FROM A DARTMOOR HILL FARM

In my own case, this includes the weaned calves from last spring, a group of autumn calves with their mothers, a bunch of weaned foals, one or two bulls that need to be under ‘close supervision’, and a few odds and sods that’ll need some TLC. They come inside before Christmas, and will stay in until early April.

They’ll need hay or silage, baled in between the ‘showers’ last summer, bedding up with straw, and given a handful of cereal-based supplement, both lorried in from arable counties. The water troughs need to be checked for detritus – and you can be sure that in each group there will be an animal who leaves a little something in the troughs every day.

This said, the daily grind is a two-way street.

The pain of frost-nipped fingers when the mercury plummets and the water pipes go all lumpy, and the tractor won’t start, or the soggy depression of driving rain in a windy wet spell, has to be set against the deep contentment to be found by close contact with a herd of cows. Bed them up with a quiet word each morning, and they’ll soon be brushing up against you to get to the feed trough.

Even that wild-eyed Galloway, whose eyes were out on stalks when she’d first calved, will deign to come and say hello. The housed young calves will soon gain confidence to gallop, heels in the air, around the shed.

The quietest cows will be the native South Devons. Dartmoor is still a stronghold of the traditional orange breed, although they have a marked plimsoll line across the moor. (Or should that be some kind of ‘Wallace’s line’? Twas Wallace, you’ll recall, who noticed the break in the indigenous fauna and flora, somewhere around Java, between the Antipodes, and Asia, which first indicated the concept of an isolated Gondwanaland.)

Obviously, as their name suggests, they’re found right along the bottom edge of the county, and then up into the southern slopes and valleys of Dartmoor. Around either side of the moor, heading north, however, they have a well-defined territory. You won’t find many old families keeping South Devon cattle north of Lydford, or much further around the corner from Chagford than about Throwleigh. The natives in the top corner will suck their teeth, and say ‘Oh no, them great things wouldn’t do up here’. No disrespect is implied; it’s just the way it has always been. Up there, they keep Ruby Reds.
(A farm carrying South Devons ‘beyond the pail’ is likely owned by a newcomer.)

On reflection, the line is pretty close to the north/south watershed divide. You might expect to find South Devons on the catchments of the Tavy, the Dart and the Teign, but not on that of the Taw or the Torridge.

Similar distinctions show in various parishes down into Cornwall. They’re oft found in pockets down through the coast, usually in and about the brassica ground. (And you can guess how big they’d get down there!) However, ask a native on Bodmin and he’ll deny that they’d keep ‘them South Hams’ down there.

Nowadays, of course, you can keep pretty much whatever breed you like, if it can live with its head in the feedbag, and you liberally sprinkle whatever minerals some clever little rep has sold you. But, in the days when cattle had to survive on the land they inhabited, the lessons learned might have something to tell us yet!

There’s one other thing to observe, on the subject of South Devons. Sometime in the last 200 years, they changed colour. My friend Robert was telling me about a survey he’d been referring back to. It was conducted among the clergy of South Devon by, I believe, the Bishop of Exeter, in the 1700s. Amongst all the other fascinating details, only two parishes were reported to have orange cattle (Modbury, and one other, if my memory serves), the rest were all black! I admit this news will be taken as heresy in some households, and I’ll need to watch my back for repeating it, but there it is.

I suppose it might explain why the breed, when crossed out to another breed, has a tendency toward black progeny, rather than
the rusty, ‘dead bracken’ colour we all know.
A South Devon cow seems only to have to look over the hedge at a Galloway bull to have a black calf!

Anyway, I’d better get back to feeding
some cattle.