After a long winter of heaping straw on top of straw, the layer of bedding could be 3-feet high with ease. There was hardly a space where calves, or larger cattle hadn’t over wintered. That was the West Country farmyard where I grew up.
Roughly square in shape, with cow stalls along the northern side and the cart shed in the westerly corner. These traditional stone-built buildings were made for a different era. Opposite the farmhouse there was a modern steel framed building that my father put up.
A story of livestock farming is written in these buildings. That transition from the intensive use of human labour to a more machinery dependent system. Going from cramped timber and local stone buildings to sheeted large span open spaces. One long lived and of great character, often listed and the other solely utilitarian, making life simpler.
A pick and wheelbarrow. Cleaning out was one annual manual task. My brother and I would push endless wheelbarrows of dung out into the yard. There wasn’t the machinery to get into the tight spaces of the confined old buildings. Our job was to dig out the masses of compressed dung. Then it could be attacked by our Ford 4000 tractor[1] in the yard.
Now, such hard to access areas of a cattle shed are confronted by a skid-steer[2]. Days spent with a pick and wheelbarrow are exceptional. There’s no comparison with the 1970s.
Here, it’s not this monotonous labour that I’m wanting to write about. Rather more outdoor farm work. Work that was a bit more fun on a steaming hot day.
One of the other summer jobs I had as a boy was cleaning out water tanks. We had a couple of large concrete and brick cattle troughs that hosted a mass of algae and all sorts of accumulated debris. Summer was a time to clean them out. The sheds would be empty of cattle.
We didn’t have a swimming pool. I think you can guess where I’m going with this recollection. Having scrubbed a season’s worth of growth off the walls of the biggest tank, the smooth concrete walls were then revelled. We did a thorough job because this cleaning process didn’t get done all that often.
In the mists of the summer heat and with the yard empty of cattle, this tank was a place for a dip. Chilled water, straight out of the mains supply, as the tank refilled added to the fun. So, we became the fish in the cow trough. At least for a summer day.
[1] https://heritagemachines.com/guides/buying-guide/fantastic-ford-force-4000/
[2] https://www.bobcat.com/na/en
John Vincent 