DAVID WILKINS OF RAMPISHAM HILL FARM, HOOKE, TALKING TO COLIN BOWDITCH ON FRIDAY,12TH NOVEMBER, 2021
TRANSCRIBED BY SALLY WAKEFIELD DECEMBER 2021
CB David, would you like to tell us a little about yourself and the farm and what enterprises you have on the farm.
DW Good afternoon Colin. My name is David Wilkins and for the last 15 years I have lived here at Rampisham Hill Farm just above the village of Hooke with my wife, Ruth. Rampisham Hill Farm is a traditional livestock holding, historically was a dairy farm and then, in the mid ’80s when, sadly a lot of dairies retired and closed, turned into more just unimproved arable pasture very much suited to sheep keeping. So Ruth and I now have the livestock of Dorset Down Sheep on our farm. Having always wanted to, like a lot of people, own a holding of their own, have the livestock and at the same time produce something from the livestock and the holding that can be of a use to the immediate surroundings and the further surroundings and, like a lot of people, also have a product which can hopefully help reduce emissions and use natural products and things like that.
So we farm Dorset Down Sheep here on the farm. They are a sheep which were really bred in the early 1800s when there was sort of crossing of various breeds to make what appeared to be more robust and more viable sheep for the area that they were farming. And the Dorset Down was basically becoming a sort of improved version of a Hampshire Down by claiming that the South Down rams that they used were creating this very much improved Hampshire Down and, because of the popularity in the county of Dorset, readily became just known as the Dorset Down.
Today, unfortunately, they are not as numerous as they used to be. Certainly in the sort of mid 19th Century and 20th Century they were literally everywhere. Very, very popular with commercial farms and most farms would have almost a few hundred if not a few thousand of them. Now, unfortunately they are just on the Rare Breed Register as a minority breed and there is in the region of about 2,500 breeding females in the country of which we have about 75-80 breeding females in our flock living on the Dorset downland to which they were really bred for in the first place.
They are a very good sheep for all round so they’ve got a very good terminal sire ability so the rams, the male sheep, can be used very confidently on other breeds of sheep both for smaller flocks and for larger commercial flocks to produce some very high quality, fast growing lambs. The females have also got very good maternal instincts so they will rear a lamb or two very easily. Lots of nice milk and, again, those lambs mature very quickly and grow on strongly. They also have excellent fleeces as well and their wool is very, very fine making it suitable, historically, for the hosiery trade, fine tweeds and really products which are going to touch the skin where it’s not going to be coarse and too itchy.
We try and use this flock of sheep and the breeding animals for all those aspects. We sell rams commercially, we sell rams for pedigree breeders, the females for pedigree. We do a lot in terms of their wool processing and the fleeces and we’ll come on to that in a minute. As well as the lambs which do go mainly for breeding sales and then a few for wholesale on to a local butcher. Very much kept Ruth and I and the farm working nicely over the last 15 years and to use them as a management tool so we don’t want to be sat on the tractor mowing the grass, we want the sheep to be rotating round the fields to basically be doing the grass keeping and cutting for us.
CB Could I ask, you’ve given us all the very good attributes of the breed, what are the key reasons why they became less popular?
DW The key reasons really were the introduction of, shall we say, Continental breeds. Like everything, global travel was becoming easier so there were other breeds coming from the Continent, things like Charollais, Texels and there was then obviously other English breeds, such as Suffolks and some of your crossbreeds and your mules, were just becoming, shall we say, more fashionable, more desirable. But things go in trends as we know and, unfortunately like everything the Dorset Down didn’t really follow suit and buyers were demanding other types of lamb whether that be less fatty, more fatty, different cuts of lamb that were more suited to other breeds and, like a lot of things, it became how many lambs can you get out of one ewe per year and you can get more out of these cross breeding combinations than you can your pure Dorset Down, things like that. So it’s almost to say they fell out of fashion to other breeds and then really they didn’t keep pace with the times and sadly the numbers just dwindled. But, like a lot of the rarer breeds now, the minority breeds, the tide is by no means turning and wont go back a hundred years but, certainly now there’s getting an increased interest in rarer breed animals, certainly a lot of people are emore conscious about where things are coming from. So they like purchasing through local farms and local stock and ultimately use local breeds in their environment to which Dorset Down sheep were very much bred for the unimproved pasture of downland environments.
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CB When people look in a museum or elsewhere at sheep production and the history of sheep flocks in the county and, at one time there were very many flocks and vast flocks as well, the name, the breed name Dorset Horn crops up. Would you like to say a few words about that, a relatively minor breed now?
