Mrs Down's Diary

When John came to use it to take a heifer and calf from the foldyard to join the herd in the fields, he noticed a small pile of bird muck in the corner of the trailer.

"I thought I can't have cleaned it out properly," he chastised himself, as the trailer has to be hosed down and cleaned out after every animal movement, "but I thought no more of it as we were not moving off the farm."

The trailer was kept on the move that day, transporting ewes with triplets to a different field in the village. They have proved very useful as a clean-up gang, and John puts them in to graze off several small plots that would be time consuming to get into with tackle. Instead this keeps the ewes happy, and the place looks tidy.

All in all the trailer was out of place for most of the day. When he parked it back in its allocated space late afternoon, he stepped out of the tractor and was nearly decapitated by a pair of enraged swallows dive bombing the trailer air vents.

For full feature see West Sussex Gazette August 6