Eglwysbach Show, Conwy Valley

This Saturday we chose to go to Eglwysbach Show. It's one of those summer traditions. In past years we've shown goats there, and my sister had taken her pony, but this year we were just visitors.

I don't know how old the show is, and the internet is surprisingly unforthcoming on its history, but one news article talks about two centuries of tradition, so it's not a new upstart. It's held on the second Saturday of August every year, come rain or shine, and rain isn't that uncommon. It's not unexpected to be ploughing through muddy footworn mire in wellies for the Show, so this year we were lucky, with broad, bright sunshine.

The Show is one of those marvellous annual agricultural shows you get in this area. I suppose you get them all over the country in rural areas. In my mind they're something like American county fairs, which have a great air of romanticism for me. I imagine American fairs being full of pies and pumpkins and fat pigs, although I'm told that's not quite the case any more, with the traditional giving way to the crass. In Eglwysbach crass is mostly outweighed by traditional. I didn't see any pigs in our show and we didn't go into any of the produce tents because they were too crowded, and crowds and autistic tendencies don't mix, but in previous years I've been in and seen glorious flower displays, bountiful piles of vegetables, and even farm animals crafted out of vegetables pinned together by children. We watched some beautifully groomed horses with shining coats and beautifully groomed riders being trotted around the field while people watched and lolled against straw bales. We wandered amongst stalls and fairground rides. A ghost train type thing whooped and shrilled. Klaxons went off. There seemed to be small boys with air horns wandering around. We bumped into my childhood friend who was very pregnant and hot and sitting in her small daughter's pushchair.

Up on a gentle slope of a field was a host of tractors. On the way in an ancient threshing machine shuddered and jolted, fixed up to a 1946 tractor by long belts, and my mother reminisced about how just such a machine had been in use at the farm next door when she was a child. I thought how catastrophic and violent a farming accident could be, and how the introduction of this kind of technology must have changed the rural world irrevocably. I imagined limbs being ripped off and flung across the grass. This threshing machine was all of wood, with faded paint, and it shuddered as if it wanted to come apart.

We visited the tractors up on the hill. Rows of vintage Ferguson tractors with shining paint and proud owners, men in flat caps leaning on the metalwork and discussing deep issues. I was taken back to our early days of living in rural Wales, when there were still a few old boys driving their cabless old tractors up and down the lanes with makeshift angle-iron roll bars attached. I don't know how old their tractors were, but I think they would have qualified for this show. Children clambered up onto tractor seats and pretended to drive while proud men waxed lyrical about their machines. But the call of candy floss and rides were too great, so we wandered back down into the main field where they went on a couple of rides and bought garish plastic candy canes filled with jelly beans.

We perused some pens of sheep, where various pure breeds stood patiently in the hot sun. We wandered over to look at some alpacas and admire the soft products made of their wool. There was a sad duck and a few sad hens in small crates, waiting to be taken home. And then we ventured into the sheep shearing tent, because a competition was starting at four. It was a wide white pavilion filled with rickety tables and a few white plastic garden chairs. People lined up along the tables, tried to sit on them, tried not to collapse them to the floor. The ground was strewn with sawdust. Dogs sighed. People saw friends and chatted. We all waited for the shearing to start. Men in sheep shearing vests wandered about fixing up electrical sockets, unrolling banners. Children gathered near the front and sat on the ground with their legs crossed. An astonishingly large amount of people of all ages wore black, branded sheep shearing vests. A baby with a sheep shearing vest over his sleepsuit wailed inconsolably. The compere kept calling out for entrants. Local, women, veterans. It was half past four and no one really minded. Outside shire horses were being led onto the field, and I wandered out and had a look, and came back in again.

At ten to five the compere put out a final call for entrants. 'We're not running too late. Starting at four, it's five now. This is Eglwysbach time. It's only an hour late.'

