This is a funny blog to write because I know that plenty of the readers will be farmers and crofters who already know about the things I am finding out the hard way. And there will be other peope reading who haven’t ever innoculated a sheep or collected warm eggs. So, to the former I say – have a laugh at me coming into your world without much of a clue. And to the latter – I say ‘crikey!’ - this is how hard it is to do stuff right with land and livestock.
Today I had a simple enough job. Put in a new post for a gate – known here as a ’strainer’ because it takes the strain of either the weight of the gate or the tensioned fence in the other direction, or both. The post itself is like a 7ft section of telegraph pole and it weighs about twice as much as I can lift. And we live on a very slopy croft. So I devise a sort of strap arrangement which allows me to drag it with one end on the floor. I traverse the steep part of the slope above the chickens with no possibility of stopping. Like some all-or-nothing ice climb. If I let the damned thing go it will roll down the hill and be a 30mph sledgehammer long before it has got to the chicken house. Chickens are so trusting. They cheered me on from the other side of the electric fence, unaware of their mortality.
Then the hole. Wisdom says that the hole for such a thing has to be 3ft or more deep. There are places on our croft where there is 3ft of ’soil’ before you hit bedrock (we actually sit about 50m from the estimated edge of the Moine Thrust, Moine side, if you like that sort of thing) – but not many. And we aren’t talking about ’soil’ like the crumbly brown stuff. Anything less than a boulder counts. So, in the absence of blasting powder I reckoned I had found such a place for my new gate. Which will allow me to gather up the sheep more efficiently in the long run.
And all because the lady loves ... to run away.
Thus began 3 hours of chiseling iron-pan with a spike, a very big steel rod, a sledge, a pick-axe and – eventually – my bare hands. At close of play I was 2ft down. I was resting my head on the far side of the hole while I reached down to scoop up the asymptotically smaller loads of crushed rock I was managing to break away.
Tomorrow, if I can still get out of bed, I will get that last foot of depth. I’m just hoping the The Shawshank Redemption is on telly tonight to boost morale.
David
