Newsletter

Let me be the first to offer a very warm welcome to Little Farm. At the age of 18 that was exactly how I felt when I first set foot on this lovely Little Farm. I married into a family who had been farming these lovely Pennine hills since 1964.

As this is the first of our newsletters, let me introduce you to my little family. They go really well with Little Farm. We have now my father in law, Cedric, my husband Jim and me, Katie. Jim and I had a lovely daughter, Amy, who grew up and enticed her husband, Tim to move in with us all. Brave chap!

They have two children, John and Albert who are wonderful and you will hear and see more of them later along with the rest of us.

For now, you have not logged on to this web site to listen to me rabbit on about how wonderful my grandchildren are, they the best and I am not even slightly biased, but we are all here now to tell the story of Russell. I have to warn you though; this is a story that has many moods. It does have a happy ending, and that will continue with updates.

Tim and Amy had a lovely quiet horse called Lady, and that she was, a Lady. You probably have noticed that we speak of her as was, she has gone now and we do miss her but she has left us Russell and his nature is just like his mother.

When he was born, Jim, John and I were on holiday in Cornwall so we heard about the birth in bits. Lady was in the field right in front of the house so that they could keep a watch on her while she gave birth in her natural environment. We were told that she had dropped a foal and all looked well then another call came to say she had produced another one.

This is very unusual in shires. If it does happen one or both foals will die. The main reason that it did happen was because this was the first horse to be born on our farm in living memory and we were inexperienced. The thought that she would have had two never crossed our minds.

The first to be born was a filly and she was named Frances after my mother in law who died a few years ago. The second was our Russell. He was the one everyone said would die. When we came back he was in a very poor state. The vet thought there was nothing for him and he would be dead within a few hours.

You should have seen him. Half the size of his sister and not able to stand up to get a drink. They had been bottle feeding him as much as he could take but he was fading fast. Sometimes, when you have an animal like this they won’t drink or try when you are helping them. You can give them milk and put it right in their mouths but they spit it out. It can get very frustrating.

Not Russell. Whatever we did he seemed to know we were doing our best and he tried so very hard. It seemed that the vet had done everything possible and no more could be done. There he was, a little baby with big brown eyes and the longest lashes, looking at us and asking for our help.

I have been trained in using aromatherapy oils so I thought that we may as well try that. The vet told us what was breaking down in his system, causing him to lose his hold on life so I mixed some oils together that would help him specifically with the affected systems in his frail body and we took turns to rub them into his skin. I think he liked the attention.

I think that something worked in him because after a day or so he looked for all the world that he had a really bad stomach ache so we decided that if he had to die, the very least we could do was make him as comfortable as possible.

What would you have done? Well, we dosed him up with the very best brandy we could get our hands on. Best thing in the world for a bad tummy.

Guess what? He liked that!

His bright red tongue reached out to the bottle as if to try to get it as soon as he could and make the most of it. His eyes glistened (maybe he was drunk) and you could tell he was not happy when the bottle was empty. When we stopped mixing brandy in with the milk he went off it a bit!

After a short while, we could tell two things. First that he was getting much stronger and second, he liked the brandy. His nickname is Brandy even though we called him Russell after the long suffering vet who attended him.

I am sure that what we did helped a little but we have to give credit to our vet because he was outstanding.

As the months progressed he grew alongside his twin sister and they look so beautiful together with their mum.

Next month I will tell you how things went when we took Frances to an agricultural show.