The Yorkshire Shepherdess

by Amanda Owen

  ‘I dun’t nah how many years ’tis sen I was last on a Gallowa [pony],’ he said.

  ‘Now’s thi chance, Jimmy,’ I said, smiling.

  I never really thought he would actually do it, but his eyes lit up at the offer. I gave him a leg up, and he rode Boxer round the yard. It was a very special moment: not a word was spoken but it was written across his face.

  I’ve seen photos of him when he was young, shepherding the moors on horseback. He loved his ponies and could recall the names of all his horses from way back, and just for a few moments, he was able to enjoy that lovely feeling of being on horseback again.

  I was twenty-one when I moved here and Clive was forty-two. He was divorced and had two children, so on paper we weren’t a great match. But I never dwelt on the age gap between us, and I still don’t. We both know we just fit together somehow.

  At first I carried on with my contract farming, especially as I had things booked and I couldn’t let people down. I continued to milk Martin’s cows, until he, like many other small-scale farmers, did his sums and made the heartbreaking decision to quit with the dairy cows.

  Anyway, it was soon clear that there was more than enough for me to do here, working full-time alongside Clive.

  I don’t know what the others hereabouts thought of my arrival but only a few weeks later I had the perfect opportunity to show them how well I fitted in. We were gathering the sheep for clipping up at Whitespots on Birkdale Common. There’s lots of lovely mosscrop up there in the springtime, a cotton grassy sort of moss that is incredibly nutritious for the yows. Clive was helping Clifford Harker, another neighbour who also had sheep up there. Clifford and Jennie Harker lived at Pry House and farmed land adjacent to ours. Jennie’s a great friend, and a great source of tales about the history of Ravenseat, as she was born and brought up in the farmhouse immediately behind ours, the one where the gamekeeper now lives.

  For the gather I was standing down by the stone sheepfolds, ready to turn the sheep in. It was a very hot day, and the sheepdogs had been working hard and were now flagging. I saw the sheep coming in the distance, about a quarter of a mile away. Now, there were a few wily old darlings amongst the flock (probably Jimmy’s), and they took full advantage of the situation and made a break for it. The air turned blue as they began streaming back up the moor and there was nothing anyone could do to stop them. The sheepdogs had no run left in them.

  Clifford shouted at Tess, his dog.

  ‘Git back, yer bogger, Tess.’

  Tess slunk off out of sight, dog tired, so to speak.

  ‘Send thi dog, lass,’ he roared to me.

  Deefa was with me, and because she had not been working all day like the others, she was fresh.

  ‘Get back,’ I yelled, my fingers crossed as I offered up a silent prayer that she would come good.

  She went off like lightning and made a wide-out run, everyone standing stock-still, their mouths gaping as she made away into the distance. She disappeared over the hill and within moments the sheep came back into sight with Deefa in full control of the whole flock. Thank you, Deefa, you wonderful dog, I whispered to myself.

  Now, they don’t say much, these tough old Yorkshiremen, it’s not their way to praise people. But they gave me a nod when the sheep were all safely penned.

  Yes, I was a woman, and an ‘offcumden’, a townie. But I’d shown them I could do it.

  5

  Hill Shepherdess

  Coming to Ravenseat felt like coming home. I’d set off as a teenager reading the old veterinary books, then I’d worked at a succession of different farms, modern and traditional, some good, some bad. By the time I came here I knew what I liked, and this was it.

  For me, it’s the place I had dreamed about all those years ago when I watched All Creatures Great and Small, and when I pored over the book Hill Shepherd. The real-life James Herriot did not actually work at the top end of the Dales, his practice was further south, some forty miles away near Thirsk. But when they made the television programme they came to Swaledale. It provided the perfect backdrop, as modern life had not really touched the highest outposts of the Dales; in fact, the money from the BBC for filming actually paid for the installation of mainline electricity to some of the outlying farms. So that’s why I have a feeling of my life coming full circle, and I recognize the characters from the books: the details of their lives may be different, but the attitudes and lifestyles are exactly the same.

