From Richard Brown, Huntly, Aberdeenshire, UK
This rekindled memories of the start of my veterinary career in north-east Scotland in 1981. It was common then for a suckler beef farm to have an area of “rough ground”: a field of wild bushes, rushes, weeds and, simply put, whatever grew in that region that wasn’t a tree. It was commonly used as a convalescence field for sick cattle, when appropriate. You would see them sniffing through the field looking for particular plants. My father-in-law, a farmer, assumed they were searching for foods that had herbal or medical benefit. These fields are almost all gone now.
