Larry’s fan club

We had twin lambs born at the farm a few weeks ago. One has a sort of ‘floppy’ ear, which makes him easily recognisable. Running down the side of our land is a very deep ravine where the stream has forged its way down the hillside into the village of Oxenhope. It is quite a climb up from the village involving walking in the deep stream or clinging to the shale sides. If sheep get into it they can live in there for months until the farmers figure out where their sheep have disappeared to – then it needs a very good working sheep dog to help get them back out. Larry the Lamb, or Houdini, as we call him – very quickly learnt the delights of The Goit (as it is called round here). The fencing along the top is brilliant – pig wire, barbed wire and even willow weaving – but Houdini gets through it. We are now getting people regularly knocking on the door. ‘If he got through he’ll find his way back again’ we repeat time and time again. One woman in tears however moved us. ‘His cries are heartbreaking – please go and rescue that poor little lamb – I cannot bear to see the poor little thing crying for his mummy’… We went to get our best dog, Meg. Sure enough there was Houdini at the bottom of the ravine bleating his head off. An Oscar winning performance indeed. Meg, who is absolutely brilliant, crawled on all fours through the water very slowly, gently picked him up by the scruff of his neck and bounded up the side of the ravine, plonking him at the other side of the fence. We grabbed him to lift him over and he shot off to ‘mum’ for a feed. At the sound of quite loud applause we looked up towards the road to see about 10 people cheering, clapping and dabbing their eyes. We waved and they all wandered off, the show over, missing Houdini, feed finished, trotting up to the fence, squeezing through the smallest hole and sliding off down the ravine again…