Till the Cows Come Home: Memories of a Rural Childhood

With their newborn baby, Lorna Sixsmith and her husband Brian James swapped their public service careers in the UK for the love of cows beneath Slievemargy’s Brow. Lorna’s grandfather George had inherited Garrendenny’s “shrubby wood, bog and decayed timber”. One of nine children, Lorna’s father Joe devoted his life to modernising and improving the farm. Now Lorna’s children play in the same fields. Recounted with Lorna’s trademark wit, through these touching, heart-warming and often amusing stories of Joe’s s childhood in the 1940s, Lorna’s of the 1970s and now her own children’s, we share this journey down memory lane to glimpse rural life down the generations. Whether it was being on the back of a tractor to deliver milk, foraging for blackberries or bumping along grassy tracks atop quivering loads of straw, the long days of summer were filled with adventure. Townie cousins came to stay, hay fields were obstacle courses, superstitions and country cures abounded, and weather was the main topic of conversation. Each generation is different, but some aspects of rural life don’t change. There are the highs and lows of farming, when you don’t know whether to laugh or cry, but laughter, as Lorna finds, is always the best medicine.