  I am fascinated by Ravenseat and its past, and I’m always on the lookout for books relating to its history. I’ve got quite a collection now. Ravenseat captured me from the first time I saw it on that bleak night, and now it’s part of me. And, for a time, I am part of it. We know, Clive and me, that we are temporary custodians, that the place went on for centuries before us and will go on for centuries after us. Looking down on the farmhouse from up on the hills gives me a feeling of timelessness, of the smallness of my part in the ongoing history of this amazing place. I feel connected with all the people who have farmed here in the past. We are doing the same things that they were, walking the same paths, repairing the same walls that they built and filling the same barns with sweet meadow hay (weather permitting). We face the same age-old problems: rain at hay time, deep snow in the winter, things that never change. Occasionally we get a more personal reminder of our predecessors in the shape of a clay pipe pushed into a wall, a clog sole behind a beam, a broken scythe blade and scratched initials in the ancient timberwork of the barns. Above all, there is a tremendous sense of continuity about the place.

  The name Ravenseat comes from the old Norse word hrafn, which means a raven, and saetr, which means a place to summer animals. The Norsemen may not have stayed here in winter, but probably kept cows and sheep here in the summer. Ravenseat is the most wonderful place for summering animals, but wintertime is tough on both people and the livestock, so maybe those Norsemen were smarter than us. The ‘raven’ part was probably the name of an early settler who claimed Ravenseat as his own. We do occasionally see ravens soaring overhead and we hear their distant cries, but ravens are a mysterious bird, rarely glimpsed, as they inhabit only the highest and remotest areas, and we do not know if they actually nest here. We have an amazing variety of birds here, including one of the largest concentrations of lapwings in the British Isles. Although a lot of ground-nesting birds are in decline they appear to flourish at Ravenseat, with snipe, redshank, black grouse, golden plovers, sandpipers, oystercatchers, woodcock, curlew and skylarks in profusion.

  I was out doing our regular evening walk with the children recently when we spotted a freshly hatched curlew, only hours old, hiding amongst the seeves. The light greeny-brown speckled eggshell from which it had hatched was lying, relatively intact, nearby. The children were puzzled as to how that chick’s beak could ever have fitted inside the shell. I hope that Clive’s knowledge and love of birds rubs off on the children as, quite frankly, I hardly know the difference between a seagull and an eagle (slight exaggeration).

  Ravenseat is one of the highest, most exposed farms and is known as one of the toughest in the Dales, with our short summers and long winters, and it’s a testing place to rear livestock. We were once at the auction mart and an old fellow who had spent a good while leaning against the pen looking at our sheep said, ‘Thoo’s got bestest stuff in t’auction, and thoo’s come off worstest spot.’

  That was a big compliment, as good as it gets.

  Ravenseat sits at the head of its own little valley, two small rivers running within a hundred yards of the farmhouse. Whitsundale Beck, the larger of the two, flows from the west, and is spanned by the ancient packhorse bridge. Hoods Bottom Beck flows from the north, from the spectacular High Force waterfall away in the distance to Jenny Whaley Falls, a series of smaller tumbling and rushing cascades only a stone’s throw from the farmhouse. It is a mystery as to who Jenny Whaley was and why the waterfall would be named after her. I like to imagine that she perhaps flung herself in after a doomed l
ove affair, but my history books have given no clues about her. Another far smaller but equally timeworn bridge sits below the falls, a remnant from the days when coal from the Tan Hill pit was carried in panniers on the backs of ponies through Ravenseat and then along what is now part of the Coast to Coast walk, and away into Cumbria.

  The two rivers join to become one, which keeps the name Whitsundale Beck, meandering through the Close Hills valley, gradually gathering strength and speed, then culminating in another series of falls below Hoggarths Bridge. Here it meets another tributary, Birkdale Beck, to form the River Swale.

  In days gone by, Ravenseat was a very busy place. In 1820 there were eighty-eight people here, according to the parish records. There were five farms on what is now Ravenseat land: the two farms in Ravenseat yard, ours and the gamekeeper’s place, and Black Howe, Close Hills and Hill Top. The people who farmed here long ago farmed much smaller parcels of land, and farming was not their sole source of income. Coal and lead mining were big business in the upper Dales and many of the men relied on these for employment.

  Tan Hill coal mine was about three miles from here. It was a small colliery which produced poor quality coal until early last century. Coal was expensive, and the farmers would have relied on peat as the fuel to keep the home fires burning. Turbary rights were important for the people in this area, entitling them to go to the moor and cut their own peat. They must have felt the cold, as I have yet to sit against a hot peat fire. We have tried them, but the fire just smoulders and glows without throwing out much heat at all.

