A tribute to three border collies I have met while walking

If you like walking you’re going to meet a lot of sheepdogs. Fortunately, I like border collies – they are serious working dogs, yet they will lie on their backs at the slightest sign of fussing and wave their paws in the air. And, while I suppose I can imagine one nipping your heels, I can’t imagine a sheepdog perpetrating serious violence.

Before the Three Tuns in Bishop’s Castle was modernised in the Nineties, I used to go there with a friend and his young daughter. There were always a couple of old farmers in the front bar with their dogs, and she would join the dogs in front of the fire and lie with her arm around the neck of one.

So here are three of my walking encounters with sheepdogs.

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These days all accommodation seems to be on Airbnb and want you to book for a week, but when I started serious walking it was easy to find places to stay for one night and a lot of farms did bed and breakfast.

Every farm seemed to have an old sheepdog, who was largely retired and spent most of its days in front of the kitchen range, and one or more young dogs, who you were told would never be as good.

One such young dog – I think this was on one of my visits to the southern half of the Offa’s Dyke path or an early holiday in the Shropshire Hills – followed me the next morning, barking. Every time I turned round, he would drop low in the grass and become quite silent.

We crossed a whole field like this before I decided the game was more fun for him than it was for me. So I pointed at the farmhouse we had both come from and said as commandingly as I could manage: “Go back!” Which he promptly did. Did I mention that border collies are highly intelligent?

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I was walking near Market Harborough, and as I passed through the village of Marston Trussell, a sheepdog decided it would walk with me.

We continued for a while companionably, and just as I was starting to worry about how far he had come with me and wondering if I should take him back to the village, we reached a drive that led to a farm. He hared off up the drive: this was clearly where he lived.

The next thing I knew, the sheepdog had returned with a friendly young foxhound who he clearly wanted to introduce to me. Foxhounds being foxhounds, I left them with muddy paw prints on my chest.

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As I was descending some hill or other in Shropshire, the path I was on slowly became clearer, then wider and finally had hedges on both sides. Just at the point where it had indisputably become a lane, there was a tractor pulling a flat trailer coming out of a field.

There were several men on the trailer, and they waved a greeting as it pulled out into the lane. Just as it set off down the hill, a sheepdog jumped from it. The dog proceeded to walk down the lane, keeping pace with me, until we reached the farm at the bottom.

He was perfectly friendly about it, but I couldn’t escape the conclusion that he had been seeing me off the premises.

A derelict cricket pavilion

Taken at Marston Trussell three summers ago.

Marston Trussell: A shrunken medieval village

The second Marston Trussell Beer Festival takes place this weekend (19-21 June). I visited the first one last year.

But my reason for writing about the village this time is that I have just come across an account of an archaeological dig that took place there last summer:

The village is first mentioned in the Domesday Book (AD 1086) as Mersitone, meaning marsh settlement; the Trussell family presumably adding their name to the village after they became lords of the manor in the 13th century. 

Today, the village is much reduced but its original extent ... is clearly visible in aerial photographs, with extensive earthworks to the east around the church and to the north of the present village framing its ‘shrunken’ size.

St Nicholas, Marston Trussell

This is St Nicholas, Marston Trussell. Royalist troops fleeing Naseby were massacred here, cut off (sources vary) because the Welland was in flood or because the road up to the church was in those days a dead end.

The unusual porch is said to include the timbers from a Danish ship.

Marston Trussell: A beer festival but no pub

When I first went to work in Leicester, we used to go out to a country pub for our Christmas lunch. I suggested the Sun Inn at Marston Trussell near Market Harborough, and we went there a couple of times.

That was long ago, and the Sun has been closed for some years now - though not before hosting the first British Big Cats Conference. It now seems unlikely that it will reopen.

But that has not stopped Marston Trussell holding a beer festival this weekend in the village hall - a mid 19th century building that was originally a school.

I went there this afternoon. You can walk across the fields from Market Harborough, but as there were showers around I compromised by catching the bus to Lubenham and walking the mile from there.

There was a good selection of local beers and cider, and I enjoyed the chance to rediscover this small village. Back in the 1980s it not only had a pub: you could buy secondhand books from one of the houses at the weekend.