No room for a U-turn delivering stock to farms
As we sell our EasyRams to flock owners throughout the UK, we end up having to deliver many of these sheep to their new homes, writes Robyn Hulme.
So far this year these trips have taken us to places as far apart as Cornwall, Kent, Lincolnshire, Northumberland, Aberdeen, most of Wales and most parts in between.
This means that we become of necessity great users of the dreaded satnav. This modern technology has many advantages but cannot easily cope with the fact that a single postcode covers an area of five miles along two sides of a valley in the Black Mountains, near Abergavenny.
When this is used in conjunction with another piece of modern kit, the mobile phone, there is even more chaos, as mobiles rarely work in these more remote areas – particularly when they are in the bottom of valleys.
Scottish valleys, Yorkshire dales, Welsh mountain tracks all provide their unique challenges but there is nothing that fills me with as much dread as travelling through the lanes of Devon. The problem is that our Ford Ranger and our triaxle double decker sheep trailer comes in at just over 35ft long and 7ft 6" wide (sorry, I am too old for meaningful metric).
This is fine when steaming along a motorway but provides real challenges in Devon.
The particular problems down there are that the lanes are generally very narrow and the famous Devon hedges are growing on top of vertical banks that are often faced with stone so there are no leafy Shropshire verges to squeeze onto when meeting oncoming traffic.
The lanes run up and down steep valley sides and there is inevitably total mayhem when you meet another vehicle, particularly if it is also towing a trailer.
The final terror is to arrive at a stone-built bridge which was designed for a packhorse and runs at right angles to the road you are driving on and measures a max of eight feet wide, leaving no more than three inches' clearance either side of the trailer.
Nevertheless such Devon adventures pale into insignificance with last Saturday night's jaunt when we were trying to find a farm near Galashiels in southern Scotland and the satnav boldly led us down an ever-narrowing road that ended at a padlocked field gate that gave no access to where we were going – aaargh!
Robyn Hulme of Pikesend Farm, Ellesmere, is founder of "Easyrams" – the UK's only NZ Suffolk breeders
