by Amanda Owen
Finally, a decision was made: the roof was to come off and the whole house had to be repointed with lime mortar. There would of course be considerable disruption during this process but the reward, a watertight weatherproof house, would justify the turmoil, we were assured. Clive was not convinced.
‘Whaaat the hell, I cannot believe it,’ he complained. ‘Lime mortar, it’ll nivver hod man.’
The architect disagreed and explained that it was how older buildings had always been held together.
‘Lang ago they only used lime mortar because they ’adn’t invented cement,’ Clive complained. ‘Square wheels were deemed all right until someone invented round uns.’
I just laughed.
The whole renovation took nearly six months, and for the entirety we tolerated falling masonry, the sound of drilling and the lack of privacy that being besieged by an army of builders entailed. I spent my days apologizing to tourists about the unsightly works and spent the evenings trying to discourage the children from using the scaffolding as a supersized climbing frame. Reuben would do chin-ups by the back door, Edith learnt a few pole-dancing moves and Sidney could exit the upper floor via the bedroom window then slither to the ground down the equivalent of a fireman’s pole. I soon found that I, too, could make good use of it by suspending larger items of washing from the metal framework.
Reuben was excited when a big orange excavator rumbled into the yard, having made friends with the driver earlier the previous year. Both The Firs and Ravenseat are situated on the very fringes of the cultivated land of Upper Swaledale, and beyond these outlying farmsteads lie only vast tracts of open moorland that stretch away into the distance. These deserted places, where one can walk for mile upon mile without seeing any sign of habitation or another living soul, are not only rich in biodiversity, home to many rare plants and birds, but are important on a global scale, thanks to the vegetation’s ability to lock up carbon. The rivers are the lifeblood of the lowlands, providing water for the towns and cities. The moorland habitat’s ability to hold water also substantially slows down the flow of water and thus reduces the flood risks downstream in the lowland areas and, as part of a new flood-management policy, the grips (drainage ditches) that were dug post-war to drain and dry out the ground are now being filled in. Slowly but surely, with the use of a tractor and a spade, the deep narrow drains are being blocked up, in a move designed to make the moors wetter and to encourage peat regeneration.
After a particularly wet winter when flooding downstream had become a major headache it was decided that it was time to bring in experts who could fill in the watercourses far quicker and more efficiently than we ever could. Our forty-year-old digger was just not up to the job so a contractor was found, who had the specialist equipment required, and within just a week he had done work that would probably have taken us a month. He parked the large modern excavator beside the moor gate and promised to return in a few days with a low loader to take it away. Months passed, and the bright-orange excavator remained, a blot on the landscape. Whenever I took a picture of the surrounding moorland my eye was drawn to the lurid machine abandoned amongst the heather. The children spent many happy hours pretending to drive it, pressing all the buttons and turning the dials, and gradually the cab of the excavator filled with empty sweetie wrappers. Even Clive and I managed to both squeeze inside once, taking refuge from a snowstorm that was raging outside. The ignition keys were hung from a nail in a beam in the kitchen, awaiting the owner’s return, and sure enough one beautiful spring day he meandered back into the farmyard.
‘Can I come wi’ yer?’ Reuben pleaded, I daresay angling for a spell in the driver’s seat.
‘Why aye,’ came the reply from the beanie-hat-wearing digger driver.
The orange digger slowly rumbled into sight, making its way steadily downhill and into the sheep pens. The clatter of metal became louder as the machine jolted and bounced its way home, the tracks scraped and creaked as they navigated the solid ground rather than the spongey grass. Reuben had been given the opportunity to drive part of the way down the fields but had been ousted from the driving seat with the trickier pens now to negotiate. His face was beaming as he ran towards me to relay how they’d turned the key and the machine had started at the first touch.
‘You’ll nivver guess what an’ all, Mam!’ he said excitedly. ‘There was a nest in t’exhaust pipe.’
Fortunately, there’d been nobody at home when the engine was fired up and the nest was ejected at high speed in a cloud of smoke.
