Beach off-limits

A lot can happen overnight, so I get out and about as soon as I've downed my first pot of tea. The key thing is to head-count the sheep: anything other than N = 15 it's Houston we have a problem.  It has happened that we have extras, as when two years ago our abutting neighbour bought in a handful of particularly jumpy sheep. But it's more likely for the count to come up short. Anything missing is dead OR has its head caught in a wire fence OR has gone on holiday. All of these are a pain in the arse. It is therefore a relief when, after repeated counts, the missing beast bursts out of the shrubbery; or is revealed cudding in plain sight exactly masked by a 'larger' sheep [not small but far away] in the foreground.

08:00 last Wednesday it was N = 14 again and I set off à la BoPeep. I say again because one of the sheep has been persistently AWOL over the Winter. She had a bad case of The Itch, lost chunks of fleece and looked quite wretched altogether. It was as if the poor creature had been sent to Coventry or the sheep equivalent of Leperstown. Despite expecting any day to discover her stiff with her legs in the air, she has survived two rounds of treatment and the worst of Winter. When she is away feeling mizz, she is often to be found in or around The Skunch. The Field Over The River is so called because beyond its Eastern edge the land falls abruptly 10m to the river stream which bounds our farm. This cliff tapers off along our field immediately N. Between this gentle slope and the cliff is a bosky dell or 'skunch'. There has always been a low wall parallel to the river in the Skunch and beyond it is a tiny beach covered in willow and shade-loving woodland plants. The kids used to have picnic-and-paddle down there when they were tots, but it's gotten jungly and briar-grown since the girls left home.

And that's where I found the errant sheep. In her earlier lonely sojourns she'd eaten her way through to wall and now was hopped over to the beach. Thence is but a short paddle to Wexford and the neighbour's meadow. Which would never do, so I hooshed her out of it, and spent the rest of the morning running a fence along the dwarf wall. Running a fence requires the assembly of a measured length of sheep-wire + stakes, pry-bar, shovel, staples, sledge-hammer, claw-hammer, pliers, secateurs, gloves, chain-saw + PPE. Then pushing a wheel-barrow full of kit 300m down-hill on a 1:10 slope. Down is easy, but you really don't want to push 40m = 20kg of off-cut sheep wire UP hill. 

We'll have to see what happens but the beach is now officially off-limits. ↑ indicating the two more-or-less vertical trees which book-end and support the wire. Dry-stone walls are the very devil for driving fence-posts unless they are tall enough and wide enough to have two faces back-filled with small stones and sod. Not the case here, so three (3) posts will have serve for the 11m run of fence.