Last week, we ran the neighbouring farm’s mixed beef herd back to their winter shed from some outlying fields almost two miles away. This happens twice yearly – going out and coming in – and it was all hands on deck.

Gateways, driveways, entrances to lanes all needed to be blocked, as did the B-road winding through Upper Castle Combe that the herd crosses on an awkward bend. It was quite a spectacle – a “stop the traffic” event in every sense.

Beforehand, I always imagine that it will be something like a James Ravilious photograph, slow‑moving cattle backs swinging along narrow-hedged lanes. In reality, it is more pacey and pressurised than that, and there is a great sense of collective triumph (and a well-earned pint in the pub) when they are all secured in their compound. It marks a turning point in the year, the final stretch of autumn leading very definitely to winter.

Our sow is similarly now back in her winter sty in the barn after a summer residency up the field (litter finished, freezer full), but our cattle, by contrast, are still out enjoying the grass. They are off the farm on leased ground – their summer grazing, in fact, which has only in recent weeks become grazeable. The eventual rain and continuing mildness have rejuvenated the grass to a spring-like green freshness. As the days pass, there will be less and less in it, and the cattle are beginning to sense that. Sometimes they shout in protest and follow me to the gate as if ready to come home.

With the clocks changing, my working days are bookended by darkness once more. The receding of the light comes as a kind of grief, that seasonal sense of things coming to an end. Just now I took the dogs on a bedtime stroll up the road and climbed the steep verge into the field above Long Dean. I could hear the beech masts falling with a tap on the tarmac.

As I walked, I could feel resistance against my welly – grass in rows, the last of it cut for late silage. A lone badger rasped in the birch plantation opposite. Below me in the village, a light went out.