DW That’s it. So in Dorset as such we had a few, I suppose you could say native breeds, so the Dorset Down we’ve spoken about. The Dorset Horn and, what is now more common, the Poll Dorset with the word Poll which just means hornless so, essentially, it’s kind of a hornless version of the Dorset Horn. And we also have the little Portland Sheep obviously originally from the Isle of Portland but certainly, yes, the Dorset Horn is also on the Rare Breed list. We’re very lucky to have probably one of the largest flocks in the country still in Dorset and very local to ourselves but you would far more commonly now see the Poll Dorset, the hornless version of the Dorset Horn. But again a very true native sheep to Dorset bred for that slightly poor quality grassland to rear one or two very good lambs each year. And in terms of compare/contrast the Dorset Down the obvious difference is the Dorset Down has sort of a chocolatey brown face and legs whereas the Dorset Horn and the Poll Dorset has a white face and legs. But, in terms of size they are pretty similar in actual size.
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CB OK. Thank you. Now one of the reasons for coming here as well, you mentioned earlier, is the extra enterprise that you’ve added to the farm and that is processing the wool. Would you like to say a few words in general about wool processing, going from the shorn fleece, as it were, through to perhaps a ball of wool, and what you are doing about this?
DW So we’ve, as I said, lived here for 15 years and for most of those years we’ve always sold our wool clip – the wool that’s been shorn off the sheep usually in May/June each year to craftspeople. So for hand spinning, for weaving, for peggling rugs or even just shall we say for stuffing of cushions or cuddly toys. And over those years it’s been amazing how many enquiries we’ve had really of do we do the processing? And then that they have wool and they’d love to process it and unfortunately the answer has been no.
But a couple of years ago we decided we needed seriously now to have a look at what it would be options or the ability for us to process sheep’s wool on our farm here. The long and the short of it is that after a two year process we have very recently opened Rampisham Hill Mill, here on our farm, and we are now able to process the raw sheep’s fibre for clients as basically Commission Processing. So we can take the client’s raw wool and process it to one of a few stages which I’ll run through now as a bit of a summary of the stages that the fibre goes through to ultimately get from the raw fleece shorn off the sheep in usually the Spring through to the ultimate ball of wool at the end for the client to then further market or use themselves.
So, as you can imagine, the sheep are shorn, usually in the Springtime on most farms and the first thing we have to do, or the shearer or the shepherd has to do, is to sort those freshly shorn fleeces. So we need to take off all the mucky bits; the bits on the belly, bits where there’s lots of vegetation where the sheep’s got sort of moss or rubbed against a hedge or something like that because it’s very much the case that the higher the quality input to the mill, the higher the quality of the output that the client’s going to get back. So the fleeces need to be well sorted ideally before they come to the mill but then we will always check them and make sure that most bits have been taken out before we start processing because, again, if you have bits of vegetation in from the start unfortunately there will always be a few bits of vegetation that remain at the end of the process. It just cannot be removed by the machines.
So, once we’ve sorted the fleece, the fleeces are then scoured which basically means we’ve got to wash them. All the natural greases of the sheep, the lanolin, the bits of dirt, this, that and the other, are essentially washed out and still most of that is done by hand in a series of sinks and being careful not to shock the wool. So, not to put it from very hot to very cold or vice versa, or agitate it too much as that will encourage the fibres to basically felt together, bind together, with neighbouring fibres and then you’ll end up with a tangled mess before you even start which, unfortunately, sometimes is almost irrepairable. So you have to be very careful in the washing and scouring process to treat the fibres gently.
Once we’ve washed it, scoured it, we then have to dry it and, in our mill, that’s just naturally air dried – can be anything from most of a day, two days, maybe three days for some of the thicker fleeces or fibres but they’re just naturally dried.
Then, once we’ve dried them we have to start the preparation of the fibre ready to produce a final product and that usually goes in the form of opening the fleece. So, picking apart the fibres, teasing them apart gently, to essentially fluff up the fleece so it’s all nice and fluffy, almost like cotton wool, and the matted locks at the end and bits of tangled fibre have all been eased apart into a nice fluffy light sort of mass. For some people, this is all they want doing because they can then stuff cuddly toys, cushions, duvets, mattresses, even use it for packing of delicate items and some clients will have it back just as open fleece or sort of fluff as such.
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But for us, usually, we then go on to the next process which is carding the opened fibre. So the Carder is a series of rollers and these rollers have got hundreds and thousands, almost millions, of tiny, tiny little teeth on them and the rollers are passing it from one roller to another roller and back and forth, back and forth, and all the time they’re teasing those fibres to make them nice and smooth and, basically, almost like a flat web of fibres when it comes out of the machine.
