Sheepskin and agriculture

We had a hectic day!
The people at the abattoir seem to find us HILARIOUS. No idea why. We went in to see if we could collect the skin of the lamb, we got as far as "We are here to collect ..." and the lady in reception said laughingly "ah yes... the black lamb". She wasn't there when we dropped it off. How did she know who we were and which of the hundreds of sheep was ours? While we were talking to her someone else rushed in to see if she needed any help with the crazy English people (he helped when we were trying to understand French theory of pig butchery and saw us and wanted part of the fun)
We managed to get across that we wanted the skin, but not the meat yet (it needs to hang a bit) and were sent round the back to speak to "Alaing (the local accent with the g) who is wearing green". He took us in to a room with hundreds or possibly thousands of skins packed in salt. Our big woolly skin was waiting, covered in salt, but specially separated from the others. He told us that the others are going to be small rugs, jackets and shoe linings. We want to make a rug from ours.

We got our skin home

and then unrolled it and set about trimming the grotty bits off the edge.

The dog wanted to help. But we had to tell her no.

But she remained very interested

 

We then started scrapping the inside of the skin to remove all bits of fat, flesh and kind of stretchy membrane that is all over the skin.

After many many hours (ok an hour) of scraping there was still a certain amount of 'stuff' on the inside of the skin

So we kept going some more. But after a while we decided it was ENOUGH and covered it in more salt. It will stay in this for a couple of days before moving on to the next stage.

After finishing with this lamb skin, we went to see our new lambs! They are very small and very cute

We then headed off to the Salon d'agriculture in Tarbes. We were hoping to get some rabbits, but we found they didn't really go in for that kind of thing. There were a lot of cows

and some rather ugly sheep

some horses

and some tractors

We went to a tasting session of 'Noir de Bigorre' pigs as we are considering them for this years pork. They were delicious.

There was also a lot of other yummy local produce

We met the farmer who had cows on our fields last summer who had three cows on show. His dad was there too and seemed interested to hear what we were up to. They didn't seem to have heard of highland cattle when we told them about the cows we would have arriving soon.