Incident number: 1083
Response ID: 313,984,668
Date of incident: 13.04.25
Location: Field in Papcastle on Papcastle to Workington Trail.
Status: Couple with two children with no dog on PRoW
“My partner and our 2 young children were walking a field in Papcastle. We crossed the field before, on the public footpath, and could not see any cattle. On our return, we got to the gate and saw a herd of cows in the field. They turned to look at us and then ran to the gate. They stopped about a metre before the gate and just stared at us. We waited for a while hoping that they would get bored and move along but they didn’t. We had no other route and there was a river to the side of us. We turned around and tried to go up a bank to find another way. As we turned around the cows raced at the gate. When we couldn’t find another route, we went back to the gate and the herd had moved but they had moved to the other gate which would have blocked our way out of the field. We therefore had no option but to walk up the other side of the field to see if we could find another way out. When we got to the top of the field and walked across, we were at the top of a hill, with the cows at the bottom of the hill- but they had moved from the footpath so we thought we would move back toward the footpath. However, the herd stared at us again and when we started walking back towards the path, they all started to run back in that direction (thankfully didn’t come up the hill). We were lucky that we were blocked from their view then by a large tree so we turned the opposite direction and ended up passing our children over a barbed wire fence into the neighbouring field. When we got near to the footpath in the neighbouring field, the cows noticed us again and ran to the fence and gate and one banged its head into the gate. Throughout the whole event, we kept our young children slow and quiet and we did not provoke the cows in any way. I’ve always been wary of cows and now my partner is too- although I’ve never seen cows behave in this way/ it felt like they were chasing/ stalking us.”
Our reporter states
“If the farmer had chosen to add some additional fencing, it would have prevented a metre and a half of grazing along one side of the field. I can’t understand why such precautions wouldn’t be taken. If walkers can’t safely use public footpaths then the UK would be very suffocating indeed.”
Cattle Safety 