O ur village blacksmith passed away a couple of years ago. He lived to a good age and in his latter years he only did a bit of pottering about, which was fair enough.

But you did see the door to his small shed open, so that you knew he was about. His blacksmith's shop has stood empty and quiet now for those two years but recently it has been sold with planning permission to convert to a dwelling.

It is the start of these new works, fencing a garden in and altering the access, that has a finality about it that is, in a way, more eloquent of the end of an era than his passing away.

It was never a very pretentious premises, the first part where he kept most of his equipment, just about large enough to take a small car but that led in to the forge proper which was a treasure trove of forge, bellows and traditional blacksmith's kit that was a joy to see.

All that, they tell me, is still there and supposedly there is a condition of planning permission that it must remain so. It would be a devil to dust! It would be far better to put it somewhere where everyone could see it on a regular basis.

It's the passing of an institution. Years ago it was an important meeting place where you met your neighbours while you waited your turn to have something made or mended.

We would all contribute to the job at hand, with advice or actually assisting in the mending, if it was harvest machinery that needed mending urgently.

Employees would enjoy the social side of the visit and employers would get tetchy about how long they were there.

There was always an unspoken rule that you could jump the queue if your job was urgent and depended on the weather.

Our last blacksmith's great skill was in wrought iron work and I know of several great country houses where his gates grace an impressive entrance.

I often wondered what he thought about having this great skill, yet spending most of his life looking in the scrap pile in the nettles for a piece of broken sheep hurdle to mend someone's mower.

When I first came to live around here there were two blacksmiths, father and son. Father was in his 70s and thought they should make their living shoeing horses. Son wanted to make gates and mend farm machinery and there was great competition between them. It could be quite scary at times.

If there was a horse to be shod, equipment had to be fixed outside, even if it was pouring with rain. All that wet and all that electricity made me twitchy, but it wasn't that much safer inside in the dry, with the old man fixing a shoe front end of a horse and all those sparks flying about at its back end.

The father (sounds better than old man) was a great prankster and would love to tease serious horse owners, especially if they were a bit on the novice side.

One day he had me holding a horse's head while he trimmed its feet prior to shoeing. It was a young lady's first horse and the first time she had had it shod. She watched what went on, wide eyed and fascinated. He did all four feet and then stepped back to have a look.

"Do you think the horse is level now, Roger?"

I gave the halter to the owner and joined him to eye the horse up.

"I think it's a bit high on that one corner."

So he lifted the one hoof up and took just a token slither of hoof off. We stepped back and had another look.

Just to be sure I fetched the spirit level and we did several checks with it on the animal's back before we were satisfied. By now the owner's jaw was well dropped, but she never said a word.

The new shoes were duly fixed but there was more to come. The owner had ridden the horse to the blacksmith's and the saddle had been removed for shoeing.

So Father Blacksmith enquired of the owner which way she intended to ride home. He went to great lengths to determine that she was going to return the way she came and not take a ride around the village first.

Having determined that she was going back the way she came he picked up the saddle and put it back on the horse, facing the wrong way round. He explained that this would save her turning the horse around.

His parting shot was to enquire, indicating his son welding outside, if she wanted to buy some sparks to make her own Christmas decorations. An old blacksmith's joke, but always amusing the first time you hear it.

■ When I went to bed last night they were getting the cows out of the field by the house for milking. Not a late afternoon milking, not an early morning milking, it was 9.30pm and it was to be the third milking that day.

My son had decided that our cows would be milked three times a day. Cows respond to this regime by giving 10 to 15 per cent more milk. It's a fact that if you do something that a cow likes, it will show its appreciation by giving you more milk.

You have to give it extra food to produce this milk in proportion, but the cows enjoy three times a day.

Conversely, if ever you do something the cows don't like, such as make them graze a field a day longer than they should, they will show you exactly what they think by the reduced milk in the tank next day, which is about as eloquent as it could be.

The driver for all this is milk price. Our milk price has come down about 15 per cent this year, which is a lot of money off our bottom line.

David sees this three-times-a-day regime as the only way he can address that. Less money per litre, so sell more litres.

This is all very well but he has a young family and those sharing the extra work have young families and none of them should have to do this to get by.

Little wonder that UK milk production continues to fall to new lows year after year.