With so much talk of ‘The Beast from the East’, it doesn’t take much imagination to realise that the words ‘beast’ and ‘east’ have featured in weather lore for a long time.

I learnt as a child that ‘The wind from the east ‘tis neither fit for man nor beast’. Later in life, I looked after four hill farms in the Lammermuirs totalling 10,000 acres and grazing 7000 ewes. The Lammermuirs have a well-deserved reputation for snow. We respected it and its harbinger, the east wind.

According to former BBC weather man, Ian McCaskill, in his book ‘Frozen in time’, the winters of 1947, 1962-63 and 1979 were the worst in the 20th century. I was born as the snow melted in May, 1947, was at school in 1962-63 and farmed in 1979. 

The weather in those winters was similar to that in March, 2018, with an important difference. The blizzards lasted for months. The longest of all started on November 22, 1962 and snow lay, except for a short break in December, until April, 1963. 

Bob Jaffray described in his book ‘To follow the dogs and carry the stick’ of the extreme exertion required to trudge miles through deep snow.

Then, he had to cast snow from the netting round the haystacks which stopped the sheep eating all the hay at once and after that, ration out the hay to the stormed sheep. 

He lost two sheep, one in freak circumstances. His brother John, who was shepherding another hirsel, lost one and was annoyed at that.

After the dreadful winter of 1947, when the country was on its uppers after the Second World War, losses of hill sheep were extremely high.

Prudent hill farmers planted more shelter belts. 

After 1963, my father planted yet more at Rawburn and I planted a few in later years. When I left the farm, there were 34 woods on it. Hill sheep could access every side, so had bield whichever way the wind blew.

Where possible these woods enclosed dangerous gullies where sheep could be buried. 

The haystacks were replaced by railway boxcars which were surplus when Dr Beeching axed local railways in the 1960s. My father bought them for £25 each and they made superb hay sheds. 

The last part of the jigsaw was getting the shepherd to the sheep. By the 1970s we had fewer ‘herds, so we bought a snow bike, or skidoo. It didn’t matter how deep the snow drifted as it sailed over the top of the wreathes. 

The cost of safeguarding the flock was considerable and unnecessary in mild winters, however in severe ones, we had a few losses due to snow.

When we did have sheep buried it was usually after an unexpected change of wind and we trained the dogs to locate them. 

In 1963, a neighbouring farm had considerable losses and later in the 1960s, so did another. There wasn’t much sympathy and the opinion of both local farmers and their ‘herds was that the shepherds on those farms should have been sacked.

Although there were more people working on farms then, what we didn’t have were modern forecasts. They may have evolved from ‘red sky at night’ but were only accurate for a limited time period. 

This year we were aware for a week that ‘The Beast from the East’ was on its way, which gave everyone plenty of time to prepare for it.

Recent postings on Facebook took us right into the storms in early April when lambing was in full swing. 

When I was in my 20s and did two lambings in succession, a friend calculated that I would spend seven years of my life lambing. 

It didn’t actually work out that way and in the end I probably spent as much time calving cows. I did spend long enough lambing to learn that storms in April were a serious threat. They had been in the past and always will be. 

Knowing what weather is on the way matters little, as the ewes have their own timetable. The worse the weather, the harder they lamb. Sheds are full to overflowing and room must be made for new arrivals. 

Once outside, dykes, straw bales and especially woods, are saviours.

Even then lambs get so muddy their dams sometimes lose them. 

However hard you work, nature seems to be winning and lambs which seemed up and away are going down. Doubts about the grand scheme of things set in.

It would be a mistake to think that these ‘killing days’ are a one-off, never-in-living-memory events. They are not and on a high farm can happen anytime in April and occasionally into May. 

On May 14, 1993, we had snow drifts in the Lammermuirs several feet deep. The lambs were strong by then, so we didn’t lose any. 

At Kettleshiel, which I took over in 1987, we financed getting the farm into good repair by letting the grouse shooting. The grouse chicks had just hatched and every one perished. 

Our income dropped £20,000 that day, the equivalent of losing 400 lambs at the prices then. The grouse population and our income took a decade to recover.

The killing days remain burned into my memory. So, too, are the sublime days late in the hill lambing when the sun shone, grass was growing and all was well with the world.

When we moved to Roxburgh Mains in 1993, we dropped 600 feet in elevation, so the dangers of the easterlies had receded. Many years previously, the then farmer, George Rogerson, wasn’t so tolerant. 

After a prolonged cold spell in the spring, his steward, pointing to the weather cock, said: “It’ll no change until that fellow gets oot o’ the east”.

George shot it and it has pointed to the south ever since. 

“Wind from the south brings rain in its month,” the poem said.

The last line suits us all best: “When the wind’s still, nae weather’s ill.”