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Two Farmer’s sons.  One of whom makes his life amongst the shepherding community of the Scottish Borders and the other who keeps intensive pigs on the plains of the Yorkshire vale.  Two sons, two storms.  They could not have been more different, except that the boys were, in their own ways, lovers of the very animals that they came to forsake.   

The first son tells of the lives of shepherds and the great storm that they survived.  A human story, both heartbreaking and uplifting, whose backcloth was a ferocious winter that struck Borders farms with tragic consequences, hurling into the Scottish Borders on the night of the last Tuesday in March; killing livestock by the thousand, and destroying the lives of good country-folk who had done no wrong and deserved better.

The second son becomes part of the great wrong that called itself pig farming.  A storm that hit the animals just as ferociously as any blizzard.   The story of a modern-day farmer, battling to make a living from that most friendly of beasts – the pig.   It was a huge success story.  But the family pig farm had ceased to exist as a way-of-life.  As for the pigs?  Well ... It wasn’t good.  What the second of the two sons wanted to do was to make it better.  Besides, it was the likes of him who had made it so bad in the first place.  

Here is country life as it really is.  The hill sheep flocks and the farmers that look after them.  The sunshine and the shadow.  The pig farms; no longer places for happy grunting mums to suckle their piglets in spacious yards.  But instead, intensive technological business enterprises.  The stories are based on real events and are true to the happenings of the times.  The characters and incidents are put together from a number of different farms and farmers well known to the author.

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Colin Whittemore, a farmer’s son, started life on a pig and dairy farm and continued to work with animals all his life.  In his lifetime he has been in some part responsible for many of the bad things and a few of the good things that have happened to farmed animals.  He has written a number of books telling of rural life, including ‘Farming Stories from the Scottish Borders’ and ‘Animal Farming’.  The Small Hill lies west of the Borders village of West Linton in the South Pentland hills where the author lives. 

Books can be purchased by emailing  colin.whittemore@btinternet.com