The second weekend in June is always marked by the Royal Cornwall Show. One of the last true agricultural shows and also very ‘royal’ this year with the presence of Prince Edward. He opened the show on the Thursday and so we sensibly chose to pull the kids out of school on the Friday.

The ‘early summer monsoon’ (and I kid you not – this is a recognised meteorological event) had occurred a week earlier - thus washing out half term - and so we were blessed with wall-to-wall sunshine for our day out. We also had added excitement this year, as we had arranged to see a bull, with a view to purchasing him to introduce fresh blood, (and indeed a fresh breed) into the herd.

We currently have a small herd of 20 Black Galloways on which we have been ‘working’ a pedigree Black Galloway bull. This is fine & dandy except that after three years we are now faced with welcoming daughters of the bull into his harem. For obvious reasons this doesn’t make good breeding sense and so we have decided to keep the Galloway bull for the older cows and buy a Beef Shorthorn for the heifers.

The Shorthorn has a long and distinguished history as shown by this extract from the breed society’s web site

“In the late 18th Century two brothers, Charles and Robert Colling started to improve Durham cattle using line breeding techniques established so successfully by Robert Bakewell on Longhorn cattle. In 1783 Charles Colling found four particular cows recorded as Duchess, Cherry, Strawberry, and Old Favourite among others, and at the same time his brother Robert had noticed the superiority of calves in the local market bred from a bull known as Hubback, which he subsequently bought for £8.

It was a combination of these bloodlines, which led to the birth of the bull Comet bred by Charles Colling in 1804, and later sold at the Ketton sale in 1810 for 1,000gns. This was the first 1,000 guinea bull ever recorded, but the wisdom of this bid was later to be justified by his progeny and he has since become a legend in cattle breeding.”

1,000gns in 1810 equates to £54,705 in today’s money. We shook hands on the bull at a much more reasonable £1,500, and then had plenty of time to introduce Churton to the wonderment of Candy Floss.