Trying to imagine a cow-shelter built of gorse.  And the ‘half-weaned calves’ remind me of those we walk past in the nearby fields. By now they have fibre-glass igloos rather than gorse-built hovels, and they seem weaned at birth, resting on their straw piles and tottering out to see you when you come near, feeding from automatic troughs and water bottles.
‘And now the half-weaned calves that have been sheltering themselves in a gorse-built hovel against the left-hand wall, come out and set up a silly answer to that terrible bark, doubtless supposing that it has reference to buckets of milk.’
Source: George Eliot, Adam Bede (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 (1859)), p. 115
