Rainy days in Cornwall

 

One of the things that typified my recent stay in Cornwall was the fact that, on any given day, at some point, I was almost bound to get rained on! I could go outside in bright sunshine with hardly a cloud in the sky and within a few minutes of stepping outside the door it would be raining.

I drove down to Cornwall through some of the worst rain I've encountered for a while. Just south of Gloucester the heavens opened and it deluged down, and it didn't help that the motorway was very busy with lots of lorries on the inside lane. Mindful of not 'hogging the middle lane', I dutifully pulled in and out of the inside lane to overtake – it was like driving through a waterfall! I had no visibility in front of me whatsoever, so I just hoped that there wasn't a stationary line of traffic just beyond. Once past Bristol the traffic and the rain eased a bit, so I decided to press on to Taunton Deane Services before breaking my journey, and when I got there the rain stopped and the sun came out! It turned into a beautifully warm, sunny day as I made my way along the A30 to Launceston, even Dartmoor looked inviting as I skirted its northern edge, with cloud shadows moving swiftly across its somnolent flanks.

After lunch James showed me where each group of sheep was – he'd thoughtfully brought most of them as close to the farm as possible with new fields of grass easily accessible should they run short, so that I should be able to manage single-handed (as I've said before, Jess, the sheep dog doesn't really work for me, so I can't rely on her too much for assistance!). James had started to feed a bit of hay to the ewe flock and the lamb flock, so I would have to take some small bales of hay around as well as checking that all the sheep were well.

The day after my arrival was another beautiful day so James and I rounded up each group of sheep so that they could be checked for lameness, before he and Jo went away for two weeks. As I said in my previous blog, we did manage to locate No 74 (my 'miracle' sheep) but she was almost unrecognisable, as the last time I'd seen her she was still very wobbly on her feet, she was a bag of bones and her wool was falling out in handfuls. There was absolutely no vestige of this sad creature in the well-covered ewe that I managed to spot. James has decided to breed from her again this year as she has made such a good recovery and obviously has a strong will to survive – just the thing to pass on to her offspring. I'm sure she will be very pleased with her 'husband' as he is a new ram and very handsome, but he won't be going in with his girls until the second week in November, after Jo and James come back.

Jo and James left on Friday afternoon and on Sunday I noticed that the new ram was lame! He wasn't very bad but it's not good for a working ram to be lame when he is put in with the ewes as he will feel less inclined to do his job if he's in pain, so I would need to do something about it if it didn't get better on its own within a day or two. I put Mary, Jo and James' daughter on 'orange alert' to come and give me a hand, but the weather took the decision to act out of my hands.

On Monday morning, I was greeted with howling winds and lashing, horizontal rain – it reminded me of a time quite a few years ago now, when Barry, the children and I went to the Royal Cornwall Show at Wadebridge to show some of our ponies. We eventually got into the lorry field after quite a delay while other, lesser, vehicles got pulled in by tractor and when we got out of the lorry it was like stepping into a horizontal shower – very unpleasant. It was amazing that the stewards, clad in yellow oilskins like lifeboatmen, remained extremely cheerful throughout the day. The Show was abandoned the day after we were there as several marquees blew away!

I donned my new waterproofs – their first outing – and ventured outside. It was horrible! There was no point in wearing my glasses, as they made me instantly blind, so I fetched and carried hay to the sheep in a rainswept blur, but had to put them on to count how many sheep were in each group and that no-one was missing (presumed drowned?). At last I fought my way back to the house and a well-earned cuppa, only to have to repeat the entire performance in the evening as the weather never let up. Tuesday was nearly as bad and the farm track down towards the woods turned into a stream bed, but I was resigned to it by then, and also quite cosy in my waterproofs and woolly hat – the waterproofs had proven their worth already. I felt a bit like Christopher Robin in his galoshes and sou'wester when, after I'd checked the three old rams way down the track near the woods, I spent ages playing with the stream rushing down the track, creating run-offs and diverting it round obstacles – well, you have to nurture the inner child, don't you? Mind you, I was a bit embarrassed the following day when Mary came over and caught me playing!

We had all sorts of rain – Horizontal Cornish Rain (see above), ordinary, plummeting-straight-down-out-of-a-leaden-sky rain and also that gentle, very wetting rain that drifts across the valley like veils of voile stirring in a breeze. One thing they have in common though, is that they cause lots of ground water and it all makes its way to the lowest point, which happens to be the River Inney (a tributary of the Tamar). Everywhere I went on the farm you could hear the constant sound of water as it dripped, dribbled, gushed, gurgled, splashed, cascaded and finally, roared its way down to the river. I went down to check the river level the day after the Big Storm (a bit of a non-event in this bit of Cornwall) and it had just broken its banks but had not flooded the lower meadow like it did when I was first here three years ago.

Eventually, when there was a dry morning, I asked Mary to come and help me deal with the ram's foot. By then one of the other boys in the field was even more lame, so we had to do something. We made a pen by the gate and with the help of Mary's son, Christopher, we started to move the three rams towards it. I asked Jess to assist us but she just lay down and looked at me as if she didn't understand the concept of sheep work at all! After one failed attempt we managed to corral the boys and, while Mary held them against the side of the pen, I lifted up their lame feet as if they were horses and did what I could to sort them out. Normally, you would turn the sheep over and sit them on their bottoms with all four feet in the air to do foot trimming but the new ram is massive and absolutely solid muscle, so there was no way I could turn him over. Luckily he stood reasonably quietly while I trimmed his nails and sprayed the foot with antiseptic spray, but he wasn't going to let me do more than one foot, even though they probably all needed doing – it would have to wait until James got back.

Strangely, the day after Jo and James returned, Cornwall was once again dry and bathed in sunshine, so James brought all 64 of the larger group of sheep into the barn and we spent the next two days trimming their feet and sorting out which ewes were going to go to the ram. In the end we had 32 ewes, all beautifully pedicured, ready for the arrival of their new man!

Because the weather was either very wet and/or windy, I did hardly any additional work outside apart from picking up barrow loads of windfall apples from the orchard. These were put into old feed sacks and on James' return the local cider maker came and collected them. The next day Jo and I went along to see the process but they had finished building the 'cheese' when we got there. First of all the apples were fed into a pulper that chopped them very fine, then a layer of straw was laid on the bed of the press followed by a layer of apple pulp, then a layer of straw, until a pyramid about three feet high was created. At this point the juice starts to flow just under the pressure of its own weight but, over the course of about four days, pressure is gradually increased by winding down the upper part of the press. When they realised that I had picked up quite a few of the apples that were making the cider, we were given a bottle to take away. It was delicious!

On the day that I left to come back to Cheltenham, the rain set in early and kept on all the way back. Because of an accident on the A30 I diverted and, following my nose, and occasionally consulting the Road Atlas, I wove my way right through the middle of Devon, via Holsworthy, Hatherleigh, Crediton and Tiverton, finally getting on the M5 just south of Wellington. Even though the roads were wet and the light was dull, I saw some beautiful villages on my meandering journey and some fantastic scenery. I am so lucky to be able to travel like this in our beautiful countryside.