Living in a city often means missing out on encounters with animals. The cows that graze in the middle of Cambridge can give residents that much-needed dose of wildlife.
Angelika von Heimendahl has been farming in the heart of Cambridge for 20 years. Her cattle are a local East Anglian breed known as Red Poll and are genetically hornless.
At the start of April, 50 of her cattle made their return to the commons after spending the winter months at a farm in Royston. This isn’t because it gets too cold for the animals. It’s because they “poach” the ground.
Angelika explains: “They’re heavy animals, and if they walk somewhere all the time, it would be an absolute mud bath and there wouldn’t be any grass left for the summer.”
The practice of grazing cattle on the commons is centuries-old. Midsummer Common has been used to graze cattle since 1381. In areas that were too low and marshy for construction or farming, fields were set aside to graze livestock.
In the 1890s, the area which is now the Cambridge Leisure Park was a cattle market. These pens could hold 700 bulls and 2000 pigs or sheep. The site closed in 1976, when the city council developed the area into the arts hub that it is today, a world a way from the noise and smells of the old cattle market!
Today, the cattle can be spotted enjoying the sunshine on Midsummer Common, Coldhams Common, and Barnwell East nature reserve. The best way to enjoy the cows are to look at them from the paths.
Despite the small number of people who agitate the cattle, or try to feed them grass, Angelika says that the best part about city farming is the people who look out for them.
She said: “If there’s ever any problems, I get hundreds of phone calls immediately, which is great. Many, many people look after them.”
Angelika now has even less to worry about after the council funded a new collar that tracks the movement of each cow and creates an invisible fence. This can be tracked from an app installed on her phone.
“We have one nature reserve that has quite a deep ditch and we’ve been worried about cattle maybe getting stuck. Now we can fence off things like ditches.”
The fence can also be used to protect flowers from being trampled over. It works by playing an unpleasant siren sound from the collar when the invisible fence is crossed.
Another benefit of keeping livestock in the city centre is the connection residents can have with their food. The meat from the cattle is sold at the Cambridge market every Sunday.
Angelika said: “I love the fact that people can have that connection between where their food comes from and how it’s kept. When you go to the supermarket you completely lose that connection.”
For the summer months ahead, the cattle will be enjoying a bit of city life from the serenity of Cambridge’s commons. You can take a trip to see them yourself, or take a look at our gallery below of them basking in the sun.
Source: Cambridgeshire