I know this website is about our wonderful holiday cottage Hepple Hill but I’m wondering if I can squeeze a bit of my farm writing in? My farming stories are now on Substack and I think I’ll slip them on here too! After all there is lots of information about the cottage and places to see on here. Is it breaking the ‘website/marketing rules for holiday cottages’ to grab some space in Hepple News for me and and my writing?!
Last year my poetry collection A Pease Myers Pastoral was published. It is a collection of poems about life on a hill farm in the North Pennines. I have sold about 90 copies so far which is not bad for a poetry book! There are a couple of books in the study area of the cottage so if you are staying, take a peek!
Now I am writing about my experiences of working and living on a farm on Substack – my page (is it called a page?!) is called The Reluctant Farmer. I’ll reproduce it here to give you a flavour:
Our limousin bull is a ton of muscle and bone. Thick necked. I have never been frightened of him before but today is different. We have to get him into a trailer.
Our trailer has a side door – it is called a jockey door and is human sized. It is open as I pull a bucket full of cattle feed on a rope. I lean in slightly and gently pull on the rope as if I was playing a game with my cat. The bucket moves an inch and the bull steps in to the trailer. I pull the bucket again and the bull – head down – steps again. I am concentrating on the bucket more than the bull. If I jerk the rope too quickly, I am afraid he will stop half in and half out of the trailer. Another inch and another step. Another inch and another step.
He’s 9 years old. Past his prime but still functioning. The trick is to get ahead of problems. I have learnt this over the last 24 years I have been living at Pease Myers – a hill farm in the North Pennines. One minute they are eating grass and sniffing heifers; the next they are chronically lame or have got themselves wedged between the feeder and the water trough. Once an animal the size of this has reached a certain age, it’s time to take decisive action.
My grip on the rope tightens. He’s nearly in. I pull one more time. Head down and nose in the bucket, he takes another step forward. Martin is about to close the trailer gate behind him. I hold my breath and at the same time the bull lifts his massive head out of the bucket. His eye looks so beady, so small, so mean although how I had time to process that thought I don’t know. For as soon as that beady eye locks onto mine, he turns and explodes out of the jockey door (human sized, remember). Now I am looking up at the sky and feeling the stone of the farmyard on my back. The bull has jumped over me. He is furious but free.
I am calling my substack The Reluctant Farmer even though most of the time it’s not true. I can be quite keen. But I hesitate to call myself a farmer. I ended up here because I fell in love with who I consider to be the real farmer. A man I met more than 20 years ago driving down a narrow lane in a tractor. I’m not from farming stock or even from the countryside. I have always felt that I don’t quite fit in.
Nevertheless, I live here and work here and my substack is for anyone who is interested in the real, behind the scenes stuff about farming – not the farming you see on TV (with the exception of This Farming Life, I like that!) – I mean the ‘entice a bull into a trailer with a bucket, end flat on your back and escape death by inches’ kind of farming.
I hope you will join me!
So now my website has holiday cottage information and also offers an insight in farming life. If you are interested I hope you will find me on Substack. I’m also on Instagram – lots of photographs of dogs, sheep, cows, ponies and stunning scenery. Find me at pease_myers_farm
