Annie Bernat has been welcoming the public to her sheep farm in France since long before it was trendy, and decades later she still loves it.
Annie and her brother's property is in between the narrow roads at Camarès, in central southern France. They've got about 600 Lacaune ewes - the sort of sheep that produce milk for Roquefort cheese.
The soil in this area looks really strange. It's red like ours, perhaps a bit more maroonish, but instead of being made up of soft lumps it's rocky and shard-like. (A bit of research tells me it's a clay saturated with iron oxide, and it's full of the skeletons of corals and marine critters from 250 million years ago).
The dirt seems to grow good grass though, because the ewes are excellent producers (350 litres per girl per season) and the barns are packed with giant fresh-smelling bales of hay.
When we got to the farm the school holiday crowd was taking off its blue shoe protectors after touring the sheep barns, and was headed towards the soft and squeezable animals.
As the mothers gathered up their young and the squishy protectors, Annie tossed grain about for the chooks who came running for the finish line from the ground floor of the stone farmhouse.
Around the corner we stopped to get out the rabbits, and once everyone under 10 had held one we poked our heads into the stable to say hello to the horses.
Then up we went past the tractor sheds, past the Jenny Craig Shetland pony pen, into a simply, but rather nicely, restored barn.
Annie told me (through my translator and friend Marion) that she got some funding to help with the glass windows and doors, and also for the three-legged stools around the tables.
As the parents lifted the kids onto the stools, Annie rushed about putting baskets of bread on the tables and started sharing the cheese. The chunks of Roquefort were the size of lunch plates and had the ripe smell of room temperature. Jam was also passed around, and the weary parents welcomed the red wine that was poured for them.
There was a lovely feeling of chaos - a bit like a flurry of warm wind between us - but Annie had done this hundreds of times and knew what a lovely feeling it was.
After the families had paid up (a tiny five Euros per adult), Annie sat with us and the left-overs, talking about how she and a handful of women sheep farmers had got together to organise the farm tours. They got some help with printing brochures, and eventually convinced the cheese companies to let them sell Roquefort from their farms (albeit at a higher price than at the factories).
Annie makes barely anything from the tours, and she doesn't have a farm shop to divert the visitors through on their way to the car park, but you can see she just loves sharing her lifestyle and animals with families who are willing to drive out to Camarès and get a bit dirty.
Annie's flock at Camarès, France, a set on Flickr.
