Firetop

On Saturday afternoon we took Maria to see some real farm animals, taking full advantage of the lovely blue skies we’ve been having of late . It seemed only fair that we let her experience the sights and smells of a farm - having subjected her to numerous children’s books full of pigs, goats, cows and sheep… and our own attempts at animal noises are nowhere near as good as the real thing. Bocketts farm, on the outskirts of Leatherhead was heaving with children and buggies, indeed we had to park in the overflow field and couldn’t even find a seat in their tea rooms, forced instead to feed Maria outside. Once over that hurdle we ventured into the barn to get up close with the livestock.

When confronted with her first sheep Maria seemed rather frightened, fair enough I suppose - I’m not a big fan of sheep either. We hadn’t expected to see lambs being born in front of us though - not sure that’s a stress free delivery option for a pregnant sheep but was nice to see the newborn finding its feet for the first time. The ponies, cows and goats weren’t as interesting to Maria as the sow and her piglets - probably because she’s already a fan of ‘piggies’ from her books.

As luck had it we were at Bocketts in time to experience the afternoon Pig Race at 3:45pm. Occuring on a circular fenced off dirt track outside in the sunshine, six young pigs were racing each other to the finish line feed. Childrens and parents lined the track which was probably about 100 metres long. From the off some pigs ran more hurriedly than others, painted with coloured markers to identify them, ‘Lester Piggott’ won by quite some distance from ‘Greased Lightning’ and ‘Bullet Babe’. I was quite surprised with how much attention Maria gave to the racing pigs, her little eyes followed them past us and up the track, even watching them on the return leg to back down the hill towards us.

Technorati Tags: fams, bocketts farm, pig racing, leatherhead, surrey

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