I walked across towards the advancing digger and gave its happy driver a thumb-up.
‘I nivver thought it’d start after standing so long,’ I shouted.
‘Why aye, like, I cannae believe tha’ it’s gan sa well, like, eh,’ he said in his thick Geordie accent.
At that precise moment, Reuben let out a holler and I saw him frantically pointing skywards.
‘Jesus Christ – stop!’ I shouted at the driver, waving my arms to get his attention.
He looked up and immediately saw that the bucket attached to the extended front boom was not just touching the electricity wire that ran between the farmhouse and buildings but exerting such a pressure on it that the normally slightly sagging line was now very tightly stretched.
The driver swore, and Reuben covered his eyes, waiting for either the cable to snap or, worse still, the digger to be lit up with some kind of electrical surge.
Backwards the driver went and, when he was no longer in contact with the wire, lowered the bucket.
‘That were lucky,’ I commented when, finally, he came to a standstill in the farmyard.
‘Aye, I spoke too soon, man,’ he said as he pulled a cigarette from the back of his ear, lit it with a shaking hand and took a long draw.
That was a lesson learnt for Reuben: never be complacent and always be on the lookout for hazards. Being a believer in the ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained’ approach, I would encourage the children to sometimes take measurable risks, to challenge themselves. In my mind, to know your limitations and to be able to assess the danger and deal with it was a good life lesson.
The excavator had now returned to Ravenseat, in all its orange glory, only this time it was to dig out around the foundations of the farmhouse where the stonework needed repointing.
The spring of 2017 was almost perfect in terms of weather for lambing. Little in the way of rain meant that water levels were low, and the becks ran almost dry. Hardly a year went by when we didn’t lose newborn lambs through drowning so not having this danger to contend with was wonderful. Each and every day dawned dry and bright, not so warm as to bring about the onset of ailments associated with excessive heat – rattle belly and scour – and not so cold that we’d be troubled with pneumonic lambs or the yows with mastitis – known also as blackbag, a descriptive name taken from the symptoms of this dreadful affliction.
Edith is a real asset at lambing time and kens the sheep almost as well as we do. It really is all about thinking on your feet and practical problem-solving. She helped me move one yow with only a single lamb to just outside the kitchen window. The yow was producing too much milk, and Edith and I would take a couple of small jars and fill them with the excess, leaving plenty for her own lamb but producing enough to provide a feed for another lamb whose mother had pneumonia and was very poorly. We didn’t have the heart to take the lamb away from the sick yow as she cared for it and nurtured it so well; we were sure that it was the lamb that gave her the will to live. This was all well and good but, like man, lamb cannot live off love alone and its mother, due to her illness, didn’t have a drop of milk. Edith knew exactly what the job entailed and could do it all perfectly by herself. The hungry lamb would run to the kitchen door to be fed, coming right up to Annas and Clemmie to be stroked. The pride Edith took in being able to do this was priceless, and the day that the poorly yow was well enough to go back out into the field with her lamb in tow was a cause for celebration.
As us
ual, in spring we had pet lambs. The numbers vary from year to year, and this time we only had four who were being fed from the bottle. They did very well, roamed the farmyard, and were healthy and happy. They weren’t afraid of people and would saunter around the picnic benches greeting the walkers and visitors who came for cream teas. But they didn’t like rain, and I spent a fair bit of time shooing them out of the old chapel building where visitors go to have tea in bad weather. If I shut the door to keep them out, they’d loiter around the farmhouse door hoping to spy the children, with whom they were familiar and who they associated with a milk feed. They were not averse to sneaking into the house when I wasn’t looking, and it was never only one that ventured over the threshold as they were always together: if you saw one, you saw all four.
After dinner one day I put Clemmie down for a nap, but she toddled downstairs a few minutes later.
‘Clemmie, you should be in bed,’ I said. ‘It’s sleepy time.’
‘Sheeeeeeepy time,’ she said, pointing back up the stairs.
