Review: Lambing at Spilman Farming

As a mum, I always feel guilty for not doing ‘everything’ with my boys. The truth is, we got out the habit of doing lots of ‘things’ when we had the lockdowns, and then when some things only happen once a year, you blink and you’ve missed the opportunity to do it, and then the kids are another year older, and so the cycle goes on. So, when we were asked if we wanted to review Lambing at Spilmans Farm, I literally jumped at the chance! I realised we had never taken our youngest to see lambing, and that our eldest was that little when he did it, he didn’t remember. So today we rectified that!

Spilmans is perhaps best known for strawberries and pumpkins, but they also do a whole host of other events during the year, Lambing being one of them – their previous events have always been lovely, and this was no different. It was a really lovely, calm and actually peaceful event, which seems an odd way to describe a half term activity for families – but it has to be as you are effectively in the middle of a maternity ward for sheep.

With a lot of clever planning, this week (over half term) sees over 70 lambs due to be born. The first lambs were born on Thursday and there are still so many more to come. If you are really lucky, you may even get to see a lamb being born (we just missed a couple of lambs being born this morning)

When we arrived, we were first directed to the ‘maternity ward’. Here Farmer Joss spent plenty of time with us, explaining what the different markings on the sheep meant, showing us the different pens, telling us all about the tupping process and so much more. We even saw some alpacas!

Next we moved through to ‘post natal’, where we got to see the lambs with their mums who have been born over the last few days. We then listened to an incredibly interesting talk by a sheep shearer who taught us all so much about the process of lambing, the record keeping, lambing around the world, shearing and so much more. It really was fascinating, and my 5 year old has come home repeating all sorts of facts he has learnt today.

We also got to watch some of the lambs who were struggling to feed be bottle fed by the staff!

Next stop (after taking far too many photos of lambs) we headed through to the crafting area. The 2 ladies running the crafting were fantastic, and even showed my eldest how to write his name in Japanese! There were several different suggestions of sheep based paper crafts to enjoy, and the ladies running the crafting were on hand to help.  My youngest was a little shy, and so one of the ladies gave him a paper crown she had made.

After an hour with the sheep and crafting, we finished off our visit by popping into the cafe for a hot chocolate and cake – we couldn’t choose, so we ended up getting a Malteser brownie and Bakewell tart to share; both were delicious as always.

We had the loveliest time today and we’ve ticked another thing off ‘the list’ of things we want to do with our boys before we blink and they are teenagers!

Lambing is on all week (booking essential) until Monday

Book now here!