Last year, papal biographer Austen Ivereigh, his wife Linda and their dogs moved to a small farm near Hereford, with decayed old barns and 15 acres of grass meadows. He blames Laudato Si’.
In Laudato Si’, which turned five recently, Pope Francis warned about the speed of activity rushing ahead of “the naturally slow pace of biological evolution.” Our new hens – thanks for asking: Lydia (chief in the pecking order), Lucy, Lettie (aka Amoris Laetitia), Maisie and Martha (fat and pecked-at) – would strongly agree. Chickens, it turns out, hate change.
Having booked a couple of Marans and three Cream Legbars from a local Herefordshire poultry breeder, we had plenty of time to prepare their coming. We allocated part of one of the big barns to allow them both indoors and outdoors space to flutter, peck, perch, scratch, dust-bathe, and all those other things chickens do when they’re allowed to be chickens. We even made – this was the time-rich lockdown – a hooped extension into the field, so they could graze; chickens like to eat a lot of grass. For security we had high fencing pegged into the ground to keep out Mr Fox, topped with penitentiary-style outward-leaning barbed-wire posts to stop our semi-feral cats from shimmying into the coop from along the barn joists.
