'The crisis in water supply was nationwide, but a 70% grant and a little Lister pump transformed five fields which had never had a reliable water supply'
No doubt 2026 will be remembered for many things but for farmers the abiding memory has been of the hot dry summer.
Many comparisons have been made to the summer of 1976. I am not sure how these statistics are calculated but 1976 has now been relegated to seventh rank in the history of hot dry summers.
It was very real at the time and was regarded very much as a one off, in contrast to 2026, when such events are no longer deemed freaks of nature and are now the norm. Actually in 1976 we were more concerned with global cooling.
The political situation in 1976 was, as it is today, extremely turbulent. The miners, led by Joe Gormley, had brought down Edward Heath’s Conservative government two years previously.
James Callaghen was prime minister and political power see sawed throughout the decade between him and Heath. After a sticky 1960s, when the government realised that they no longer were as dependent on farmers as they had been in the post war period, the 1970’s turned out well for agriculture.
In 1973 we had entered The European Common Market, and its strong Continental farming lobby was exerting a powerful positive influence.
I travelled north through Scotland with my father at the height of the 1976 drought. My Uncle Joe, who farmed Eribol in Sutherland, had died and the farm was being valued by Angus Macdonald of Torgorm, Conon Bridge.
The entire country was the colour of a digestive biscuit until we reached Eribol. As it has been this year, there had been plenty of rain in the North West. While the seniors got on with the business, I wandered through the fields, which were knee deep in grass and wildflowers.
Joe’s wee fat Angus bull and dozen or so cows lay chewing their cud and swatting off the flies with a flick of their ears.
In 1976 we sold our top Greyface ewe lambs, off the Border Leicester then, for £18.50 at Hawick and our top Blackie ewe lambs at Lanark for £12.50. At Hawick our North Country Cheviot ewe lambs made £16.00 and the wedders £17.30.
We topped Hawick Tup Fair with a shearling at £1,100 which went to Kingside. His sire made the same price the previous year to Field of Noss in Caithness. We had recently started selling Blackie tups.
Our pen of seven averaged £137 at Lanark.
For this first time, I bought a Blackie tup at Newton Stewart, the fashionable place then. He was bred at Dalwyne and made £800. When we went to the pen to pick him up, he had disappeared.
We found him, just as he was about to board the ferry to Ireland. That hasn’t changed over the years. Last year two of our Suffolks at Kelso disappeared. We traced them to the South West of England a couple of days later.
They had already been resold.
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When I looked through my stock book I was reminded of a sharp lesson I received in 1976. Over the previous two decades The Landale Farms in the next-door parish of Cranshaws had spent a huge amount on Northie tups.
The manager had retired and the new man planned to replace the Northies with Mules. He happily agreed to my request to buy some of the best of the Northie ewes. I sold one ram out of the 58 ewes I had picked out of 1500 for £140. I had selected the poor milkers and those which hadn’t been pulling their weight.
They looked great beside their sucked down and hard-working sisters.
Most of the water troughs at Rawburn were fed from springs. In 1976, for the first time, many dried up. Some of the other fields had no water supply at all, so we had to run them together with other fields, which had access to the little river Watch, which ran through the farm.
The crisis in water supply was nationwide, so James Callaghan appointed the Minister of Sport, Dennis Howell, who had been a well-known football referee, Minister of Drought. Later in the year after heavy rains, he became known as the Minister of Floods and in the severe winter of 1979, Minister of Snow.
Howell introduced a grant of 70% for improving water supplies.
We installed water tanks at the highest point in the fields and pumped water to them from the river. The water then flowed by gravity to five fields which previously had no water supply.
The little Lister pump, powered by a Briggs and Stratton engine, did duty for eighteen years without fail. I put enough petrol in it to fill the tanks, and it switched itself off when the petrol ran out.
After the grant my Landlord, The Roxburghe Estates, and I split the bill. My share of providing water to five fields was £372.
The water supply to the houses and farm buildings also faltered. The water came from a concrete cistern about a mile away on the hill ground. It was reputed to be fed by three springs.
We had an Irishman John McCafferty, rebuilding one of the march dykes. He, like many of his fellows, was a superb craftsman, and had great knowledge of water management and drainage systems.
When we mucked about with welding rods trying to locate tiles some like John seemed to smell the water. We found one of the springs, which had been tapped in 1902, out in the heather.
It was beautifully built of drystone and, despite the drought, running well. The problem we discovered was in the mile long cast iron pipe from the cistern to the farm. It was slightly cracked.
This didn’t matter in times of normal rainfall. We replaced the pipe and all was well.
Prior to our discovery of the cracked pipe, I had asked the shepherd on whose ground the cistern was situated to look into it to see how much water it contained.
On his return he reported that it was nearly empty.
“It was fu’ o’ frogs. Half of them were deid and the other half were terrible lean”
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