Dartmoor National Park Authority

Brian was raised near Chagford and his first job after leaving school in the early 1960s was at Frenchbeer Farm with Jack Rowe; he remembers the winter of 1963 and the plight of sheep on the moor:

"In ’62, '63 the very bad winter, we went out to Teignhead ‘cause there was some sheep out there when it snowed, us couldn’t get them back before it finished snowing, and us picked up all these sheep and several ponies and brought them back to Frenchbeer, gave them a bale of hay, went out next morning and they’d all gone back out the Teignhead again yeah! Because that’s where they lived that’s what they knew and that’s where they wanted to be and they’d gone back out by their selves… then the helicopter started dropping hay, but the unfortunate part of it was the river had frozen and the snow had settled on top the river, and they dropped several bales and of course it went down through in the water and the sheep was so hungry trying to get in and get it that they drowned".

"And then another thing that really tickled me was the chimney right up the top was getting dirty and Jack said ‘us’ll get one or two old fowls up’, he said, ‘Chuck them down the chimney’, and I said, ‘What’s that for?’ He said, ‘As they flap they’ll clean the chimney’, and that’s the way they used to do it, he’d flap his way down and down would come the soot with him [laugh] yeah, the first time he done it I just didn’t know what to do I was so curled up with laughter. Yeah, it was brilliant".