COVER STORY Robin Mills met Ruth Wilkins at Rampisham Hilll Farm, Dorset
© Ruth Wilkins Photograph by Robin Mills
’I
grew up in the centre of Oxford where my parents, both physicists, were academics at the University of Oxford. I spent a lot of my childhood with a family who lived in a narrow boat moored on the canal at the end of our street. They ran a wheelwright’s workshop and kept ponies on Port Meadow right in the middle of Oxford, which they used for carriage hire in the wedding business, and I used to help prepare the ponies and hold them outside the church while the wedding took place. When I was 12 they moved to a smallholding further up the canal where they ran a farm shop from their boat and kept a couple of cows which were hand milked, some chickens and pigs, as well as the ponies for the weddings. I spent every weekend there, usually with my best friend, sleeping in a caravan in the field or in the horsebox and helping with the livestock. My life in the countryside, immersed with farming and horses, had already taken root. Before university I had a gap year working in a lab in Oxford growing tissue cultures for medical experiments, then went to Wye College in Kent to study Agricultural Science. It was the last year they offered that course, and I was one of only two students on it. Wye College had been owned by the University of London but had recently been taken over by Imperial College London who, during my time there, embarked on an asset stripping exercise, and tried to sell the site to build 4,000 houses on the College farm. They had Tel. 01308 423031 The Marshwood Vale Magazine January 2022 3
