This spring, I’ve had an amazing adventure and I joined the animal welfare team at Watermeadow Park as part of the Great Spring Adventure at The Chester House Estate in Northamptonshire and what an adventure it was.
Firstly, for people that know me well, lambs are certainly not my thing let along any other farm animals and I found myself looking after 80 cade lambs, orphaned by their mothers and delivered to the Northamptonshire estate by local farmers.
This was all part of the Great Spring Adventure where families could participate in feeding them, along with the hunt for Golden Egg and enjoy over 10,000 years of history on the estate dating back to Roman times.
Arriving on 9th March, we had to create the lamb barn, which would be my home for five weeks, and then manage the shock of 80 cade lambs arriving – some as little as two days old. I’ve never looked after lambs before and this was something that was certainly going to challenge me, but in different way.
In the early days, it was about educating the lambs to drink milk from bottles, topping up water for their pens and feeding them four times a day – 6 am, 12 noon, 6 pm and 10 pm. They were long days and a complete shock to the system, however, once I was into the routine of waking up early, working with other volunteers to make up milk and hand feed the lambs, I would start to see progress of the lambs growing.
We were also joined by two six month old pigs and four chickens who would lay us around 20 eggs a week. It was literally proving to be a spring adventure!
Gradually as the lambs got older and more used to being hand reared, life became easier although I did sleep for a whole weekend at one point to catch up on what I had missed! I was also adapting to living the longest amount of weeks in Miles the Motorhome – a total of five weeks.
This proved interested as I had been buying food on road trips, however, this time, Miles was permanently parked up for six weeks meaning I had to bring shopping in and we couldn’t drink the water on site, so it was buying water to drink and numerous trips off site to wash clothing.
The Easter weekend was very busy as families came in their hundreds to feed the lambs and I would find myself talking to families about them, how we had fed and hand reared them and it was great to meet people from across the world who were interested in seeing the lambs. Some people had travelled from Japan, Jamaica, Italy, Bulgaria and Poland to name a few.
There were times when I would hope for an early night and times when I would fall asleep exhausted from the day on top of running my business at the same time…… but…… I loved it. This was unpredictable, it was exciting and it was fun. Seeing the lambs grow into almost baby sheep inside a few weeks was incredible and I’ll never forget this experience.
A big thank you to Clark, owner of Watermeadow Park, for enabling this to happen and for me to experience this. Will I be back next year ? YOU BET!