Then the competition began. I had never realised sheep shearing could be so exciting. The compere read out the names of the entrants and you've never heard anything so Welsh. A stream of Wyns and Geraints, Joneses and Williamses and Roberts. I'm not sure what they'd do with a John Smith, and it's nice to see that no matter what the media might tell you, Welsh culture is alive and well in the farming communities. A flat screen tv was perched at the side to show the score, a single nod to a high-tech world. So when they were ready to go a man wrestled a young sheep out of the pens. Each man brings his own clippers and attaches them to the power supply. I didn't know clippers were so individual, but maybe they like the familiar. Maybe it brings them luck. My dad has seen a sheep bleed to death when the shearing went wrong, so I suppose it's good to be confident in your tools.

The timer is connected to the clippers - when they turn them on the timer starts, and when they turn them off, it stops. And as the man clutches the half-adult lamb between his thighs he runs the clippers over its skin like a sled over snow. It's that smooth. The wool just falls off. A good time is around twenty five seconds. The crowd yells out encouragement. Sometimes the sheep bucks, and people groan, and the compere, who is commentating on all of this as if it's a Formula 1 race, makes jokes about lamb dinners. You get the sense that everyone knows everyone else, and everyone is happy. The sheep is shorn and is hefted back into a pen on the other side of the stage. After a minute three cards are thrust up above the screens by unseen judges - red or green, bad or good. The compere treats us to more banter, and then the next man is up.

After the men had all taken their turns we were tired. We didn't stay to watch the women (I'm not sure they managed to recruit any, despite energetic pleas to the crowd) or the veterans. We ambled back through the crowds, along the dusty tracks and over the road which was busy with cars streaming out of the village. The show was over for another year.

Some of the impeccably groomed horses and riders.

The jacket is as smart as the horse.

Crowds lounge on straw bales, wearied by the heat perhaps.

A little more impeccable horse fashion.

Beautifully turned out.

A honey stall where you could pay a pound to pull three nails out of a bale, in the hope of winning a honey-based prize. We didn't win.

Straw bales continue to make the best seats.

Some intense discussion over the vintage tractors.

A lovely piece of vintage machinery. We remembered seeing something similar in a terribly rusted state, abandoned in a field near our home.

Lovely old Nuffield tractor with very new tyres.

All the ranks of tractors with the showground beyond, nestled in the Eglwysbach valley.

A lovely yellow Massey Ferguson.

I'm not sure what this is but it was a tiny baby tractor that looked like it had escaped from the eighties.

A rather demure grey tractor.

That old and rattling wooden threshing machine, fixed up to a rusted tractor with long belts moving at a swift pace.

A Welsh fair wouldn't be complete without a harpist. There were signs indicating you could slip into the tent for a free paned, or cup of tea.

A very striking young girl on the candyfloss stall.

Some of the patient penned sheep.

I always love to see the rosettes proudly displayed.

Alpacas always look very self-satisfied.

More rosettes, this time on a chair.

More of the sheep pens.

The ubiquitous Japanese tourists. I wonder what they made of it all?

Yet more gaily coloured rosettes.

The cups out ready to present for the shire horses.

A beautifully done up and patient shire horse.

These mane decorations always make me think of darts.

Back inside the sheep shearing tent, a dog waits patiently with its owners.

A glimpse of sky through the top of the marquee.

Only half an hour late so far, and they're rigging up the electricals.

Behind the pen doors, the sheep are waiting too.

Finally the competition is underway...

The wool slips sweetly from a lamb with a nasty bit of fly strike.

The sheep aren't entirely content, but they're not too bothered.

The compere kept things going with a marvellous stream of commentary and banter.

Lots of sponsorship around, and little children at the front all as enthralled as the rest of us.

More expert shearing. Even some of the children were in the sheep shearing vests.

This guy's trousers got an honourable mention.

Even the ice cream vans are all out to support our agriculture.

On the way back to the car, we saw one of the really vintage tractors waiting to be loaded onto a trailer and taken home, wherever that may be.