Ruddy faces, fellas in tweed flat caps and jackets with ornately carved horn on the tops of their sticks, the sad braying of cattle and the skidding clop of sheep's hooves on concrete as they clattered down the pens for sale, bleating loudly and hudd
led together until one made the break and they all followed, sometimes with a little leap as they set off.
The incomprensible quick Northumbrian of the auctioneer as he rattled off what sounded like "five-five-five-seven- hup ten-poond on the bearded" in the beautiful round wooden ring.
Men with baler twine belts and wellies that smelt of earth and woods and burned heather. That shouted "awaaay" and "come by" to their alert working collie dogs that would just give you the merest glance, no matter how hard we tried to put them off, before averting their attention back to the sheep, their ears pricking up and tongues hanging out as the farmer called.
Large trailers with wooden gangways that dropped to let the cows out, steam rising off their backs on a cold morning. The mart days were noisy, colourful days and they represented everything that was good about countryside life.
Hill farmers who would spend lonely dark nights in front of the dancing flames of a coal fire with a sick lamb and bottle to feed it meeting up for a drink and crack with the colleagues that they might only see a few times a year.
Men that had farmed the bleak and lonely hillsides for generations, a chill westerly wind whipping over the tops as they rounded up the stock and set off down to Rothbury in a battered Landrover as the first orange light of dawn broke through the black sky and illuminated the steep, rounded mountains. The gurgle of the Coquet running between the scree-covered slopes of the upper dale breaking the silence.
The auction mart was the life-blood and social centre of Northumbrian farming for years. Government subsidies and crop growing just can't give that feeling of togetherness and community that the mart days provided.
Rothbury is a market town – there was trading around the cross outside the Newcastle House for years in the distant past – and with the proliferation of famers' markets being promoted by the likes of TV chef Hugh Fernley Whittingstall, it would be nice to see honest, local-produced farmers' goods at the mart.
Rothbury's highly-successful annual street fair would provide an excellent model for a monthly event. People are growing tired of mass supermarkets – the success of Whittingstall's anti-battery hen campaign has shown that – and are getting keener to reconnect with real fruit, veg, meat and produce.
It's a canny idea and I tell you what, the parish council can have it for nowt. Whey, one-one-one- two-two point five per cent on the beared. It's as good as nowt!