And there they were, all four of them, on the landing. I shooed them back down. Counting sheep was supposed to help you nod off, but this was ridiculous.
There can be no telling when things are going to go wrong, and fate has a nasty way of creeping up on you and kicking you on the backside just when you are not expecting it. After weeks of lambing, it feels like the hard-won battle is over when you finally take the marked-up yows and lambs back to the moor. The lambs, now two or three weeks old, are strong enough to walk, following their mothers the mile or so uphill through the bracken to the moor gate. Ambling quietly behind the flock so not to tire them, with the sheepdogs weaving back and forth, occasionally nipping at the heels of a belligerent yow when it deviates too far from the course, is a thoroughly pleasant and satisfying task. Your job as a shepherd is not over, but the hardest part is behind you, the yows birthed safely, the lambs past the first few critical days and now the little family units are ready to go forth onto their heafs. For the yows this is a familiar place, where they and their ancestors have roamed for centuries and they can settle, but for the lambs this is all new and about learning the lie of the land, developing the instincts that will keep them roaming but only within the confines of this boundary-less ground.
The shock discovery of the fate of nearly a dozen yows and lambs didn’t occur until one fine sunny evening in June. A distant fence line that divided the peat haggs of Cumbria and Yorkshire had become tired and the wire sagged to such an extent that sheep were getting onto an area set aside for peat regeneration. The rarest of bog plants grew in this area and it was often visited by keen botanists who would marvel at what seemed to the untrained eye to be the most unremarkable of flora.
We took part in environmental stewardship schemes, for which we were paid, which meant that some of our land – as was the case here – needed to be clear of stock at certain dates in the calendar to encourage regrowth and regeneration. Clearly, a new stretch of fence was required. New posts, strainers and wire needed to be taken across the roughest of terrains and laid out in preparation for a day when we felt strong enough to begin the laborious process of knocking in the new posts. A tractor-mounted hydraulic fence-post knocker that takes the sweat out of the job would have been welcome but, owing to the remote location and treacherous route through peat bogs and gutters, we had no choice but to opt for man power. Jonny, a local lad and the son of my friend Rachel, was drafted in to help with knocking the posts into the ground.
It took a good few trips back and forth with equipment, as we could only carry a certain amount on a quad bike and trailer. Overload them and you run the risk of getting stuck, owing to excessive weight, plus the route was so rutted that everything would bounce out of the trailer and you’d be constantly stopping to retrieve the fence posts. We took turns to carry the posts and wire over the last few hundred yards, it was just too risky to go any further as the drier ground frequently crumbled beneath us and gave way to blanket bog.
It was on the return journey of one of these trips that Clive and I accidentally deviated from our usual route. The sun was setting, and we were not in so much of a rush to be back to the farm, so we stopped the bike and felt the last rays of sun upon our faces. A light haze hung over the distant heather-clad moors and just the faintest wisps of cloud tarnished the near-perfect sky. It was still, not the slightest breeze to stir the woolly heads of cotton grass that now were bathed in a warm, rich amber light. The silence was only broken by the occasional bleat of a lamb or the almost mystical call of a drumming snipe, invisible to the naked eye but making their presence felt. I stood, breathing deeply.
‘Isn’t this the most glorious place?’ I said to Clive, who was still sitting on the bike. ‘It’s at moments like this that I feel so in touch with nature and the earth.’
I was working up to saying something deep and meaningful.
‘It’s impossible to be in such a stunningly beautiful place and not feel some kind of deep emotion, isn’t it?’
I closed my eyes, lost in what was almost a spiritual moment.
‘Summat stinks,’ proclaimed Clive.
I opened my eyes.
‘Can ta nut smell it?’ he said, now looking this way and that, his nose in the air.
I sniffed and thought yes, maybe there was a smell, a familiar smell. The stench of death. We both looked around and our eyes were drawn by a black patch of ground only fifty yards or so from where we were. As we walked purposefully towards it, the smell became gradually more pungent until it was almost unbearable.
