Poor Cuthbert: a sheep with an abscess

My poor tup Cuthbert has been in the wars these last few months and on Sunday I found that he has a big abscess on his jaw.

When I fetched him home from his wanderings, he had a puncture wound on his jaw which was infected but I treated it and it healed over... or so it appeared. On  Sunday it was suddenly huge and hot to touch. Poor Cuthbert had rubbed all of the wool off it.

Luckily with some help from my friend Elle and some Animalintex, I was able to put a poultice on it and bandage him up. Now I just have to keep replacing with clean dressings and wait for the poultice to work its magic. In the meantime, I'm not sure that Cuthbert is convinced about his new look!

A Fleecy Experiment

Since these February days are cold and dark still, I decided that I would use my indoor time productively by doing something with my fleeces which have been safely stashed away but rather neglected.

I decided to use Sheilhope Girlsta's beautiful moorit fleece and took it home from the stables to process it. It looked lovely spread out on the driveway and I started by taking a quarter of it, washing and drying it before sitting down to decide how to use it.

I was about to card Girlsta's fleece when my mam, who was sitting nearby said, "won't you loose all of those lovely sun bleached twizzly bits if you card it?"

I stopped and looked at the wool. Shetland wool naturally forms little spiraled tips at the end of each "staple" which is the name given to a lock of fleece. It was really beautiful varying from rich chocolate brown at the root to bleached blond at the tips, but the staple formation is also very technical and is key to the Shetland sheep being able to survive on those wet windswept islands. Rain falling on a Shetland sheep is wicked to the ends of the staples and drips off the twizzly tips and in this way is kept away from the sheep's skin, leaving it warm and dry. It would be a shame to loose such a characteristic feature of my sheep's wool.

"Could you spin your wool so that those little twizzly bits stick out?" Asked mam. I could try this but I'm not the greatest spinner nor knitter sadly. Much more practicing to do.For now I decided to stick with what I know: needle-felting jewellery.

First I had to pull out all of the nicest twizzly staples.

Then I carded the remainder.

I made a bracelet as usual but then needle-felted the twizzly staples around the outside. I'm rather pleased with the result, perhaps I'll make a load more and sell them!

EquinePsycho

In the last year, I've made a very special friend and in a short space of time we've had some excellent adventures together and really enjoyed feeding off each other's knowledge and passion for the great outdoors, animals generally and horses in particular.

Danni (Elle) Metcalf is an equine psychologist who is about to open her own riding centre at Bowkerstead, Grizedale, where Chris and I had our wedding reception last year. Elle has been travelling around finding horses for her riding school. Being without a bottomless pit of money to purchase her trusty herd of steeds, Elle has been rather canny in her methods of selecting horses and has had to draw on her experience, knowledge and ability to pick out a diamond in the rough and turn it into a safe and reliable trekking horse.

I wanted to share with you Tizzy's story because the transformation in this animal has been so rapid and it makes me so proud and happy to see Elle's talent so evident.

Tizzy's background is little known to us; there are a lot of previous owners on her passport. She is a 20 yr old Hanovarian x TB. Her shape suggests that she has had a few foals and she has had a big injury in the past. Elle was asked to take her on because the young man who had her could no longer afford to look after her.

She did not look great when we went to visit her but we put her in the horse box along with her pal Teeto, a little unbroken Section A Welsh.

The first time I rode her she was quiet and felt like a bag of bones. We didn't go far but we wanted to bring her back into work to pick her up, get her muscles developing and give her some interest in life.

After just a week she was beginning to look better, but Elle there was still a lot to do.

Three months on and Tizzy is a different horse. She is far more positive in her outlook (despite being a very stroppy mare in the stable) and is really becoming quite forward.

When I rode her a couple of days ago for Elle's new website photo shoot, she was really quite strong and excitable and at times I struggled to settle her down! Ignore the dropped rein please, I'd just ducked under a low branch when she shot off!

She is clearly feeling good and I'm looking forward to getting to know her better as we build up her stamina and give her some more experience of longer trails. Well done Elle!
http://www.cumbriahorseridingadventures.co.uk/

Something old, something new...

I should imagine that anyone who has pondered over my lack of blogging will have come up with three options: either I am too lazy to blog, I have nothing happening in my life, or life is so busy that I don't have a lot of time to blog. I'm blaming mobile technology mostly. My old phone used to send posts direct to my blog. I liked this and bought a Blackberry thinking that this would be an even more slick way to blog on the move. However, it has not worked like that. My Blackberry and my Blog are not good friends, not in the way that Blackberry, Fackbook and Twitter are at least!

Now that the days are dark I seem to get up, do the animals, do some work, do the animals, have some food and go to sleep! I haven't even wished you all many Yuletide Greetings! But I hope that you all know that they were beaming out all over the world to you all wherever you are.

The good news is that Cuthbert, my wayward tup, has turned up again. Goodness knows where he was but he was gone for almost a month!

He is hat-rack thin, had an abscess on his jaw, has a lesion around his foot as though he has had wire wrapped around it and bald patches (intriguingly as though he has been wearing a raddle!)  but he is alive and bright and improving slowly.

