Country Life
BY IAN NIALL
FOR some reason sheep-shearing on the moun- tain was later than usual this year. Perhaps it was a question of the availability of all the labour at the right time. Whatever the cause, the sheep carried their heavy fleeces through uncomfortably warm days. One found them sheltering from the sun in the undercut banks along the track, The shepherds know the urgency of their tasks well enough, and it is an outsize job to gather sheep in and handle the many hundreds that have to be clipped. These gatherings are an impressive sight, but just as wonderful is the dispersal when the large flocks go back to their grazing, looking whiter than ever, flowing along familiar paths that twist and turn with the firmer ground on the way to the high pastures. Coming down, the converging flocks remind me of streams feeding a lake, and going back they move like trails of smoke going into the bracken until the mass disintegrates and fleeced sheep are individual again. The tiny dots on the hill represent a great investment in labour be- tween lambing time and that final market day when they stand penned for the butcher in the bustle and interminable patter of the auction. It is a great deal harder to raise a good sheep or bullock on the mountainside than it is to farm a valley.
HAPPY COUNTRYMAN
I have just been reading a book that seems to me to be all set to find a place on the book- shelves of very many country-lovers—E. L. Roberts's Happy Countryman (Herbert Jen- kins, 16s.). Mr. Roberts has studied birds and wild life in the Hebrides, the pine forests of the north, and Hickling Broad in Norfolk, among other places. As a naturalist he has been the companion of gamekeepers, poachers and rat-catchers, and his book is the sort of thing that, as one reads, one wishes the author at hand to receive compliments. Mr. Roberts has found delight in search of the stone curlew and its nest, watched the peregrine eyasses, fed and reared a leveret that almost turned his home upside down in the end. I endorse his opinion of a minority of gamekeepers who indiscriminately destroy owls and kestrels, and share his feeling for the land and natural life, which is something a fortunate man is born with.
GYPSY FOLK
Several times I have had the fortune to encounter large parties of travelling folk moving into my bit of the country. They are to be seen on occasions coming through the old town of Chester and crossing the Dee bridge there. They may also come in from the east. but, whatever their route, they soon break up into small detachments of two or three vans with a collection of children and dogs and the inevitable horse walking at the end of a rope. The travellers don't work very much on farms here, but sell odds and ends, clothes pegs and paper flowers. There are some gypsies to be found occasionally working at harvest or potato-lifting, but these, I think, are mainly 'residents' who have almost become assimilated locally. From the old people one sometimes hears of families considered not quite conventional and these accounts often end with the remark, 'Her old father was a gypsy—you can tell just by looking at her— and that's the reason for the behaviour of all of them,' This may not be very just, for the
SUMMER PRUNING
Summer pruning of apple and pear trees involves the pinching out of side shoots to leave no more than half a dozen leaves, thus encouraging the formation of fruit buds. Standard trees should be left untouched but others benefit by this treatment, which can be given from now until about the end of August.
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