The Tally Gate at Batch Farm

Original short story written for Revision Library; not based on any existing published work.

Every summer, eleven-year-old Amara Osei-Bonsu spent the last week of the school holidays at Batch Farm, a smallholding on the western slope of the Long Mynd where her uncle, Tomos, kept a small flock of Shropshire sheep and mended fences for half the parish. This year, Amara had brought her cousin Freya Pryce along, mostly because Freya's family had just moved to nearby Church Stretton and wanted, in Freya's words, "an excuse to see something more interesting than moving boxes."

On their first morning, Tomos sent them down to the far paddock to close a gate that livestock kept forcing open. The gate itself was ancient: black iron, patterned with rows of small studs that Amara had always assumed were purely decorative. Freya, running a finger along one row, noticed something odd. "They're not evenly spaced," she said. "Look, there's a gap, then five studs close together, then another gap."

Amara counted along the top rail. Groups of studs, five or fewer, separated by wider gaps, repeated all the way along the gate: five, three, five, four, one. She had no idea what it meant, but the pattern was too deliberate to be an accident of manufacture.

When they mentioned it to Tomos that evening, he set down his mug of tea and smiled in the way adults do when a question reminds them of something they had almost forgotten. "That's a tally gate," he said. "My grandfather's grandfather made it, back when a shepherd up on the Mynd couldn't always get down to the farmhouse to report how many sheep he'd counted that day. He'd notch or peg a pattern into whatever gate or post was nearest, and whoever passed later could read the total without a word being exchanged."

Freya frowned. "But how do you read studs as a number?"

Tomos explained that shepherds on the hill had once used a counting system called Yan Tan Tethera, older than ordinary English numbers, in which sheep were counted in bundles of twenty rather than tens. Each group of studs on the gate stood for a bundle counted that way, and a shepherd fluent in the old system could glance at the gate and know, within moments, roughly how large the flock below had been on the day the studs were added.

Amara asked whether anyone still used the system now. "Hardly anyone," Tomos admitted, "though a few of the older farmers on the hill still count that way out of habit, more than need. Machines and spreadsheets do the actual counting these days." He paused, running his thumb over one worn stud near the gatepost. "I keep meaning to have it recorded properly, before nobody left in the family remembers what any of it means."

That gave Freya an idea. Over the next three days, she photographed every stud pattern on the gate, sketched a rough map of where each cluster sat, and asked Tomos to talk her through the old counting words for a recording on her phone. Amara, less patient with sketching, instead wrote down everything Tomos said, word for word, in a battered notebook she had brought for the holiday.

By the time they packed the car to go home, they had produced something between them that Tomos called, only half joking, "the first proper transcript that gate's ever had." He told Amara that he would frame a copy of her notes and keep it in the farmhouse kitchen, next to a photograph of the same gate taken by his own grandfather nearly seventy years before.

Driving away down the lane, Amara looked back at the gate, ordinary and unremarkable to anyone who did not know what to look for, and thought about how close its whole quiet history had come to being lost simply because nobody had thought to ask a question about a slightly uneven row of studs.