When you come to East Mellwaters Farm where Mellwaters Barn is situated in the North Pennines Area of  Outstanding Natural Beauty, you soon come to realise how lucky you are. 

Reason being is  Mellwaters Barn sits roughly in the middle of the farm of 367 acres which is approximately 200 football pitches!

This means social distancing of 2 metres apart is no great problem because with the people who live in this area together with people staying in the cottages you will have approximately 7 football pitches to each person so plenty of room for exercise together with about 7 km of footpaths to walk on.

East Mellwaters Farm specialises in sheep with a flock of around 1,200 ewes.  Their year starts in the autumn when they are ‘tupped’ followed by ‘scanning’ early in the New Year to see how many lambs they are likely to have.  This enables us to split them into groups of ewes with one, two or three lambs and occasionally four lambs expected  so we can feed them accordingly.  In 2017 we built a large sheep shed to house them from the winter weather as it can get pretty extreme up here in winter time, especially when they say on the traffic reports ‘The A66 between Bowes and Brough is closed due to snow, wind or some other problem’.

The sheep share the farm with local creatures, such as rabbits, stoats and weasels all the year round and the occasional deer or otter in the winter time.  We also have a large number of birds from waders (curlew, lapwing and oystercatcher) to summer visitors (garden warbler, grey wagtail, pied wagtail, house martin, swallow and wood warbler).  Last but not least our local residents (blackbirds, blue tits, buzzard, chaffinch, goldfinch, great tit and greenfinch).

Although the A66 is a busy road between Scotch Corner and  Penrith, once you get off this road, you will find many quiet and pleasant roads to drive on, but not fast, as some corners are sharp with short steep hills.  There are several villages in Teesdale, well worth a visit , popular at times but parking is generally easier than elsewhere.

Finally the views and scenery in ‘England’s last wilderness’ is magnificent during the daytime with starry night skies for all to see.  

Find out more about East Mellwaters Farm.