3 minute read
John Nash: “Well I Never!”
John Nash is a retired, well sort of retired, fruit farm manager in Kirdford who enjoys scribbling about life on the farm from the now to days gone by.
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Well my friends… Christmas is a memory, New Year celebrations are over, and the long, grey month of January stretches out before us. Not the greatest vision to look forward to is it?
To make the first few days a touch brighter I thought I would introduce a couple of past events that may just raise your interest for a few moments.
Winter nights are fully primed to just the right consistency for strange events to happen that are difficult to explain. Long, cold, dark hours, when we hide away behind locked doors, cuddle down under the sheets and blankets and yearn for the sun’s warmth on our faces once more. It all lends to the mystery of these couple of stories I think you might find interesting.
I say stories but they were fully reported at the time. So… Story 1. It was a cold and snow covered night on the 8th/ 9th February in 1855. It had snowed through a great part of the night and people in the villages and towns around the counties of Devon and Dorset awoke to view the heavy fall. They also awoke to something else. For a distance that varies (according to various records) from 40 to 100 miles, there was a line of hoof prints in the snow. They extended from Exmouth up to Topsham, across the Exe estuary to Dawlish and Teignmouth. Other areas also reported these hoof prints around the counties.
The prints ran in a line with nothing impeding their way. Over walls, over roofs, across courtyards and over meadows.
They were reported as resembling a donkey’s hoof in some ares and a cloven hoof in others, and measuring four inches long and three inches across.
Superstition labeled them to be ‘The Devils Footprints’.
How true were they? Who knows? It was a darn clever spoof if it was a group of Victorian students at work, that’s for sure, especially the bit about going over roof tops!
But the Illustrated London News that reported it in 1855 was confident enough to print a diagram of the tracks found.
As you can see, a very detailed diagram! Story 2. This happened in the south of England around Oxfordshire on the 3rd November 1888.
Around eight o’clock that night thousands of sheep all over the county went ballistic. They broke out of fields and barns; burst out of hurdled paddocks and fled in panic.
In the morning they were found crowded in field corners, many still panting in terror, some many miles from their home farms.
The panic had spread through flocks covering over 200 square miles!
The Times reported the event and said that even a thousand men could not have induced such panic in those sheep. What had happened? There had been a storm, with plenty of lightning and thunder. Did this cause them to mass panic? I have my own theory… If you’ve read my scribbles before you know my opinion of sheep. I love lambs, they are the most adorable of God’s creatures but adult sheep… no way! They permanently look for ways to commit suicide while steadily driving their owners to a breakdown. I don’t think it needed a thousand men. I believe just one would be enough! So, I think that fateful evening was probably the fault of some poor farm worker slowly weaving his way back home from the village pub after a hard day’s work on the farm. Poor chap stumbles and falls into the ditch alongside a field of dozing ewes. He shrieks out as he hits the ice-cold water at the bottom of the ditch – it is November after all!
On the other side of the hedge the shriek awakens a dozing ewe. She, by natural instinct, is instantly convinced she’s about to be attacked, disembowelled and eaten.
So she panics.
The rest of the flock are only too willing to join in the fun and join her in the stampede for the horizon. As virtually every farm in those days would have had a few sheep somewhere on its fields, the panic soon escalated to county proportions.
Eureka… common sense… it’s the answer.
Well, that’s my thoughts anyway.
No good? Well, what’s your suggestion then? In the meantime, while your thinking…
Happy New Year folks! John Nash