I stopped, put my hand over my nose, and breathed through my fingers. Clive walked to the black patch and then stood, looking downwards, his hands on his hips.
‘What is it?’ I shouted.
He turned and grimaced, the colour drained from his face.
‘Jesus, yer need to see this,’ he said.
What a sight! Never, ever had I seen anything quite like it. The black patch, only some 12 feet in diameter, was thick, oily mud. Ridiculously, it had wavy edges and looked as though a child had drawn a cartoon puddle. There was no real graduation between solid ground and this puddle. It was just there, a surreal mass of black gloop that seemed to sit upon the grass.
Bogs are something that both Clive and I are very familiar with, but never before had we seen anything like this. Usually a bog would be covered with a layer of sphagnum moss in the brightest and most lurid shade of green. The more obvious ones were no secret and would resemble a small pond, standing water on the top, seaves and sphagnum moss growing around the edges.
This bog seemed to be slightly raised from the ground because the surface was bumpy. Upon closer inspection, these bumps became identifiable as sheep. The big humps were yows, and the smaller ones lambs. Clive and I stood, aghast at the horrendous sight that confronted us.
‘There nivver was a bog here,’ Clive said, shaking his head.
It did look as though it had just burst through the surface, rather like an Icelandic mud geyser that I had once seen on the television, but quite why this natural phenomenon should have occurred at Ravenseat is a mystery. The real puzzle, though, in our eyes, was why had the sheep gone into it? The fact that there was no water took away the theory that it was thirst that had lured them to their deaths. We walked around the bog and saw that in places the outlines of horns could be seen. The profile of the head of a young lamb was just beneath the crust. It was sickening and puzzling.
‘Yer’d wonder why, yer really would,’ mused Clive.
‘Why would so many animals venture into such a tiny bog, when they have thousands of acres to roam?’ I said.
‘Nay, we’ll nivver knaw,’ said Clive. ‘But we’ll ’ave to fence this off now to mek sure nowt ever ga’s in it again.’
There was nothing more that could be done other than to construct a fence around the hell hole and leave nature to do its work and reclaim the bodies and, for a while, the bog became an object of fascination for the children.
When we eventually set off on the backbreaking task of renewing the original broken fence, the accompanying children would ask to stop just to peer at the bog. There was talk of spectral ghost sheep, Violet and Edith being fond of making up such tales just to see the reaction of the little ones who hung off their every word. For a while, the children were afraid of being out on the moor in unfamiliar places, always watching where they stepped in case they happened upon the same fate. Getting bogged was a frequent enough occurrence, you didn’t have to venture far before you could find yourself up to your knees in mud, but seeing and smelling the rotting corpses served as a timely reminder to the children that there is danger to be found even in familiar places.
There is nothing quite like the thrill of a ghost story or the fairy tales, myths and legends that have been passed down from generation to generation, rooted in places that are real. I can’t imagine how many times I’ve had to recount the story of the robber trying to gain entry to the Crook Seal inn, now just a solitary barn standing at the roadside on the way to Kirkby Stephen, how shots were fired through the roof by the terrified innkeeper and then years later a skeleton discovered in the peat. There’s usually an element of truth to these stories, even if the facts have been distorted over time, and there’s no doubt these folk tales keep the landscape alive and exciting.
Every year we would welcome the return of the house martins that nest in the corners of the sash windows. They had already begun the construction of their new nests when the scaffolding appeared, but they did not seem troubled by the close proximity of the builders, they just carried on flitting back and forth carrying their nest-building materials and, later, food in the form of insects for their broods of chicks. We didn’t open the upper floor windows during their breeding season in case the nest was dislodged and crashed to the ground, so a scaffolding platform was a bonus as far as the children were concerned, enabling them to get close and observe the previously secret world of the feather-lined mud nests. Inside, scrawny ugly featherless chicks lay quiet in semi-darkness. Only when an adult bird returned did they come to life, craning their necks upwards with gaping yellow beaks that begged to be fed.