And again we have a couple of options now for the clients. We can either roll this very thin web into a big continuous drum and produce something called a Batt so our partiicular machine is 1 metre wide and will make batts up to 2 metres long or we can make them narrower than a meter so it’s very popular to have them about half the width so 5 – 600 millimetres, 50, 60 centimetres, just short of a couple of foot is a very popular size. That’s good for needle felters, people who want padding for quilts and quilted blankets and things like that because we can build the layers up and make a thickness of material that the client wants.
More commonly for us we would turn this fine web of fibre coming out of the Carder into something called Sliver and Sliver is almost, I’d describe, as a continuous snake of fibre which we can coil into some cans basically and that can then be given to customers to then draw off for handspinning or needlefelting or peg loom rug-making, things like that. For us we would generally then go on to the next process.
So Slither has basically got all the wool fibres in random orientation. They are all over the place but it holds it together nicely. The next process for us, before we spin it, is we put it through a machine called a Gill or a Gillbox or some people know it as a Pin Drafter and that takes these randomly orientated fibres and it aligns all the fibres to be in the same direction and at this point we can blend different batches, different fibres, different colours and different breeds, things like that. So again the client can have a blended uniform output to the Gill Machine. And that is known as Roving and a lot of people would commonly know Roving and that might be what they buy for hand spinning projects or projects that they are doing themselves.
For us obviously the client can have it back in Roving but we would generally take that Roving and put it through our spinning machine. And this Roving is then drawn down and stretched between rollers to create the size of yarn that the client would require. And the machine would then spin that, putting in the amount of twist that, again, the client requires, to create a single strand of yarn, of basically twisted fibres of wool. Most clients would probably want that single strand then combined with other strands.
We would do something called Plying it together. So usually two, three or four single strands would be twisted together to make one thicker piece of yarn and that, again, would be to the client’s requirements. Once we’ve spun it and, if necessary Plyed it, we can then take it off the spinning tubes (the reusable tube that the spinner winds things on to) and we can then coil it up into hanks or twisted skeins or we can then wind it on to cardboard cones. So we have various finishing options for the clients in order to be able to get back a product that they’ll either use themselves or market and sell on under their own brand here, produced at the mill.
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And then, likewise, we do then have a few sample breeds and selection of yarns and carded fibres and Rovings for clients to buy from the mill shop or to see if they’re not quite sure how they would like the finished product of their fibre to turn out. We can show them some samples to help them decide on the output option they’d like, or the weight of yarns they’d like.
CB That’s marvellous, thank you very much for that. Roughly what area do your customers come from with their wool?
DW So, we have recently opened the mill and we have been amazed by the support we’ve had primarily from within, probably, 50 to 75 miles of the mill so realistically driving distance. A lot of people are very excited to be able to have a wool processing facility within the South West that can operate on a smaller scale. We are sort of unique in the South West in that we will take small batches in. The Natural Fibre Company down in Launceston in Cornwall they are a very good mill and they do a lot of spinning for local customers but their batch size is much larger than ourselves so its very reassuring to see how these smaller businesses, individuals in new potential startup businesses have been enquiring and already providing us with their fibre to process very locally. Likewise we have had fibre already processed and returned to even as far as Scotland, slightly closer, but Wales and the South West things like that so, really, in the modern age of next day courier as such then it’s becoming very accessible for people to send their fibre from really anwhere in the UK ultimately. And, likewise, local producers will quite often come and drop their fibre at the mill and then get and see the process and things we do here at Rampisham Hill Mill.
CB Thank you very much indeed for, in fact, a description of your farming and the sheep flock and, in great detail, the processing. That will back up much of what we are trying to show and expand in the museum. I wonder if I might ask you just a little of the area and the parish where you live? You obviously came here 15 years ago so you were sort of brought up in the marea. How would you describe the villages around you in terms of their make up, their habitation and livelihoods and this sort of thing?
DW Very much so. I mean we, as I say, are just a little north of what would have been the market town of Beaminster, as Colin said, just above the village of Hooke and very much in the area of West Dorset, here. We’ve got some lovely, traditional, unspoilt landscape whether that be meadowland down in the valleys, unimproved grasslands and chalk downlands on the ridges as well as ancient woodland right through to the new plantations which will obviously be the woodlands of the future.
So we live as I say just above the village of Hooke on Rampisham Down with Tollerdown at one side and going across to Buckham Down at the other side. The farm itself here is about 600ft. a couple of hundred metres up above sea level and we can actually see from the farm across to near West Bay, Bridport area. If the sun’s in the right direction you can just see the sea glinting from the top of one of our fields. Hooke is a village and the surrounding villages of Kingcombe and Toller and then Tollerwhelme going the other side, were very much traditional agricultural communities and, looking about the valleys, you can still see the ancient field structures, the lovely old mature hedges. Old tracks where animals were driven over the years gone by. There isn’t a lot of arable around the area predominantly just because of the gradients of the fields and often the soil make up is not the most suited to arable crops so you will find a lot of primarily dairy farms around. But again there are some much larger sheep flocks as part of some of the estates as well as a lot of smaller scale sheep flocks in the area.
