Living on a hillside, you notice the general comings and goings, and in working hours yesterday almost nothing but the school bus came or went. We're used to this in winter, especially since the younger farmers started disappearing early in the morning to the building sites in towns.
But this was a new kind of silence: as if everyone was staying away.
The ewes sat together in the fields above the road, heavily in lamb and soaking up the first warm sun of spring. They're all due to give birth any day now, filling the hillside with the clamour of their young. What will be the thoughts of the farmers out at dawn, patrolling the flocks for new life?
In the old days - say 25 years ago - when bad news came in on the radio we'd have seen men crossing their fields to meet at the ditch for a talk, heads down. But that was the day of full-time farming, when working the land still seemed worth doing.
I don't know how they've taken it all these years, the small men at the margins. On the one hand the headage, the subsidies, the occasional brief boom, all gratefully spent on home comforts. On the other hand, the drip-drip-drip of being told your day is finished: join REPS (the Rural Environment Protection Scheme), plant trees, rebuild the walls and take in tourists.
Foot-and-mouth is just the latest reason for losing faith in the land. You could see the change beginning with the years of overgrazing: no one would have treated the hills like that who expected a son or a grandson to keep sheep. But still, whenever an old fellow died, there was always a nephew somewhere to keep the farm in the family.
That is where this last straw could fall: on what's left of family feeling for land. Not for its market value, as bungalow sites, or another wedge of hectares for a big rancher, but as a way of life.
As a would-be ecologist, sitting on the ditch, it's been my dream that all the misfit farmers serving out their lives on acres they never asked for would one day be replaced by mad-keen organic types who loved the soil and everything that grew, and would keep their sheep healthy on garlic. In that Utopia, animals would have names, not numbers, and the crazy trade in livestock units, which has nothing to do with farming, would be exposed for the cruel fraud it is.
Meanwhile, there's this dreadful reality, blowing in the wind across the hills.
On Wednesday's cold and gloomy evening, half a-dozen Americans, over for St Patrick's week, drove their people-carrier right out across the strand, stopped in the middle and trudged to the edge of the waves. It looked a pretty desperate way of enjoying themselves, but perhaps they felt there was nowhere else to go. When they got back they were stuck in the sand, as we knew they would be, and by the time someone came with a tractor, their tail-lights were little red dots in the dusk.
They could be the last tourists we see for a while. Up and down the West there's consternation and disbelief.
As the bad news broke we had a call from friends in Belfast who had planned a spring holiday in a house beside the lake. Did we think they could still come?
We had to say no.
Michael Viney writes a column, Another Life, each Saturday in Weekend