Porky and Bess.

Today saw us up at the crack of dawn, well not really, but for us very early. It was piglet collection day.
Several friends had said that it would take about three hours to get to where the piglets were, but in fact the journey was simple and quick, taking us just one hour forty minutes, which was in fact ten minutes quicker than Goole maps had said. We met the breeder at a garage in his town, garages in Ireland seem to be the main meeting points, we of course were over an hour early for our appointment but it was not a problem, we then followed Richard, the breeder, to his farm a few miles out of town. We had a choice of piglets and settled on two ten week old gilts, Tamworth X Saddleback.
After the initial shock of being grabbed and bundled into a very large dog kennel the piglets soon settled down, but not before they had tossed straw all over themselves, and had a good root through it. They then bedded themselves down under a duvet of straw and slept for the entire journey to their new home.

Warm and snug.

Once we arrived they were transported to their run, still in the kennel  where they were quite happy to stay,

One eye open.

it took them about half an hour to venture out, squeals and grunts of pleasure as they started rooting. Then the dogs came over to investigate. Tess is fascinated but a little confused, I'm sure she expected them to bark, all she got was a grunt and a definite look of distain.

Our old dog Robbie however greeted them with a growl and a bared tooth, yes, tooth, being as old as he is he only has one tooth, poor old chap. Piglets have now found that electric fencing bites, so we are hopeful that we will not have any escape attempts, but knowing pigs this is something we cant take for granted, but we can hope.

Just five minutes work.

They have been given their supper but are far more interested in rooting, clearly they are energy saving rotovators.
We have been very impressed with the efficiency of the Department of Agriculture dealing with our pig licence application.  The application forms arrived the day after we had applied for them, despite there being a long bank holiday weekend, we had our inspection on Wednesday, just one week after sending the forms in, on Thursday we were issued with our herd number, by phone, with all the associated paper work arriving on Friday. The efficiency might be something to do with our local office closing down, with the loss of jobs for all the clerical staff. All paper work will now come from a different county, Cavan. I have my doubts if this will lead to greater efficiency, and it certainly means yet more money being taken out of the local economy.
On our travels we went through some very pretty country side, Bluebells and Garlic Ransoms are already out down country.

 We spotted a very pretty Irish thatched cottage, a different style of thatching to where we live,

and some interesting modern metal sculptures,

unfortunately we couldn't get very good photos of them as it was a very busy road

                                                 and it was raining.
Tess our Golden lab has a new best friend, she had been friends with one of our old cats Emily, who sadly died at Christmas. Tess was very sad at the time as they used to play together, however, Felix, our young black and white boy has decided that he prefers Tess to the other cats, one of them , we are not too sure who, caught a mouse,

Felix and Tess took turns in playing with the poor mouse, neither wanting to eat it, just to play.