Nearly a week and a lot has happened

The third car, as predicted, has this evening (9 pm ish) gone around the right hand bend or rather not gone around and looks rather crumpled beside our gateway, anyway hopefully thats the end of the incidents with vehicles for a while.
It has been really wet here today with thick Dartmoor mist, impossible to see the ewes and lambs in the fields until nearly driving over them on the quad bike. One or two lambs have met their maker because of the wet and cold, the little ones that were not so strong or lacked milk from mum. Foxy is still taking his share of lambs to, at both Greenwell and the Prison Farm, this is really frustrating, after we work hard to get them born and into the fields, also each one is a financial loss, next autumns income. The positive out of all the rain is the fields are really greening and trees are bursting into leaf.

Neil's wife Anna has had to have the vet today for a young horse that they think has got Colic, hopefully it will  be ok, Emily is to stay at Princetown tonight just in case they need help, leaving new arrival Janet, a vet student from Hong Kong to hold the fort here.

Janet letting a lamb feed from a un co-operative mum

I have been  to the Exeter Rural Payments Agency (RPA ) office this afternoon to try to sort out the last of our field maps with errors on before the latest 2011 Single Payments Scheme(SPS) forms can be completed. You never know we might even get paid for last years as well !  its only 4 months overdue. Wonderful efficiency in government departments these days, how much does it all cost? I wonder. As a Commoners Association  we have been trying to get Meavy commons registered and  mapped to allow entry into an environmental management scheme, this has been going on for at least 18 months if not more, one does tend to lose the plot !! Anyway I'd better stop there and just say the gentleman who I met with today was very helpful, lets hope the systems he has to work within will deliver.

Finally, just to say that the first calves were born on Sunday night 3 here and 3 at the Prison Farm, that bull must have been working overtime when he first met the cows and one of those wonderfully friendly heifers in the sheep shed calved on Monday night and is very proud of her new baby.