The Coakers have been off on their jollies this last week or two.

Alison had already taken the kids off to London for a few days, to expose them to some culture. Agnes likes museums, and Polly, the shopping. John, meanwhile, spent all his time hooking perch out of the Thames, annoying them for a minute and then chucking them back.

This left me wrapping bales, living on triple-decker egg sandwiches, and avoiding mounting housework, until they returned.

Then we loaded everyone up and slipped away up to Northumberland, for a combined holiday and Riggit Galloway Cattle Society summer jamboree (as you'll see, the RGCS jamborees are a treat, and well worth the sub).

Trundling up the M5/M6 loaded with rapidly bored and shuffling kids isn't always the best way to spend the day. The ruts in the inside lane are worse again. I notice they even hold water after a shower now.

I also notice subtle graduations in the counter girls at the motorway service stations/coffee shops. They are alternately of East European stock, often bright and may very well be qualified physicists taking a career break to earn some extra cash. Or they're local, and don't seem to have a full set of chromosomes. Why is this?

With the radio warning of horrendous traffic past Brum, we dived over the Severn, and went up through the Welsh Marches, coming back out above the Long Mynd. Much more interesting. Good farming country there too.

After a night spent by the Lakes, we hit Haltwhistle, and set to a week's gallivanting around.

I learned that the garrison at a fort called Vindaloo (or some such) was oft made up of Belgian conscripts, with cavalry from Frisia. Looking out across those high windswept mile forts must've come as a bit of a shock.

As well as a day capsizing boats in Kielder Water, in the middle of the largest man-made forest in Europe, the kids climbed high ropes, to whizz down zip-wires, and then dutifully absorbed some of the Roman heritage stuff.

The girls went pony riding out across a grouse moor, while I quite wantonly encouraged the boy to purloin a few of the estate's brown trout from a mountain brook, using a little seven-foot rod and line adorned with a worm.

I'd decided it would be a heartless ghillie indeed who took offence at such a crime. This rationale was OK until he worked his way down onto a larger body of water.

Scouting ahead, I found a great waterfall, with a boiling pool of peat-stained water below.

"Try in there sunshine," I suggested. Now he'd already chucked back a salmon par further up, being a sensible lad, and I observed that this meant migrating salmon must get up over this 8ft-fall. With that, one leapt at the curtain of falling water, skidded all the way across it, and nearly fell into his pocket. The pool was full of them. It dawned upon me, in a sweaty, uncomfortable revelation, that should the little tyke get a hook in one of these great silvery things, while it would make his day, it would take rather too much explaining, and the stoniness of the ghillie's heart may very well be tested beyond the point of a clipped ear.

We skedaddled with the trout he'd already conked, and went to collect the girls.

Towards the end of the week, Alison juggled amusing the kids (pitch and putt golf, and a water park), while I helped officiate at the two-day Riggit beano. One of the members hosting the event rather sensibly organised the meeting in the tearooms attached to a local brewery.

Now there's a man with inspiration.

We soon got the meeting done, although the chairman had to deputise by phone. Having freshly flown in from Australia, he was sitting, jet lagged, in a queue of traffic 100 miles away on the M6.

The rest of our agenda was spent alternatively 4x4ing out over rolling Northumbria landscapes, viewing grazing herds of White, Belted and of course Riggit Galloway cattle, and fetching up in hostelries and welcoming farmsteads for ever-larger platefuls of provender. Those folks know how to live.

The ground covered, strung along the Wall, twixt Hexham and Haltwhistle, is still a bastion of the breed, with many farms in between also sporting herds of the once ubiquitous blue-grey crossbred, rearing tremendous beefy calves on the better ground.

The historic houses tended to be rather less ornate, and more built for defence, than some. This is largely due to centuries of cross-border raiding by the Reiver families, who would lead their neighbours' cattle astray of a foggy night, over generations of reprisals and lawlessness. Border law dictated that you had seven days to chase after the raiders, but had to shout your intent – hence "hew and cry".

I was delighted to discover that one of our hosts is indeed a scion of one of those feuding clans, the Olivers, although I believe their behaviour has improved of late. Fantastic, what a way to holiday.

■ Anton Coaker and his family farm on Dartmoor, also direct retailing Galloway beef and hide rugs and running an oak sawmill.