The fields on the other hand are doing the opposite of improving. The mud is horrendous! We have had nothing but mild weather and rain for weeks. It's horrible! If you look at the photo of the new fence in the previous post, you will see grass. No longer!! That area is now all deep sloppy mud where sheep and horses have been puddling up and down to the stables.

The horses managed to break into the haylage bales twice so that they are now ae big tubs that I was initially using to stop the girls from trampling their hay into the mud!

As well as the usual suspects, we have some new arrivals to keep us busy, but at least they pay their way! We're getting three or four eggs per day!

They're not sheep...

They are Mountain Goats!!!

I have been thoroughly given the run-around by my flock in the last week.
First the boys, who I thought were secure and safely out of the way down on a nature reserve, found a gap in a fence after our neighbouring farmer moved his flock of commercial ewes in next door. So they were returned to me by the (thankfully laid back) farmer in a quad bike trailer.

I couldn't put them back on the nature reserve without doing some fencing there, so I took them to my new fields where the girls are... and they created havoc by finding a way around any fence put in their way. Shetlands don't see boundaries; they merely see obstacles to be overcome!

At last Chris and I, with some help from my friend Elle, got the little bleaters contained... for a while...

In the meantime, Rivendell Cuthbert, my new tup, decided that he'd covered all of his new girls and that he would move on to pastures new. Previously he was working a much bigger flock and clearly he thought himself short-changed with his 13 ewes at my spot and gone off on the pull in neighbouring fields.We're now been looking for him for three days, following tufts of ginger wool along the hedgerows, but as yet we have not located him. The neighbouring farmers and the police are all on the look-out.

Today, after another fruitless Cuthbert search, we got back to sorting out the unruly younger tups, who were blocked into one of our horse paddocks which unfortunately had very little graze.

Chris and Elle set to work building a new fence (I had to take my Mam to the doctor's) and when I joined them it was looking very smart! They had fenced so that there was an overhang at the riverside that couldn't possibly be sneaked round, and everything was looking tight and sheep proof. We released the boys into their new pasture only to find ourselves under attack from all angles: Balthazar and Brian took flying leaps across the river while Blitzen and Biff climbed up the muck heap, dropped down behind the stable and trotted out into the girl's paddock!

It was dark before we left the field and we'll have to be back first thing again to see whether we have won the battle... or not!

Belated Update

I am a slack blogger. Sorry folks, there is no excuse for it. However, things have been moving apace in the Holden-Wilde household.

Chris and I have our business off the ground and our website can be found HERE. This is a temporary site while the main one is being built by Chris's wonderful cousin Karen. Thanks Karen, you're a star xx

Chris's photography is coming on in leaps and bounds and very soon there will be a gallery to admire on the website.

My horse Danny and the sheep have moved house again and are now in a village I know very well from my childhood: a little place called Gleaston on the Furness Peninsula.

The girls have a new boyfriend called Rivendell Cuthbert! He's a handsome moorit lad originally from David and Joy Trotter's flock.

Down the road, the boys are chilling out down at Ireleth on the the salt marsh still. With no girls close by they are a proper lazy bachelor group, not a scrappy bunch as they were last year with the girls the other side of the fence!

Since the summer shows we have had an awful lot of calls about the flock and could have easily sold all of the girls three times over. Smali Archie, Smali Buttons and Smali Arrow have all gone off to new homes to work as flock sires and Galtress Ptolemy has a new home too with my friend Philip. Philip and his brother run the Wadley flock in Northumberland where Arrow, Tolly and ten of our girls are now living. Seven of the girls are out on loan and will come back to us probably next year once they have added some new members to the Wadley flock.

Smali Arran is growing into a very handsome lad. I took him along to a Shetland Sheep Society Ram Inspection day last weekend and I am proud to say that he has passed his assessment and is now an Approved Ram! I was so chuffed to get such positive feedback about him and his fleece in particular. I'll be very interested to see how his first lambs turn out next year!

Trotting Along Nicely

It's great being self-employed (even if the winter is seeming a little scary and uncertain at the moment!). I can organise my own time and do the boring desk stuff when it's raining or in the evening leaving the daylight and sunny weather for doing the surveying and doing the things that I enjoy, like going out with the dogs, spending time with the flock and riding Danny.

Luckily I have friends who are also self-employed or work funny hours and can usually squeeze in a ride.

My friend Danni (very confusing having a horse and a horsey friend with the same name!!) has moved her horse Blade into the same field as Danny for a little while and we ride out together most days. Danny and Blade are great pals and very evenly paced which makes hacking out easy and fun.

Our boys are a constant source of amusement to us as we explore, often at speed, the forest tracks. Both are sure footed and fit enough to enjoy the challenging tracks and love to leap ridiculously high over small fallen logs! However, they are also both thoroughbred crossed and a bit highly strung and spooky. They find all kinds of things to be terrified of.

When excited Danny tends to turn into a giraffe with his ears pricked right forward and nostrils flared, while Blade arches his neck low, takes hold of the bit and prances along pretending to be very grand but refusing to accept the bit and work properly. They perfectly demonstrate "above" and "below" the bit! Danni and I are working on improving their outlines!

I've bought Danny a convertible head collar/bridle for hacking out in. It's great to be able to give him a proper break on a day ride by un-clipping the bit and letting him graze while I eat a snack. I don't worry about it getting damaged if we get a drenching either. He looks rather smart in it too!