Rebekah Housden: Tup transformation brings lesson in change

As the season changes to autumn, we prepare to release the tups.

Initially, they aren’t keen on the idea and shuffle, fidget and snort as I put on their harnesses. They’re even less enthusiastic about being loaded into the trailer.

It reminds me of how we can all be plucked from our physical and mental comfort zones and of the changes we face constantly in farming which may be unexpected, uncontrollable or unwelcome. 

See also: Chris Bennett – knowledge from beyond agriculture is an asset

About the author

Rebekah Housden

Rebekah Housden is based at Roadhead in Cumbria, and has worked on a farm with 600 ewes for 11 years. She also shares a smallholding of 90 ewes. She is a first-responder, a parish clerk, runs a community bar and caters for rural weddings. 

Read more articles by Rebekah Housden

These changes can be merciless – involving the weather, illness or death.

In our area recently there have been a couple of bereavements in rural families. The devastation this brings goes hand-in-hand with uncertainty.

How will the families cope? What will happen to their farms?

I recently chatted with a woman who suffered such devastation 23 years ago. At the time, some doubted she would be able to continue alone.

She did, for the sake of her children, and now – in a different area with a different husband and a different farming regime – lives in an idyllic location with beautiful gardens.

From the outside looking in, you would never suspect the tragedy she had once experienced.

In this area we are also aware of the permanent changes that can be made to our landscape as a result of schemes that can alter the lives of tenant farmers in the blink of an eye.

Each time I’ve visited the auction recently there have been more than a couple of dispersal sales included, almost all from over the border – with the tenant asked to leave by the laird to make way for solar schemes or tree planting.

Each time the mist lifts from Liddel Water and I look across the border into Scotland, the view is different. More trees, more turbines, fewer fluffy white dots. 

Arriving at their destination on a dreich Borders morning, the tups trudge out over the saturated ground, the image of reluctance.

Within minutes their world transforms as the ewes circle them and they suddenly stop looking for the way out. It reminds me not all unexpected changes are to be resisted.