Acton Scott Working Museum

We joined lots of other Shropshire volunteers at a thank-you event at Acton Scott working museum near Church Stretton.

It was a beautiful evening, the air was still, with a hazy sun in a reddening sky. While we gathered around the introductory speech, a robin hopped around on the barn roof and cocked his head on one side as if he, too, was listening.

When I finally climbed into bed my head was full of piglets and haymaking, brick-making and butter-churning, lambs and ducks, cobblestones and farm carts. I was reminded of the time when I used to climb over the half door and sit with the calves at the farm at the bottom of the hill. Calves were small and docile. There was a later day when I was grown up when I had to stand with an electrician in a barn full of cows and stop them knocking over the ladder he was standing on. Cows gradually get more and more bold until nothing you do frightens them away – and they’re so big!

The piglets were gorgeous, soundly asleep alongside their mum in an old-fashioned pig-sty. The last time I saw piglets it was at the Royal Show and the mum was in a cage so small she couldn’t possibly turn around with all the piglets lined up feeding. I’ve only bought Freedom Food pork since then.

This picture I’ve entitled ‘total contentment’. If we didn’t eat meat, pigs would probably be extinct as we don’t drink their milk or use their skin for much (correct me if I’m wrong). We might not like the idea of killing animals for meat but the fact is that to get milk a calf needs to be born – and you can’t keep all those calves as pets – can you?

Beautiful old trees sheltered a pool surrounded by wildflowers, foxgloves and alkanet, buttercups and campion – pinks and blues and yellows all vying for space around the water. Wild ducks swam lazily, dipping their heads and dripping water droplets spreading rings across the water.

We were taken back to an age when time was getting the hay in before it rained and muscle-building was butter-churning and cheese-making, bale-lugging and ploughing, and energy was provided by shire horses pulling the ploughs and turning the wheels for machinery.

How simple life seemed then, working with nature to earn a living, provide food on the table. How many of us these days, in 21st century England, I wonder, would be able to survive without food shops?