Lambs on the Stuchbury path. Photo: Colin Wootton
Richard Fonge writes:
Now in mid March the weather is changing to being more spring like. Lambs will soon be in the fields across to Weston and up the Moreton road. This is a good time therefore to ask all dog owners to remember to keep their dogs on leads when walking the footpaths through fields. The worrying of livestock is on the increase costing the industry an estimated £2million a year on official figures. That is without the cruelty and suffering. The young sheep on the Stuchbury footpath are ewe lambs. They are twelve months old and will be bred from this autumn, lambing next spring.
Age brings nostalgia, and looking back over a farming career and an involvement in rural life, the memories are good. As a child and teenager farming was still very labour intensive and physical. It wasn’t until the mid sixties that we saw the rapid mechanisation of agriculture. This not only brought specialisation to individual farms, but the demise of the smallholder and the less need for farm workers. This in turn led to a change in the make up of our villages, with many leaving the rural life to one of a more urban life in our local towns and beyond.
Surnames back then were synonymous with certain villages. Sulgrave had many families called Wootton, Cleaver and Hirons. Greatworth or Grit’worth as it was pronounced had families called Carpenter, Barrett and Isham to the fore.
Today we forget or don’t realise how hard life was back in the fifties with the pig and allotment vital to the living of the household as it had always had been to the rural worker. The allotment grew the vegetables and the pig the meat. The pig was salted down and the bacon sliced off as required, usually about 80% fat, which was not a problem as the work was physical and the day started with a walk or cycle ride. Many were still living off the land and not the supermarket as of today.
True conversation in Grit’worth shop. Ernie Isham (always known as neighbour) was patiently waiting to be served is asked by shopkeeper Ernest Barratt If he has planted his broad beans. Reply: “Yes. and the b*****s will be up before I get my tobacco”.
Richard Fonge.