Bill Knott visits Claire and Robert Symington, whose Leicestershire farm is home to fruit trees, cornfields... and two thousand geese. Photographs by Arthur Meehan.
Never before had I seen a farmyard with dandruff. On closer inspection, the thousands of specks of celestial scurf were actually wisps of goose feather; with 2,200 geese in the general vicinity, a certain amount of fall-out is inevitable.
The geese belong to Claire Symington and her husband Robert, proprietors of Seldom Seen Farm, near Billesdon in Leicestershire. Claire started out at the other end of the food chain, back in the early Seventies, when a spot of catering was just the ticket for nice young gels from the shires. Claire, one suspects, had a bit more talent than the average - soon she was rolling up her sleeves with Prue Leith and Caroline Waldegrave (now principal of Leith's School of Food and Wine) at Leith's Good Food in London's Sebastian Street.
Long, long before this - in fact, when Claire was just nine, and travelling up to a pony club camp in her dress-designer father's van - she had seen an 11-year-old boy standing at the roadside, waving his arms. "He was pointing the way to the camp: he seemed very grown-up." It was, of course, Robert. Young Robert's family had had a corset business, which his father sold (in straitened circumstances, perhaps). He bought a farm with the proceeds, and Robert, after travelling the world, went to Cirencester Agricultural College to learn the business. After a spell in relief farming, he set up a pick-your-own fruit farm, selling strawberries.
The geese came soon after they were married. "Robert got me a pair of Brecon Buff geese, Mac and Mabel, for my birthday, but, being Robert, he'd bought 30 others as well. We decided to fatten them for Christmas, and they went like hot cakes." Both believe strongly in diversification - they now grow Christmas trees, as well as every variety of soft fruit, and have 100 acres of corn, 82 acres of pasture with a few sheep, and a farm shop. They saw the geese as a 'good fit' with the rest of the farm.
Goose has a wonderfully rich, sweet flavour, especially when raised on corn and pasture, but, as anyone who has ever cooked one will know, they are not the most efficient birds for feeding a crowd; nor are they easy to serve. The novice goose roaster is likely to end up with a scrappy carcass and a kitchen coated in fat.
Claire can't remember how she came up with the solution, but their three-bird roast now accounts for nearly half of their annual production. The three-bird roast is a boned goose stuffed with a boned chicken, then stuffed with a boned pheasant. The birds are arranged to give a fair proportion of each meat in every slice, and are sandwiched together with minced pork, orange, celery and herbs, which hold the roast together. This makes it easy to carve, and bastes the meats naturally during cooking.
Six local women work in a purpose-built kitchen, while their menfolk slaughter the geese in an outbuilding, also purpose-built and wryly known as the 'departure lounge'. The geese are killed humanely - welfare concerns aside, a stress-free bird is more tender. They are then dry-plucked (wet-plucking is cheaper, but ruins the skins); singed, not waxed, again to preserve the skin; hung at 0°C for a week or two; and eviscerated by hand (not hot water, which can encourage the growth of bacteria). They are now oven-ready.
It is now early autumn, and the geese are slowing being fattened for Christmas. Too fat to fly very far, or very high, they spend much of their time waddling around the fields in great white flocks, and occasionally need rounding up at feeding time. Which is where Jess comes in. Jess never quite made it as a sheepdog - too much in-breeding, according to Robert - so she is now probably Britain's only 'goosedog', intently skulking around the birds as if they were bigger and woollier. Even Jess, though, is little help against the Symingtons' biggest foe - the fox. One particularly dreadful night, they lost 27 geese and a pair of pet turkeys. They were awoken by a banging noise, coming from one of the turkeys flapping its wings against the henhouse gate, its throat hanging out. Nature is rarely as beautiful as television would have us believe.
There is a serenity, however, to the Symingtons' lives, seldom seen in these days of intensive farming. For relaxation, they have a summerhouse by the lake and, incongruously, a billiard room in the middle of the farmyard. They also make excellent sloe gin - not for sale, which, given the rate we were drinking it, is no bad thing.
And, although you may be a little late to buy this year's goose from Seldom Seen Farm, you might feel comforted by another of their goose products: the feathers from each bird are sold for stuffing pillows and duvets. The perfect meat, the perfect cooking fat, and a great night's sleep. What a useful bird the goose is.
Seldom Seen Farm, Billesdon, Leics LE7 9FA. Tel 0116 259 6742.