Back to nature for animal magic
 Ducks and Ducklings. |
 Newly Born Foal and Mare. |
Picture-perfect scenery and a soundtrack of birdsong greeted Christopher Somerville
I WOKE at Southcombe Farm to the chirping of dunnocks and the chizzick! chizzick! of a wagtail. A glance out of the bedroom window revealed a beautiful breezy morning, with sunshine and cloud shadow chasing each other across the rolling Devon countryside. The smell and sizzle of grilling bacon wafted up from downstairs, along with the yapping of Treacle the terrier, impatient for his morning walk.
“Take Treacle with you if you’d like to,” said Eileen Clark after breakfast. “I expect he’ll come, anyway. Keep an eye out for the marsh fritillaries — little browny-orange butterflies with white spots, they’re quite rare. This is where the best of the orchids are.” She pencilled in the place on my Farm Trail map. “Oh, and you may see some deer in the woods along there if you go quietly. We do love our guests to appreciate the wildlife on this farm — so take your time, won’t you?”
It was through the Green Gateway scheme, an initiative by the Devon Wildlife Trust in partnership with the local tourist board, that Eileen and Jim Clark, owners of Southcombe Farm, established the walking trail that winds through the fields of their 55-acre farm near Holsworthy in North Devon.
Southcombe is a good example of the kind of farm that accommodates visitors in Britain’s countryside these days: smallish, hard-working, forward-looking, with plenty for guests to see and do.
On the Clarks’ farm there are geese, chickens, sheep and dogs, plus a couple of thoroughbred mares and their potentially racehorse-material foals that are Jim’s pride and joy. He and Eileen plan to start a small herd of beef cattle. There’s the Farm Trail with its huge variety of wildlife. And there’s the B&B business itself, advertised largely through the Clarks’ website.
The sheep that feed in the Southcombe fields today belong to a neighbouring farmer who rents the grazing. The flock of 100 Mashams and Suffolks painstakingly developed by Eileen Clark were sold last October, secondary victims of the 2001 foot-and-mouth epidemic that devastated so many British farms.
“We didn’t get foot-and-mouth,” Jim told me, “but we lived in fear of getting it. The farm next to us was culled; that’s how close it came.”
“Around here it was like a war zone,” Eileen added. “Holsworthy was closed, the market shut, you couldn’t move stock. I can hardly describe the misery of it; everyone stayed on their farms and just hoped against hope. We shut down the B&B; we didn’t want anyone coming on to the farm, and we didn’t want to be blamed for introducing the disease. I couldn’t sell the lambs, so they had to be slaughtered on the farm. I sold my ewes. I just thought, I can’t go through this again.”
The outbreak tore a gaping hole in Britain’s farming industry, and it came on top of a long period of falling prices and rising costs for the farmers. “Diversify,” urged the Government. Easier said than done for many farms, but those who can have redoubled their efforts to attract staying guests.
Farms have always offered B&B to walkers and holidaymakers on a restricted budget, charging a modest price for simple accommodation, good plain food and peaceful surroundings. Those are still the bedrock virtues of farm B&B.
But recently, with every High Street travel agent’s window glittering with cheap foreign package holidays, British farms have had to take a hard look at what they can provide by way of extra enticements.
Some, like Southcombe Farm, have established nature trails. Some offer organic meat and vegetables, home-brewed beer and cider, home-baked bread. You can shoot and fish, try quad biking and mountaineering; your children can watch sheepdogs at work, bottle-feed the lambs, help with the shearing and the harvest. After the knock they have taken from foot-and-mouth, the B&B farms are only too keen to do all they can to make guests feel welcome.
I spent the morning at Southcombe Farm wandering around the fields of culm grassland, an internationally rare wildlife habitat. In the tussocky, boggy fields of sedge and hairlike grasses I found clumps of feathery pink ragged robin, meadowsweet, marsh marigolds and more orchids than I could have imagined — southern marsh and early purple among them. There were fine hedgebank beeches like gnarled old men with mossy limbs, and tall, brilliantly coloured marsh thistles.
Treacle the terrier bounced enthusiastically alongside, leaping over the tussocks. A buzzard circled overhead. Lambs cried from the fields. Marsh fritillaries settled in warm patches of grass and sunned themselves with open wings. I wanted to catch and frame this idyllic scene and carry it away with me under my arm.
Any Victorian pastoral painter would have known what to label it: Peace and Plenty, Down on the Farm.
