We started in Yorkshire England. We did the TV tours of James Herriot and the Yorkshire Dales. Then the Heartbeat tour of PC Nick Rowan, the English Bobby who moved to a small village station near the Yorkshire Moors.
We are now heading north into Scotland. We reached Edinburgh and obviously went to Edinburgh Castle. We went onto the Castle carpark area where they hold the Edinburgh Tattoo each year. It was pouring rain; it was cold, and we didn’t stay very long. We moved down the road to a Coffee shop and whilst we drank our coffee, we wrote a few postcards to send back to Australia. We spent the night in a B & B in Edinburgh. Then the next morning we headed north along the East coast road to Aberdeen then across country towards Inverness.
The plan was to arrive in Inverness at a reasonable hour and spend the night there.
We had a busy day travelling and sightseeing. It was getting dark, and we still had quite a way to go before we would reach Inverness. I said to my wife, “we need to look out for a B & B, we are not going to make it to Inverness at a reasonable hour to get accommodation tonight”.
Not long after that we saw a B & B sign in the middle of nowhere, a farmhouse on the side of the road. We did a quick U-turn and went into the farm’s driveway. We were barely out of the car when a little elderly lady came running towards us. “Quick, Quick,” she was saying in her very Scottish accent. “Over here, in the barn”. We thought straight away, there was something wrong, some sort of emergency. So we rushed over to the barn and followed the lady in. There were two men inside, standing next to a small cow but bigger than a calf. On the ground was a small heap of something. All sorts of things raced through our heads. 'What is that?', we thought.
The men were talking to each other in very Scottish accents. “It’s too small” one said, “I have never seen one so small”. “How did it happen, it’s impossible” the other man said. “I have been a vet for a long time, and I’ve never seen anything like it”. Then the lady spoke, “Will it survive?” she asked. “Doubt it, too small” the apparent vet said. We got closer, nobody spoke to us. The small bundle was still in a heap on the ground. “What is it?” I asked. “A calf” the lady said. Then went on to repeat what the men had been talking about, explaining how the mother cow was so small and so young but had somehow become pregnant and had just had this bundle on the ground. Her calf.
“It's a miracle if it survives”, they were all saying. I had seen newborn calves before, but this was small like a lamb, not a calf.
We went inside, had a meal, then went to bed.
The next morning we went into the kitchen. The lady saw us and said “Come on” she said. “It’s survived”. We went out to the barn. The two men were still standing near the cow, the calf was sucking away on the mother. The men had been there all night. A lot happier and chirpier than last night when we arrived. We finally got to talk with them. They were so excited, proud and surprised. It was History and a miracle to them.
The miracle occurred and History was made. We finally got to our destination in Inverness. We sat down for a meal and watched the Six O’clock News. There on the news right in front of us were two small men, a small elderly lady and a small cow with the smallest calf ever born in Scotland.
Phil Hughes
July 2023