Life at Court Farm

I arrived in Court Farm Clovelly in……. Liz has a job as a Physiotherapist in the hospital in Bude and works there Monday to Friday until 2020. She is due to leave this year in August. Liz leaves around 8am Monday mornings and gets back around 5pm, she has an NHS car and goes daily. Piers rents court farm from the Rouse family and keeps long horned cattle which are beef cattle with long horns which grow in a sort of bow, there are about 50 on the farm. He takes them to the Abattoir at Hatherleigh where they are sold for beef and delivered to a butcher in Bideford. They produce exceptionally good beef. Long horns are a breed which have been farmed in the UK for about 100 years. They are wintered inside and fed on silage which is made on the farm. The damns are reared on the farm and are raised here also. The house is set on the side of a large yard which used to be cobbled. Grass now grows on it as keeping the cobbles clean was too time consuming. The buildings around the yard are quite old and rather beautiful to look at a date of 1800 is displayed but they could be older. The house is old too and can be quite cold sometimes but there is an Aga in the kitchen which keeps it warm providing the wind is in the right direction. There are two small areas one at the front of the house where flowers are grown in pots and one in the back of the house which is left for birds with fat balls hanging down. This is seen from the kitchen window, mostly sparrows seem to feed and nest near there but also robins and blue tits can also be seen there. Piers and Liz live in the main house, but there are also two other houses which belong to the Estate. Calves used to be kept in stalls on one side of the yard but latterly they are used as storerooms. When the weather is warm enough, we eat our food on a large round wooden table in the yard. The cattle graze in rota out in 10 fields. The farm overlooks the Bristol Channel and on a clear day you can see over to North Wales. You can also sometimes see Lundy island. There cannot be too many farms in such a beautiful setting in the South West, we sometimes walk to Mouth Mil and have our picnics there. This is where we saw the new millennium in on New Year’s Eve. It is the most beautiful place.