Empty for forty-six weeks a year

The Lambing Shed.

Four pens, a creep, a heat lamp and a camera. For six weeks in spring it is the most watched room on this website. For the rest of the year it is where the straw lives.

At: 2.8 miles
Live: Mid-March to late April
Cost to watch: Nothing, ever

The whole route Watch it live

On the walk

What is here.

Lambing runs from the middle of March to the end of April. In those six weeks somebody is in this shed at two in the morning every night, and the busiest hours are between two and five because ewes lamb at night and there is no arguing with them about it.

Chapter 2 was called Sheeping and it was the first proper lesson in how much a new farmer does not know. New breeds arrived in Series Five. The plush toy of No Face Sheep is, like most of the others, permanently out of stock.

The camera in here is the only one on the estate that sits outside every membership tier, free to anybody at any hour. Charging for lambing would be the cheapest thing this platform could do and we have decided not to.

The record

What happened here.

Sheep were the second thing tried here and the first thing to demonstrate that livestock does not care what the schedule says. Lambs arrive at three in the morning in weather nobody would choose.

It is also the part of farming that people find hardest to watch, and the camera does not cut away. A farm feed that only shows good outcomes is an advertisement rather than a window.

At
2.8 miles: Live
Mid-March to late April: Cost to watch
Nothing, ever

How it was made

The arithmetic

What it costs to keep.

The Lambing Shed

Straw, per tonne: £40 to £70And a lambing shed eats a great deal of it.
A heat lamp, running: Pennies an hourBut there are several, and they are on for weeks.
Vet, per difficult lambing: £90 upwardsOut of hours, which most of them are.
Weeks in use: SixOut of fifty-two. The rest of the year it stores straw.

Costs are indicative ranges for work of this kind in this part of the country, not invoices. Where a figure is a published estate number rather than a general one, it says so in the row.

On the walk