The Funny Farm
By (Author) Jackie Ellis
Transworld Publishers Ltd
Bantam Books (Transworld Publishers a division of the Random House Group)
15th April 2004
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
Agriculture and farming
630.92
Paperback
304
Width 127mm, Height 198mm, Spine 19mm
210g
How often have you thought you might like to chuck it all in, leave the steaming metropolis and its noise and dirt behind and make for pastures new, to begin your life again We often talk about it but people rarely do it. Jackie Moffat is one of those who did. In 1982 she and her family - armed with a bucketload of optimism, stout boots and a highly developed sense of the ridiculous - upped sticks from London (where she'd lived all her life) and went North, to Cumbria. Their destination was the Eden Valley, and a small stock-rearing and dairy farm called Rowfoot, and there they have spent the past twenty years getting to grips with the practice of running a working farm, keeping sheep, cattle, pigs and horses, becoming part of the (often eccentric) community, coping with the ups and downs (Foot and Mouth devastated them) of farming life. For the past ten years, the author's written a regular column for the Cumbria and Lake District Life magazine, and it was this that inspired her to write about her rural life, her wacky take on it and the trials, tribulations and pleasures of running a farm.
Jackie Moffat is a Londoner, born and bred, but in 1982 moved to the Eden Valley in Cumbria, where she still lives and farms. As well as breeding Manx Loghtans (a rare breed of sheep, originating from the Isle of Man), she also writes a column for Cumbria and Lake District Life magazine.