Nov 7, 2007
'Trafficking in Sheep' author, former resident finds her 'Wilton' in Nova Scotia
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When Anne Barclay Priest was a young child, she spent her summers in Wilton, in a house built in the 18th Century, on Piper’s Hill Road. In her book
Trafficking in Sheep she writes that summers here were idyllic.
Her mother saw to it that there were animals to take care of: chickens, ducks, goats, ponies to ride and later, horses. There was a beautiful garden. She learned how to churn butter. “My love of animals got its start in those early days in Wilton. But despite all the animals we had, I never knew any sheep,” she writes.
Mrs. Priest spoke at the Wilton Library recently to a group of people who sat quietly in amazement as she described her colorful life. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1949 and became a foreign correspondent, covering the post-war work of the United Nations. She spent 10 years working with the civil rights movement. She was an actress with the stage name Anne Barclay.
The sheep farming came when, as a divorced mother of two young boys, she wanted to escape the crowded touristy summers in Cape Cod and took off with the boys to Nova Scotia, where she bought a house and then an island and became the owner of a flock of quasi-wild sheep.
“ I decided I’d buy property only if it made my heart sing, and that’s what happened. I fell in love with property that was eight acres of field that led right to the ocean, and signed the papers on the spot.”
She describes how she started by renting a cottage, with no plumbing and no refrigerator. “In good weather, I would brush my teeth outdoors in the field with seagulls wheeling and screeching overhead and the sound of waves pounding on the shore. As my teenage boys would have said, “Not too shabby.”
“One day, while I was brushing away, I realized that I had found my ‘Wilton’ in Nova Scotia. I was home again.”
Her memoir is filled with impulsive, sometimes even outlandish, epiphanies. Ms. Priest is definitely the kind of woman who is always ready to jump into a whole new world.
Her lambs were also being raised for meat and she describes the butchering process vividly. The lambs had to be shot and skinned. “It was my job to salt the meat,” she writes. The grassy land gave a special flavor to the meat. She tells how she moved sheep from Nova Scotia to her farm in Greenville, N.Y., and how she transported cows, two at a time. In between, she took a three-month trip around the world.
Ms. Priest’s sister, who lives in New Canaan and was in the audience, described the unusual experience of feeding a ram and it was apparent that she considers her sister a one-of-a-kind person.
Trafficking in Sheep, published by the Countryman Press in Woodstock, Vt., to this writer, is an exciting, funny, amazing, uplifting memoir by a woman, now in her late 70’s, who defied the restrictions of her generation and dared to live an independent life. The book is at the Wilton Library and at bookstores.
© Copyright 2008 by Hersam Acorn Newspapers
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