Last Saturday, I let a batch of heifers out to some rough ground that I wanted tidied up.

All of them are homebred heifers and it was their first time out of the shed since they were housed last November.

I had no help and the ground in question is across a main road, so, as Jeremy Clarkson would call it, “a bit of trailering” was needed.

These cattle were never on a trailer before and weren’t overly enamoured at the thoughts of their first trip. But with a bit of gentle whispering through a two-foot length of a heavy-gauge water pipe, I got them loaded.

Raised rates

Heart rates were probably a little raised on both man and beast at this stage, but nothing that I would have been overly concerned about.

Off I went to the field, let out my cattle and congratulated myself on a job well done.

Now, for the next two days, for one reason or another, I only looked at these cattle over the hedge and didn’t walk through them, nothing majorly strange about that either.

I could see easily enough that they were all there and were happy and healthy, so on I went.

But on Tuesday, I decided I better take a little more time and go and walk through this batch properly, just to make sure they were ok.

I parked the jeep at the gate and headed off walking across the field. The field in question is quite long and narrow. The heifers were lying quite happily chewing their cud in the spring sunshine.

They were probably 250m away from me when I entered the field. The field is low lying and quite wet in nature and although it is reasonably dry at the minute, there are plenty of ruts and marks in it.

Slightly tipsy

So, walking across it you tend to look like a slightly tipsy individual on their way home from a good night out, while you try not to break your ankles or fall over.

Anyway, the heifers didn’t seem to like the way I was walking and before I got half way across the field, they were all on their feet with their ears pricked.

I didn’t like the look of this at all, so I stopped walking and started with my reassuring 'suk suk' noises. The heifers were far from impressed with this either and quickly headed towards the far end of the field with their tails above their backs.

Chase

Into the corner they ran, through an electric fence, down into a river, up the bank at the other side, through another electric fence and into my silage ground.

“What the feck am I going to do now,” I thought, with the bad humour rising. “I’d have been better to keep looking at them over the hedge,” I thought.

I was afraid to go after them, in case they decided to go through another fence, which would have left them on the main road.

I decided to let them and myself cool down a bit and go and get the quad. Back I came 40 minutes later with the quad full of electric fence posts and reels and a bucket of meal. A bucket of meal will never go astray.

I drove into the silage field quietly saying a decade of the rosary and preparing, as they say, for a "handling".

Surrounded

I hadn’t got the gate closed behind me, when the heifers had me surrounded, with some of them licking the meal dust off my leggings.

I slowly trundled down the field, all the time waiting for something to spook them again, but thankfully they trundled after me until I eventually returned them to where they came from.

I'm not sure what their original problem was, but it would appear I look an awful lot scarier off a quad that I do on it. I'm not sure how I feel about that.