Overcast but dry

Checked flock early in the morning, an overcast but dry and still morning, to find a beautiful black bleating little lamb with an attentive mother. This was a lovely surprise as I was expecting a flurry of lambs towards the end of the week to herald the start of lambing.

All was well and I put the mother and lamb in a pen in the lambing barn which is all ready – disinfected, beautifully clean with clean hurdles all set up with lambing/mothering up pens, well bedded down with straw. Stacks of clean water buckets and feed trays await them, complete with a trolley of iodine, tags and veterinary medications if required.

We then moved the last of the replacement ewes and some muttons back to the home fields here – and then the heavens opened and it rained heavily for the next twenty four hours, rather like in January.

Now the fields are very waterlogged and the flock is stomping along doggedly through the rain, along with their shepherd!

I hope that the weather clears and is settled and dry by the end of the week so that lambing gets under way in the dry.