Fordyce Maxwell: 'Shepherds who walked miles a day have been seduced by quad bikes'

Fresh Air
FARMERS are reluctant to walk if transport of any kind is available. That has always been true. As doyen of farming writers AG Street noted of his Canadian neighbours almost a century ago, men would spend an hour trying to catch a horse rather than walk half a mile.

Back in Wiltshire after a year of prairie-busting, Street found that his father was still, as he had done for years, using a pony and trap to get round the farm.

And Street himself, like many farmers, was among the first car owners, starting a tradition of using them in ways the makers had never dreamed of. For Street that included adapting his car to sweep rows of hay together because it was faster than a horse or primitive tractor.

Nor are tales of farmers buying cars on the strength of a big enough boot to carry sheep and calves all apocryphal. Farm cars, more recently mainly four-wheel-drives, work for a living. They are covered with genuine mud and have an undercarriage thick with straw and grass for a genuine reason – they travel where city off-roaders fear to put a wheel.

Within the past 20 years the last of farmers and their staff who walked regularly have gone. Lean, wiry hill shepherds who walked many miles a day, and quite often as much again at night for social reasons, have been seduced by all-terrain quad bikes.

Now the few remaining shepherds, men and women who might have covered a dozen miles a day on foot to look after 500 sheep, quad-bike round 2,000 and more.

Farmers and their staff have always preferred four-legged or four-wheeled transport to walking because of the perceived need to be in two places at once. So little time, so much to do, so roar into a field to check one operation before racing off to another part of the farm or for a spare part or extra seed or, let's be honest, for the hell of it and to look busy.

That, I suspect, colours their opinion of recreational walking. As does the fact that farmers might have an incorrigible urge to look over a neighbour's hedge , but few go on to someone else's land without invitation or permission.

I found that ingrained reluctance difficult to overcome when I started walking for – as so often I use the word loosely – pleasure about 10 years ago. When I find myself on a path that goes through a field, round field boundaries or close to a farmyard I remember how we felt when walkers came along our farm right-of-way.

No question, we resented it, and no matter how much legislation has since been passed about right to roam and how justified most of that is, I suspect most farmers still do.

So whenever I see a farmer watching us, wondering if we'll shut a gate, jump a fence or frighten his cattle, no matter how convinced I am that we're sticking to the prescribed route and walkers' code of conduct, I think of the general who returned every salute with the muttered comment: "And you."

Eventually, a junior officer asked: "Excuse me, sir, why do you say that? "

"Because," said the general, "I started as a private and I know exactly what they're thinking."

So do I.