Unfortunately the village of Hooke now, like a lot of rural villages, the services have pretty much disappeared and left in the village now really all we have is St. Giles church which becomes the focal point, the meeting point of the village as we don’t have village halls or anything like that and there are, as with a lot of villages, various events organised every year fundraising for village community projects as well as the church itself. And we are very lucky really to have the village of Hooke just below us but at the same time we are an isolated farm where we live here so in a way the best of both. We can be ourselves on the farm and process all the fibre here at Rampisham Hill Mill and obviously have our sheep but at the same time go down to the village for the community events and really just the community spirit that a lot of these old traditional villages have. At the same time there are a lot of local services nearby so we are very lucky as well to have a lot of independent shops and retailers in some of the slightly larger towns such as Beaminster and then Bridport and Dorchester being obviously larger still again havea lovely array of very traditional independent shops and retailers which is very nice to still see and be able to use.
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CB Do you find Beaminster is your main point of contact as a town?
DW As a town. Yes, we do use Beaminster quite a lot and, again, as I have said there are a lot of lovely services and shops there. We are quite lucky in as much as we have Crewkerne, Bridport, Dorchester and Yeovil all approximately 10 / 12 miles from the farm going in various directions so really, depending on the type of service we need or the items we need to purchase, will depend on where we are going. But certainly Beaminster has got all the services you’d need to live. Unlike a lot of people we are fortunate in the position we are here so we can grow vegetables, get the meat from our own stock and things like that so we do try and use as much as we can from the farm as well.
CB Do you get involved at all very much in the discussion of rural housing in the sense that sons and daughters of local people want to try and remain in the area but one is told all the time that there are very few new properties coming on the market or, not new properties, but properties coming on the market which they can move into. Do you come across that at all?
DW I’m afraid I haven’t that much, no. Obviously I do know of the shall we say ‘the problem’ in inverted commas and certainly you look at the village of Hooke and obviously surrounding villages then there’s a lot of obviously children of all ages which either currently are looking for local affordable housing or very soon or ultimately in 10 / 15 years time will be as well. And, in the scheme of things, Ruth and I have two daughters ourselves and in due course we are probably going to find the same conundrum of trying to find them somewhere local and affordable.
It is unfortunate I think really in the South West we do have a booming tourism industry and, on the back of that, there’s a lot of properties which are just used for lettings and rentals and things which, don’t get me wrong, the money coming in from tourism is very good for the area and certainly the publicity that Dorset gets and the good experiences that tourists have and take back to their home towns and places, is good but the throw back from that unfortunately is that the prices have been driven up by sort of second home owners and holiday lets. Likewise, while obviously you don’t want every green space to be built on it is obviously quite hard to find affordable housing and build affordable housing where either planning restrictions don’t allow it or sometimes the services in the area can’t take additional infrastructure or the young occupants as such needing to commute to the place of work and for other services. It’s unfortunately one of these things which, whether anyone will ever find the answer to easily, I don’t know but certainly in Hooke, as a village, there’s rreally no scope for any further building within just the topography of the land and the way the village is laid out. It’s really one of these places that has almost reached capacity but long before the problem of affordable houseing was known really.
CB OK. Finally then if I may ask you a similar, a related question, you mentioned family and so on. Where do teenagers go for entertainment and so on. Do many suffer from isolation because of lack of transport or whatever in the area or are they reliant on parents
DW Again, our two children are a bit young at the moment so we haven’t got to that state but exactly as you say I think there are buses – we in Hooke have a bus (don’t quote me on this) but I think it comes every Wednesday morning and it will go to Dorchester or Bridport and it’s sort of a dial service. You book your place and it will come back in the afternoon. As you can imagine, getting a taxi to come out to a remote village as such costs a lot of money just to get it there, that’s without your fare to your destination so, unfortunately I think a lot of teenagers and young adults do have to rely on their parents or parents’ friends or maybe slightly older peers who have passed their driving test and realistically apart from just shall we say their immediate friendship circle they might have within the village they live then unfortunately, as I sort of said really, the main urban areas are 10 / 12 miles away from the village of Hooke and it would similar for other villages so either way really they’ve got a half an hour journey by car to get to a more built up area where there would be that style of entertainment and/or gatherings.
CB Well, thank you for that David, it’s been exremely helpful and it’s covered everything I wanted to raise. I should have said right at the start, I do apologise, that in fact this is a joint enterprise. It’s Mr. & Mrs. Wilkins, it’s David and Ruth.
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