This blog is intended to tell the story of our animal sanctuary, which began in the Scottish Borders and moved to Fife in February 2023.

We moved to a bungalow with 4.1 acres of land in the Scottish Borders September 2017, used a scythe cutter cutting through decades of fields left fallow, to get the land in a reasonable state, and had it fabulously fenced (strong pig fencing!|) into three fields of about one acre and a third each. 

In February 2018 we welcomed our first residents to Noah’s Arcs, eight ex-battery hens from A Wing and a Prayer. In April our pigs Timothy and Barnabas arrived, courtesy of the RSPCA.  In May our first retired Shetland ewes with lambs at foot made their home with us: Morwenna with her twins Cuthbert and Boisil, Hilda with Aebbe. In June Brigid and Ethelburga came kicking and screaming, obviously fearing the worst having been loaded into a cart and taken away from their home – until they saw the others – then ran off into the field with their ewe lambs Ita and Amma. 

I began a  Creative Writing unit with the Open University, and the following poem was published in Borderlands: An Anthology in 2021, edited by the. Borders Writers Forum. 

Our winter  work on the animal sanctuary, expressed in a modern spirit of the Carmina Gadelica^[1]

Birther
May we be midwives to your purpose
as we prepare the food stations,
break the ice on white filigree etched water troughs,
carry pails of water across hog wallows
criss-crossed with vegetation
and frost-hardened into mud like chocolate coconut ice.
Our sheep dogs supervise.

Saviour
May we work for you, as co-redeemers, wresting happiness out of pain
so that we may all have a chance to live and hope again.
May our pigs snuffle endearments into the warm straw
as they lie top to tail, nose upturned at their arc door,
may our hens enjoy clearing the polytunnel of greens
and ‘passing the harp’ noisily through long winter sleeps,
may our sheep enjoy hay as the wind blows hard,
their three generations of families safe on Noah’s Arcs.

Spirit
You have blown us here, across the Border
may we breathe your creative energy   
like a prayer wheel, scattering a gratuitous generosity of blessings,
warming all sentient beings across these fields, this community, this land.

---

^[1] The Carmina Gadelica is a collection of prayers by 19^th century and early 20^th century Scottish highlanders and islanders, orally collected and written down by Alexander Carmichael.  Many of these prayers detail their daily work, and ask for God’s protection and blessing on it. Many are in Trinitarian form.