Having friends to stay this weekend gave us a good excuse to have a day off and see what Dalwood Country Fair was all about. Dalwood is one of our local villages (we walked to the vineyard there the other week), and in fact we stayed in Dalwood a couple of times while looking at properties in the area back in 2019, but the fair hasn’t been on since we moved here.
The only point of comparison we had was Stockland Fair (the Yarcombe Terrier Races is the other local event we’ve been to), and so we were surprised to see just how big Dalwood Country Fair was. A lot of the market stalls were the same ones as Stockland, but there were far more games aimed at children and adults, helping to raise money for various charities and local community ventures. Our visitors loved the coconut shy and a curling-style game with water and washing up liquid… as well as a game where you had to push a rubber duck down a gutter with a water pistol, despite your chances of winning seemingly depending on which way up the duck was placed! There were so many rows of stalls intermingled with games that it was quite easy to get lost. The ferret racing was back again, as was the children’s train ride – although this time one of the ferrets (a baby) was a little inquisitive and tried to wander off!!
Because there was so much going on, the old tractors and diggers on display didn’t get much attention – although the police tractor and police car attracted quite a few people – most asking how the police managed to chase people in a tractor (spoiler alert apparently it’s not actually used and is more for attention to raise awareness of rural crime at local events).
After a couple of hours we’d had a go at everything we wanted to try, and decided to head on to the Axe Sheep Fest 2022. One of our neighbours had sent us the details, but we hadn’t realised it was the first time the event had ever been held – it had been organised as a fundraiser for MNDA (Motor Neurone Disease Association). We parked up and the first thing we came to was a very professional-looking tug of war competition involving proper teams with heavy duty purpose-built boots and clearly a lot of expertise!! Their starting pose reminded us of the haka that the New Zealand rugby team do… fascinating to watch although of the rounds we watched, the team pulling downhill won each time (the teams swapped ends as normally done in sports).
We’d missed the sheep racing but managed to catch one of the sheep-shearing semi-finals, where 4 contestants had to shear 8 sheep on stage against a clock. We think it was part of a much wider country tournament as the shearers we watched had come from Wales, Bodmin, and Devon (and somewhere else we didn’t catch), and they were so fast! The winner finished 2 sheep ahead of the others – although the judging was based on both speed and quality of shearing. We were surprised to see the sheep weren’t really complaining about being manoeuvred so much and so fast, although the confidence of the shearers must have reassured them. Plus after the recent hot weather they were probably keen to lose their thick fleeces!!
The other highlight was seeing some of the rare breed lambs and being able to stroke them. The dog had never been so close to sheep before, certainly ones that were so tame they didn’t bat an eyelid when she sniffed them through the fence. She went from scared to excited to bouncing and playful in about five minutes, at which point we thought people might mistake her playing for trying to eat them, and so we moved on to the next pen quickly!
The big success of the weekend was when our friends kindly said they’d help replace our kitchen tap for us. We’d tried fixing it last year with the help of some other friends, but the tap had ended up leaking again and wouldn’t turn without falling out. Having never replaced a kitchen tap before we’d decided not to try ourselves – nothing in this house is ever easy – and were very glad about that when we firstly had to borrow tools from one of our neighbours, and then the old fittings turned out to be fused together and had to be hacksawed off. Thankfully our friend was able to fix it, and we now had a smart new kitchen tap that is worlds apart from what we had before. A Saturday evening well spent (for us anyway!!)
Ley Farm Cottages 