And to make your day complete, just before you head back to town and all mod cons, you’d quite like to have to grind to a halt on the road because…
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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