At the close of the TTEAM week, I traveled the three hours to Cornwall with Julie to her farm outside Helston. Julie had offered to have me stay Sunday night at her home with her husband, Andrew, a buddhist cleric. I've booked a self-catering cabin in Mullion, about nine miles south of Helston, starting tomorrow.We drove across Devon and then Cornwall in her Mercedes caravan, a self-contained camper van, with her terrior, Henry, and her terrior/yorkie mix, Megan. Megan sat in my lap almost the whole time. Andrew had supper waiting--homemade garlic pizza with vegetables from their garden and the goat cheese they make from their goats' milk.
Andrew and Julie have a 70-acre landholding called Carthvean ("small holding") that was all field seven years ago and is now gardens and pastures and woods (they've planted a whopping 10,000 trees), replete with two huge polytunnels (plastic-sheeted greenhouse quonset huts). Andrew and friends had just put the plastic on the second polytunnel today--Julie was thrilled.
Julie's a TTOUCH practitioner for camelids (llamas and alpacas), and she and Andrew run the farm, grow most of their own food (fruits, berries, vegetables, greens), raise alpacas, make their own cheese and yogurt, and have all manner of critters around the place--rabbits, three llamas, alpacas, goats, guinea pigs, cats, ponies, dogs, chickens, probably others.
Their farm is a WWOOF member: WorldwWide Opportunities for Organic Farming. WWOOF hooks up people who own farms or ranches with people who want to work on them for room and board. Three WWOOFers John, Imiko, and Manuela, are at Carthvean on various schedules to help out. I met all three of them while I was here.
I woke at 7 Monday morning, bathed in a clawfoot tub, and had a breakfast of homemade muesli with fresh goat's milk, homegrown strawberries, and apples. John came in carrying seven eggs, this morning's generous output from the Muscovies in the coop.
The weather continues to be very hot and sunny, with a breeze at the top of hill. My laundry on the line dried in very short time.
Alpaca shearing was to start at 10a, but first we had to get the critters into the shearing barn--girls this morning, then the boys after lunch.
Julie, Imoko, and I herded the girls from the pasture using TTOUCH wands, a herding tape, and voice. There were thirteen alpacas in this group. They shuffled along the field in a great bleating, scrambling mass of round woolly bodies and long woolly necks, directed and, in some cases blocked, by our moving barricade of herding tape. As they reached the narrower wooded lane, they hustled and balked and shoved and walked at our insistence, eventually jamming up at the open doorway to the work barn.
The barn has concrete floors and moveable partitions so corrals can be resized and areas closed off to direct the animals through the shearing process. Julie clucked, cajoled, and shoved them into the main holding area, Colin the shearer arrived, and we all got to work--Julie, Imiko, another friend of Julie's, Colin, and me.
Shearing alpacas is different from shearing sheep. Alpacas are big, strong, feisty, and all flailing limbs and neck when you get them down. You can't just pin them to the ground like you can with a sheep.
Instead, the shearer must lift and bring the alpaca to the floor, truss it by forefeet and hind feet to a pulleyed stretcher system, and flip the animal over twice during shearing to reach all parts of its body for the fleece. Colin, well muscled and well skilled, did all this wrestling and shearing with expert maneuvers and a predictable rhythm that made it very easy to know where to be next to support him.
After photographing the first shearing, I helped with the rest, holding down the alpaca’s head to keep it from squirming, and doing TTOUCH on its ears to help calm it. Some of them screamed or whistled or bleated with astonishing shrill throughout the whole process, while others lay submissive and quiet until they were released, looking like fuzzy miniature giraffes, barely ten minutes later.
The deep drone of the clippers motor, the constant calling from those still in the holding pens, the screeches of the one being shorn--every sound bounced off the concrete walls, and my ears were ringing by the time all twenty of the alpacas were done. (The seven boys didn't want to come in for their turn in the shearing barn--they'd seen what the girls looked like when we herded the boys past their fields.)
By the end of they day, we'd collected bags and bags of alpaca wool. White, brown, fawn, caramel, black--I'd never known they came in such colorful variety. We took two qualities of fleece from each alpaca--first quality from the "blanket" (back, sides, upper flanks), and second quality from legs, belly, neck, chest, head. The textures and lengths also varied widely. Long and crinkly is best, according to Julie, for its elasticity.
Duties done, Andrew later drove me to the Criggan Mill cottages in Mullion and took Manuela, another WWOOFer I met at the farm, to her holiday hotel a few miles away.
The day had been hot, and although the cabin's windows were open, the cottage smelled a bit musty. And, ohmigod, I’ve traveled back in time—the whole place is decorated in 1960s orange, brown, and yellow, big stipes, and funky lamps. It's sunny, though, with a stream at the back behind an embankment and wood pigeons and magpies sharing the bushes.
I pay for electricity from a meter box that looks like it was built in the 1930s. The place has a kitchen, so I can cook my own meals for the week--yay.
The cabins are at the bottom of a hill in a fold of valley; I can't see the coast from here; it's 200 yards down the road. The landlady was brusque, as if she doesn't like her job today.
Cornwall has fields, hedgerows, gorse, heathlands, and--surprising to see--Monterey pines, which were imported by the Victorians. The pines do very well in this windy coastal area, just as they do in northern California. They've been here so long, though, that they're dying off of old age, and the government wants people to plant more. Andrew and Julie have planted about 50 on their land.
I had dinner at Mullion Cove Hotel, just up the hill from the cabin toward the coast. It has a spectacular ocean view. The evening was warm, so I dined outside on mushroom risotto and garlic bread at an umbrella-covered picnic table. The bread was hot and buttery and garlicky--a big, fat french roll sliced in half. I munched most of one piece before starting my meal. The waiter had forgotten my cutlery, and I went in to get it, leaving my food behind. I returned to several people all talking at me from nearby tables.
"We tried to stop him, love, but he was off quick as a wink."
I looked over. The other half of my luscious garlic bread was gone--nicked in all its melted garlicky butter crispy glory by an opportunistic seagull. Dang. And I'd saved the best piece for last, too.
The gull made short work of his catch, entertaining us all with how quickly he swallowed it, and practically whole. By the time I got out my camera, he was downing the last hunk.
"What wine are you drinking there?" one of my fellow diners asked. "He'll be comin' back for that next."
I laughed, finished my meal, and took the last of my white wine across the street to the cliff edge to watch the planet roll away from the last fifteen minutes of sunlight. The sky gave a burst of pink light after the sun was gone, like a little explosion of color.I toasted the dayfall, ordered a takeaway dessert of cheese and biscuits to have for lunch this week, and toted my leftovers home to my 1960s cabin to enjoy a comfortable year 2000 bed.
