Charlotte's Poultry

Charlotte Carnegie has built a thriving poultry business in Wiltshire, and has even featured on TV.

- John Wright

Charlotte’s Poultry is located on a green hill far away in rural Wilt shire, and owner Charlotte Carnegie herself has to make a 45-minute drive each day (and back) to visit her chickens. If renting a remote one-acre field seems anything to lament, cut to the Hairy Bikers, who fell so head over heels for Charlotte and her set-up last year that they featured her in the first episode of their incomparable BBC 2 TV series Chicken & Egg.

Meeting another amusing and gutsy person would’ve been right up their street, and the rapport between the three is quite apparent. Still, the modest star did agree to an interview, and told me her hobby turned into a business four years ago.

Charlotte has had chickens since she was four when she was introduced to Brown Leghorns. “I have fond memories of my first hen Beauty, whom I was determined to teach to talk,” she says. “Unfortunately Beauty never did speak, but it was tending to her and her friends that sparked my passion for poultry.”

A visiting fox led to a change to Pekin bantams, and when asked what she wanted for her birthday there was little hesitation: ‘Chickens!’ Poring over the book Bantams in Colour with her mum, Charlotte went for Partridge Wyandotte bantams, a breed she has been fond of ever since. Her dad bought her first incubator at 11, which yielded only three chicks from 12 eggs. “We purchased an auto-turn cradle and soon we were overrun,” she said. “Within a year we were getting a 100% hatch rate and that little machine served me well right up until recently!