Welcoming guests to The House in the Hill means welcoming them to our family farm: Swinside Townfoot. With lambing season always proving itself to be the most rewarding and challenging time of year, we thought we would share with you what happens behind the scenes on our farm each spring...
We are expecting around 2500 lambs this spring, and yes, that’s a lot of lambs! To us though, these lambs aren't only new additions on the farm but also the result and reward after another year of hard work, attention to detail, and careful management of our flock of Cheviots (mostly by Peter).
As always, lambing will be a team effort at Swinside Townfoot with all four of us (Peter, the boys, and myself) working on rotation to keep watch, and intervening where necessary. We also have Scott, Robbie, and Moira who come to help us out during lambing. Scott is an old school friend of Peter’s who has been coming to give us a hand for the last 25 years! Robbie is a neighbouring farmer’s son who started lambing with us at age 15. Now at 23, he is a full-time accountant but he’s still lambing with us each spring. Moira (who is Robbie’s mum) is a great friend and a woman of many talents! She’s worked with us for years and every lambing season, she takes the first shift to feed and water everyone.
With our trusty (and very experienced) team in place, we lamb two batches of our sheep indoors over 6 weeks. Lambing indoors ensures there is always someone on hand, but it also gives the ewes and newborn lambs shelter from the very unpredictable Scottish weather. If you know any sheep farmers, you’ll know that the weather is our biggest challenge. Last year’s lambing season was brutally wet, with some farmers losing a heartbreaking number of lambs to the unrelenting cold and rain. We experienced some losses, which are always hard to take, but with lambing indoors we were able to keep as many sheep inside as possible before sending the lambs out, wrapped in their little raincoats if need be.
I take the night shifts during lambing, leaving Peter and all the boys to enjoy the craic and camaraderie that comes with working together for long hours at this busy time of year. Day or night, the process is the same though, in the majority of cases the ewe will lamb by herself but if anyone needs a midwife, we’ll help out. From then, ewes and their lambs are put in individual pens so they can bond and rest following the birth - think of this as the ‘tea and toast’ time new (human) mothers get at the hospital. Unlike humans though, individual pens are also to prevent other ewes from attempting to steal newborn lambs.
From then on, it's just a case of keeping an eye on everyone and ensuring the lambs get a full tummy of colostrum (liquid gold!). If a ewe doesn’t have enough milk, we’ll also top her lambs up by bottle for her so that no one is going hungry. As soon as everyone is stable and looking well, they are turned back out into the fields as it is the best place for the new mothers and their lambs to be.
Though it brings challenges each year, we’re always as ready as we can be for them and every year it’s worth it to see the lambs skipping together in the fields. We know our hard work has created a thriving bunch of lambs that will continue our way of life here at Swinside Townfoot.
If you would love to stay on our working family farm during the spring months, The House in the Hill is now open for bookings and we would love for you to see those happy lambs playing in the fields, just as we do.
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