RICHARD Thompson is keen to introduce his ‘girls’, Sissy and Esther, during a visit to Finney Hill Green farm overlooking the East Allen valley.

Underneath a belt of conifers, rootling around in the earth are two lovely ginger pigs.

“Tamworth pigs are on the Rare Breed Survival Trust’s watch list so I suppose we’re doing our bit to keep them going,” he says.

Richard and his wife, Vivienne have just sold six of Sissy’s second litter to Bill Quay Community Farm in Gateshead and previously they’ve sold their own bacon and ham locally.

Vivienne says: “They love tomatoes which is good because I work part-time at Allendale Co-op and there’s often vegetables spare. We also get hops from Allendale Brewery for them.”

In a nearby field four Dexter cattle are munching the lush grass. Richard and Vivienne bought two in-calf heifers, Nelly and Daisy, from first-time farmers and Dexter breeders, James and Lucy Howard at Longsyke Farm, near Steel Rigg, last year.

They’ve since had two bullocks, Oscar and Elvis.

“You have to keep them for two and a half years and the trouble is, I am getting quite attached to them,” says Vivienne.

“We’re going to have to eat them though, that’s their purpose in life,” she adds.

It’s just three years since the Thompsons swapped their suburban existence in North Tyneside for the wilds of Allendale and they’re still pinching themselves to make sure it’s real.

“Even after a few years you find yourself looking round thinking, ‘how did we get here?’”

It was a brave move, selling up their Victorian semi in the bustling coastal village of Monkseaton to come to a remote farmstead.

“We expected it to be windier as we have moved from practically sea level to a thousand feet above sea level,” Richard says.

They did have three hens, but that and their two moggies, was the extent of their livestock experience. So what prompted them to become smallholders?

“You just get to the point where, once the children have left home, if you’re not careful you’re going to do the same things for the next 30 years,” says Vivienne (55).

“We had had it in our minds for a while,” Richard adds. “You kind of start to feel a bit closed in. Also there’s the drip, drip, drip of the television – all those programmes like River Cottage and Countryfile!”

Vivienne has three daughters in their 30s who, she says, Richard ‘inherited’ as teenagers when the couple married 20 years ago and they now welcome four grandchildren on to the farm.

“I have big plans for them when they’re older,” Richard, 52, laughs. “The eldest, who’s nine, can’t wait to get up in the morning and collect the hens’ eggs.”

Becoming smallholders has been a learning curve as steep as Allendale’s Finney Hill (it’s a slow climb in low gear).

For example when they first took delivery of the Dexters, they were ‘quite flighty’ according to Richard. In fact they jumped two stone walls before disappearing into their neighbour’s field.

“It was around two weeks before they finally decided to come home and settle down,” says Richard.

But thanks to the smallholder’s bible, John Seymour’s The Complete Book of Self Sufficiency, and various Haynes manuals (yes, they cover sheep and chickens as well as cars) Richard and Vivienne have learned a lot in a short space of time.

Indeed they helped both pigs to farrow. “We read up on it and brought them from the wood into the yard into a shed with heat lamps. In Esther’s litter two were born dead and then one came out barely breathing. We read that you put them in the oven to warm them up so we did that but it still didn’t seem as though it was working. We put him back in the barn with mum and he began to feed. We were like, ‘He’s alive!’

“These are all ‘firsts’ for us. Will the joy disappear? I hope not.”

The couple have moved further towards a more sustainable environmental future by adding solar PV panels and switching from oil to a biomass boiler.

Richard has also planted a vegetable patch, which he hopes to extend, which includes basics like dwarf beans, carrots, leeks, swedes and courgettes.

Whilst they’re nowhere near self sufficient, they enjoy the fact that some of what they’re producing will go in their freezers and as time goes on they will sell more of their meat.

Richard still works as a freelance computer consultant in the oil and gas industry and they’ve also just converted a barn into a two bedroom self-catering holiday let.

Richard has found the help of other farmers and smallholders particularly useful and is now an active member of the relatively new North Pennines Smallholders Group originated by the AONB which aims to bring together smallholders, gardeners and landowners from across the North Pennines and surrounding areas, including Tynedale.

In fact the Hexham Courant’s village correspondent for Wark, Peter Samsom, is its chairman and Graham and Polly Shore, of Whitfield, are also involved.

Peter, who with his wife Fransje, runs a small flock of Shetland sheep for wool and meat, says: “There are many people in and around the North Pennines who have small areas of land but who don’t have a traditional farming background, and by establishing the group we hope to bring together people with similar interests.

“Many of us have a lot to learn, be it about making hay or about keeping livestock, or about how to best manage our land to benefit wildlife, and most large-farm solutions do not work for us.

“By organising bespoke training, social events, networking, and learning from each other, we’ll get better at what we do, and who knows, we might even make some new friends, be able to help out each other, and enjoy the experience.”

Richard runs the website as well as writing his own blog, Small Plot, Big Ideas, which documents his own smallholding successes and travails.

They haven’t regretted their move to a more environmentally friendly way of life for one minute.

“There’s never a wasted day,” says Vivienne. “If it’s raining, it’s raining for a purpose and when the sun shines it means that the grass grows and when the grass grows the animals have got something to eat. I am much more aware of Nature’s calendar. My sisters laugh; they say: ‘“She’s going to talk about her bloody big skies again!’”

l For more information about the smallholders group visit www.northpenninessmallholders.co.uk