Escape to the Country

***WARNING, OVERLY LONG SENTENCE ALERT!*** 

If you’ve had any access to social media while you’ve been wherever you’ve been to this holiday, you’ll have noticed, along with the seemingly endless videos of your friends or celebrities chucking buckets of icy water over themselves for charity, the usual über-smiley holiday snaps and the I’m-not-trying-to-make-you-jealous-but-you-probably-will run downs of all the super-cool music festivals your super-cool mates have been to. (Don’t say I didn’t warn you).

The words ‘sheepdog trial’ and ‘tractor fest’, however, would not necessarily be odds-on contenders to make the Holiday Tweets Top Ten. I would like to redress the balance and strike an earthy blow for the country folk that don’t have the privilege (?) of being Martin Eavis.

Not far from my mum’s house, in the sedately jaw-dropping countryside near Builth Wells, there is a field.A farmer called John owns this field. Now John trains sheep dogs, very well as it happens and dogs are brought, as puppies, from as far as New Zealand, to learn from John’s expert tutelage. Whatever the weather, and it can it can be pretty beastly out here, he’s out there, passing on years of experience to his canine charges. The fact that John has MS and does all his work from the back of specially designed quad bike, is neither here nor there, but anyway, I digress.

On an unusually bright and sunny afternoon (for mid Wales), as the heather robed the rippling hills in its summer coat of royal purple, the field in question was amass with crooks (shepherds’ that is) as it hosted the first round of the Hundred House Sheep Dog Trials. Seeing no parking anywhere near the painted road sign, we engaged the 4x4 and trundled up the path. Upon seeing someone we presumed to be a competitor, we wound the window down, just as one of his dogs decided to shoot out into the path of the car! “That’ll do!” yelled the farmer angrily. “Steady on!” we thought, we hadn’t said anything yet! It wasn’t until he’d yelled it several times that my mother and I realised that he was talking to his dogs.

The parking, as it turned out, was on the field itself and it appeared that we were to be the only spectators. Across the bottom of this hedged-in arena the combatants (including one German and one from the Midi-Pyrenées) waited. Even at rest, the border collies were alert, eyes bright and ears pricked for the slightest hint off action.

Everyone knew his or her slot though and at the allotted time shepherd (or shepherdess) would stride, dog at heal, up to a stake marking the bottom of the course. There they waited until, from a gate at the top of the field came their quarry. Glancing skittishly this way and that, as if expecting something, the ruminant trio would begin to amble along the ridge at the top of the field. At an inaudible signal from their master, as if sprung from a bow, a black and white arrow would shoot from behind the stake and scorch up the hedge-line, ears pinned back, eyes homing in on the targets. Dipping briefly out of view it would reappear – much to their dismay – next to the sheep, who then bolted. Now came the trial.

In the centre of the field a system of gates had been set up to form a Maltese cross, through which the dog needed to direct the sheep through one vertical axes then a horizontal, before taking them across to a makeshift pen, this all in an allotted time. Using a series of commands and whistles, the shepherd would move his dog around the sheep, firstly from a distance and then, as the dog funnelled the sheep down off the hill, he would run in to direct matters at close quarters, using his own body and the crook.

Being new to this, it took a little time to see a pattern, but after a while, we could recognise “stand” as telling the dog to stop, “come by” to circle the sheep in one direction and the aforementioned “that’ll do” to call the dog off. What the different whistles meant we had no idea, but it was plain there was a huge amount skill and trust between and dog.

Not a small amount of frustration too. Many a time dog and shepherd would have two sheep lined up with the gate, only for the third to break rank and skid around it like one of those infuriating games where you have to put the ball bearing in a hole. The level of frustration could be measured by just how rapidly the shepherd flicked his crook up and down and when one dog refused to follow the line and cut corners not once but three times, that arm was going like the pen on a seismograph when the big one hit.

All of us sat in wrapped concentration (including our two usually fidgety Breton spaniels). We felt every success, near miss and failure and groaned inwardly as yet another team was timed out before completing the task. The dogs never seemed disappointed though, despite all the shouting and stick waving, merely flopping down to drink. For both them and their owners, it was same again next week at another trial not to mention every day at their own farm. A testament to the difficulty of this test was that, in more than an hour, we saw only two pairings succeed. Of such stuff champions are made.

Film stars too apparently…Two days later I found myself down in sunny Kent at the Biddenden Tractor Fest, a superbly organised little country fair about ten miles from Ashford. Among the stalls and attractions were a steam train converted to BBQ pulled pork; a mobile organ that played everything from “Dancing Queen” to “The Final Countdown”; some beautiful classic cars, a real-life gold prospector, a blacksmith, chainsaw sculpture, a plethora of farm vehicles and machinery and a dog and duck display.

This last intrigued me and it turned out to be a very similar, if much less serious version, of what I’d witnessed 48 hours before. Using ducks instead of sheep the shepherd demonstrated his art, working the crowd like a circus ringmaster. It began with two puppies running circles round a cage of ducks, already demonstrating the instinct that would lead them along the same route as their forebears. Moving up to older dogs, each part of the family, the shepherd gradually worked in more complex instructions, the dog seemingly second-guessing him at every turn, it was as if he had it on a string. Whistles replaced oral commands and it was soon clear the dog recognised the number of blasts reflected the number of words, for example: “That’ll do” becomes “peeeep-peep-peep!”

The final act was to set up an obstacle course, including a bridge and a slalom made up of small children, through which the collie Boots (doggy star of a forthcoming version of ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’) would herd the flapping birds. The children were encouraged to make sounds, such as rushing water or swishing trees but the implacable Boots didn’t bat a doggy eyelid and simply got on with the show, steering the ducks around like a canine Christiano Ronaldo (sorry!).  You hardly realised her master was there. Cue much applause as she flopped down (a little dramatically it has to be said) in her own bucket of water for a well-deserved thirst quencher. Showmanship aside, the shepherd never failed to remind the onlookers that these were working dogs and that sheep not shows were his livelihood.

Toasting the success of the fest that evening, I couldn’t help but think how far we have become removed from our countryside and our traditions and also from the ethic of trust and hard work that that imbues.

So next year, how about leaving V alone, giving Glastonbury a miss and catching an episode of  ‘One man and his dog’? Something tells me you won’t regret it.