It is Bank holiday Monday. Whitsun. The last Monday in May. Everyone expects a little more warm than we have, although life carries on as if it is warm. The car park at the beach is full. Lots of people enjoying a walk on the beach.
Farmer has been getting ready for sheep work over the weekend. Cleaning out the fank, sorting out the dosing gun, the injection needles, ordering and collecting the medicines. He brought the Cheviots and the Zwarties up from the fields on the other side of Scoma in to the hill park so that they were easy to collect in when help arrived..
The ewes and lambs are gathered into the big holding pen outside the cattle shed. Then the lambs are shed off into a pen separate from the ewes. Today, they left two ewes in with the lambs to keep them calm.
Despite the occasional baaa for their mothers, there was an air of calm in the pens.
The lambs are vaccinated against clostidrial diseases found naturally in the soil here. They are given a spray of Spot On to protect them against tick and fly, and off they go back into the field to find their mums. We don't mark earlier as there is a risk of mis-mothering and we don't have room for any more abandoned lambs in the Stack yard shelter.
