Today I was to accompany Nigel to the Ram and Fleece Show at Fox Bay on West Falkland. This necessitated catching one of the small eight seat Islander aircraft that constitute the Falkland Island Government Air Service.
The aircraft arrived and offloaded two or three people but the engineer decided he wanted to change the brakes before the aircraft left again. Nigel and I stood on the tarmac in the sunshine chatting with the pilot and head of fire section-cum-baggage handler; it is genuinely fascinating to hear the life stories of some of these people and it is also fascinating to experience the relaxed nature of things here compared with the more regulatory constrained approach back home.
Thirty minutes later and we were off and climbing west. The colourful houses of Stanley, spaced along the blue of the harbour, slipped past quickly to our left and then we were over the rugged land immediately outside the small town. The mountains and battlefields I had seen on my last visit and on my first day here were to our left and right, craggy outcrops of granite lined the mountain ridges and black peaty ponds and rock pockmarked the valley floor. A number of those ponds were perfectly round: identical small black dots spread seemingly randomly but from this height obviously shell holes from the conflict, now part of the peat-pond landscape.
Deep blue water and islands in the distance got closer as we flew over the deserted brown-green of the hills and valleys below us, occasionally marked by the thin and wrinkled path of a peat river, like a black vein across the landscape, or the occasional dark lake. It looked quite smooth terrain from up here but in reality was probably extremely rugged and impossible to cross by vehicle except by the roughest of tracks and only with difficulty by foot. Once I saw the red roof of an isolated house in the middle of nowhere, lost in the expanse, and could only assume a certain type of person would want to live there. Even as we flew over the tiny splash of red and white that was Goose Green I could not help but feel it was totally lost in the landscape of green and blue.
We were only a thousand feet above the ground and I could clearly see the 'rock runs' across the landscape, fascinating features that are supposedly a bit of a mystery to geologists. They present as areas of rocks, some as large as a fridge, that give the impression of having flowed down from the hills. They look for all the world as water might, sometimes with small tributaries off the main flow. I was told during my first visit to these islands that the formations are particular to the Falklands and that the exact geological mechanism that creates them is unknown although the theories relate in some way to glaciation.
It was fifty minutes before we landed on the small grass strip that served the community of Fox Bay which sits on either side of a wide inlet. We were driven to the show in the large barn that served the community’s sheep farming needs on the eastern side of the bay. I abandoned Nigel to the organisers while I went to find some locals to talk to. The event had the feel of a village fete, small in scope and limited in its offerings, crossed with the importance of a large town show; this was after all one of about only seven settlements with a total population of about two hundred souls located on West Falkland, an area almost as large as Devon and Cornwall combined. Everybody seemed to know each other, chatting together while we sat in groups on the grass, sun on our faces and food from a small barbecue in our hands. And then of course there were the rams and the fleeces. Those who wanted got walked around the animals and fleeces displayed in the main barn - fleeces on tables around the edge and animals in cages in the centre - a local sheep farmer highlighting what constitutes a good ram and a good fleece. Apparently when taking a fleece sample from a sheep you should take it from the left side of the animal as sheep tend to sleep on their right (something to do with internal organs) so the left side of a sheep tends to have slightly higher quality wool.
It was fascinating to speak to the locals about their history and their work. Some were Falklands born and bred, others immigrants from the UK. Some were from well-established Island families (and are keen to let you know). Some were sheep farmers, others were local government and some had small businesses. Mostly they were people from the settlement but some had travelled from Stanley and a small contingent had come in from Mount Pleasant for the event. It was an interesting mix and they shared interesting views as we sat on the grass in the sun sharing beer and conversation that ranged from global warming to things military and to life on the islands in general.
Eventually the time for the prize giving arrived. Nigel carried out his duties, announcing the winners and handing out the prizes of which there were a few and then it was time to depart. We drove back to the airfield and climbed aboard the aircraft for the return trip, again crossing that isolated landscape of green and blue although this time making a diversion to Bleaker Island – where I had failed to get to a few days ago – to collect a couple more passengers. It was then it was back to Stanley to collect the car and head back to Government House for a quiet night in after a long day out.
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