• THE woman sitting beside me on the straw bale clicked her tongue in affectionate exasperation. “Typical farmer!” she said. We were on a huge tractor-trailer, surrounded by rural men, and for the past half hour we had been trundling uphill towards the 381m (1,250ft) apex of Meldon Farm, Okehampton. Now the owner, Philip Heard, leapt off the tractor and began talking to us about his livestock while tweed caps blew off the assembled company and bowled across Dartmoor. You could hear only the odd word, because a gale was getting up.

  This was the farm tour at last week’s Sheep South West show, and as everyone knows, farmers always take you to the highest point of their farm when they want to show it off. In fact, Sheep South West was an excellent place to observe the quirks of the agricultural personality. It was entirely geared to the things sheep enthusiasts enjoy doing: you could eat roast lamb while patting a prize ram, and, for light relief, gaze through a microscope at a grippingly horrible selection of live sheep parasites. I rather missed the count-the-maggot competition, which was such a feature of last year’s do.

  One of the guest speakers on Tuesday was Anthony Gibson, the NFU Southwest regional director. He confided that, while judging the trade stands, he had been very taken with a lamb weighing machine that seemed to have been constructed out of old supermarket trolleys — all its steelwork was etched with the words: “Property of Budgens. Not for sale or hire”. “It is the combination of ingenuity and revenge in the construction of this item that I find so satisfying,” he said, to gales of laughter.

  In fact, there was a happy atmosphere to the show because — thanks to the opening up of export markets and the fall in the size of the national flock — sheep prices have become good again, and farmers are now getting between £50 and £70 for each fat lamb. It allows them to enjoy their work once more — and over on the Sheep Improvement Group stall John Bennett was handing out free sponge cake and talking about the strange friendships he has noticed between foxes and sheep. “The other morning I went up to check my Ile de France ewes and lambs and found them all sitting on the brow of a hill watching the sunrise. And, as I started to count them, I thought: ‘What is this? I have not got any prick-eared sheep.’ A vixen and her cubs were sitting right in the middle of the flock.”

• A FEW days later I went off to see some wooden sheep in Somerset. “It is a bit fraught in here at the moment,” Liz Mangles said, as she opened the door of her thatched farmhouse. “We have bees in the chimney and they keep whizzing out through the Aga.” It was an oddly furnished house: every room had at least one rocking horse in it, there was a life-size baby camel in the hall and a flock of sheep on the carpet.

  Mangles explained that she became obsessed by rocking-horses after falling in love with a brown fur one in Hamleys at the age of seven. “I became warped and twisted because I could not have it.” She later apprenticed herself to a wood-carver in Crewkerne and began making them herself. Soon after marrying a cider-apple farmer, she branched out into fairground carousel animals, and the sheep are her latest venture.

  Though, as she explained, there is a silly side to whittling things that develop strong personalities. Her least favourite job is drilling a hole for a rocking-horse’s tail. “By the time you do it the horse has been painted and got eyes and it feels like a horrid assault. Especially when it is skidding across the floor to get away from you.”

  Unlike the horses, Mangles’s sheep are fluffy — her friend, Kristen Smith, upholsters them for her — and this causes complications because both women have small children who find the creatures irresistible. “I keep finding that someone has dressed them up in one of my bras, or carried them off and tucked them up in bed.”

  Mangles, a small, neat woman in her thirties with waist-length brown hair and something Mary Poppins-like about the face and carriage, cannot see why anyone is reluctant to buy life-sized carved animals. “When they say they haven’t room I point out that when we got married the only furniture we had was a sofa, a picnic set — and a rocking horse. It is just a matter of your priorities.” She was so persuasive that I ended up spending next month’s housekeeping on the camel. As she strapped it tenderly into the back seat of my car, and explained that it was called Edgar, she said that farmers and smallholders were her best customers.

  lucy.pinney@thetimes.co.uk

• Liz Mangles: 01460 72359; www.ethel.biz

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