Beware the Giant Brown Cow

The thing about coming down the cottage is that even the most innocent activity can turn into an ‘exciting’ adventure ,and so it was when Myself, Linda & Bernard + dog went for a walk from the cottage up to the reservoir.

All went well for the walk up the hill above the village ,it had however been raining quite a bit and we decided to take the ‘footpath’ towards the reservoir road ,unfortunately we missed the proper crossing point of the Mellte and hopped across on the rocks into a large field leading up to the reservoir road.

At first the field appeared to be completely empty of any animals but as we came over a crest we could just see a very large single brown cow about the size of a transit van about a mile away . Unfortunately it had very keen eye sight and spotted us and in particular Elsa the dog.

We headed across the field but so did the cow towards us ,we increased speed but so did the cow and the nearer it got the angrier it looked at our intrusion into its domain!. The field was very large and it began to look like there could be an interception before we reached the gate – perhaps it was just curious or just wanted to have a close look at the dog.-nope it wanted an argument !

Eventually it got about 20m away and started pawing the ground (not a good sign) knowing that there are numerous incidents every year of dog walkers being mangled by angry cows I advised Linda if the cow charged to let Elsa off the lead and to RLF for the gate on the grounds that it was the dog the cow was after and the dog was likely quite capable of dodging the cow. I thought I would have a bit of go at it as it was probably used to the farmer telling it what to do, so I moved towards it waving my arms –at first this worked and it ran off, soon, however its anger at the dog soon overcame its fear of me and it started to come back . Fortunately during this interval we had made some serious progress towards the gate at which point it realised that it was munching grass time and lost interest. Needless to say we returned by another route.

Author: 
Chris Crowley