  Then there were the lead miners. Lead was mined all over the upper Dales from Roman times, when lead was important for making coffins. Mining was a grim job, and it’s difficult to imagine that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the industry boomed because new methods of roofing and building became popular, women and children worked down the mines. Our friend Jennie Harker is one of the Whitehead family, who used to live in the farmhouse right behind ours, and she and her siblings remember talk of the days when the menfolk would leave home in darkness to walk to the mines and return in darkness during the winter months, never seeing daylight except on Sundays.

  Below the road end that leads into Ravenseat there was a lead mine called Lonin End. Little remains of what once was, in its heyday, an innovative and substantial mining operation employing fifty people. I sometimes take the children down to Lonin End, and they are awed by the enormous, gaping open shaft. I have to be very attentive as, intriguing as it is to the children to drop pebbles and count while waiting for the splash, I don’t want to hear a far bigger splash.

  It is not a great place to take our metal detector, as it bleeps constantly. The children were determined to find a lump of galena (lead ore), but I broke it to them gently that this was very unlikely, as it was highly sought after by those early miners. Just to prove me wrong the children soon found a substantial lump and by the time we had taken turns to carry it home we were all thoroughly fed up.

  Cheaper imported lead from Spain meant that the mines were abandoned from 1870, although one or two survived until the end of the nineteenth century. There was an exodus of people from the Dales to the woollen mills of West Yorkshire and the cotton mills of Lancashire and even further afield to the gold mines of the Americas. The few remaining in Swaledale now had to survive from farming alone.

  Everyone made some extra money by knitting stockings, a trade which began in the early seventeenth century. Even the men knitted: as they walked to and from the mines the lead miners would make woollen stockings using a knitting sheath tucked into a belt. This held a needle so they could knit using one hand. Knitting sheaths varied in design from area to area and in Swaledale the goose-wing variety was most common. Some were ornately carved affairs with magnificent detailing, but the majority were crudely made and often carved only with the initials of their owner. They were sometimes given as a love token to a girl from her admirer. I’m still waiting for Clive to produce one for me but if he is after a pair of woollen stockings then he may be waiting a while: using these required an incredible amount of dexterity which sadly I lack.

  The wives would knit as they walked from barn to barn to tend their cattle and sheep. From the earliest age, the children were taught to knit too, and the women would spin the raw wool given to them by the wool merchants into yarn for the whole family. The merchants would also visit the cottages and farms to collect and pay for the stockings. Payment was poor, but it helped towards the subsistence living the farmers made.

  Back in the seventeenth century, there was a stocking merchant known as Blue John, probably because of the wool dye on his hands, who visited the Swaledale farms to buy the knitted wares. When he left Ravenseat he still had a large sum of money, and he set out from here to walk the lonely route across Birkdale Common and into what is now Cumbria. He was never seen alive again, but a couple of years later his body was found among the peat haggs. A farmer was charged with the murder, but the evidence was very shaky, coming from a miner who contradicted himself and gave a description of events that nobody else supported. So, in the end, nobody was held to account. His name has been immortalized, as the place where his body was found is known to this day as Blue John Holes.

  In addition to the farming and mining, there was a quarry at Hill Top supplying stone to build the houses and barns in the vicinity. The poorer stone was carted away to build and repair drystone walls. At the turn of the twentieth century, there was a family of thirteen brothers working there. People came from far and wide to buy the flagstones, which were of very high quality. The quarry was worked until relatively recently, supplying flagstones, quoins and lintels for the many barn conversions that need to use traditional, local materials to conform to the original builds.

  Whenever I get a spare moment (not that often), I research Ravenseat, not only with my books, but by talking to anyone with memories of what it was once like.

  Instead of it being a place in decline, a remnant of busier times long ago, I love the fact that we are re-stocking Ravenseat with people. We have all the children, we have guests staying in our shepherd’s hut, we have walkers stopping for a break and other visitors just driving up to sit in the sunshine, or the barn if it’s raining, and eat my cream teas. During the shooting season we see the shooting parties come up through the farmyards and out onto the moor, a real cross-section of people from beaters through to the well-heeled set who have come to spend the day grouse shooting. There have been times when we have caught a glimpse of well-known faces, Elle McPherson looking splendid in tweed, or even Prince Charles.

  Actually, it was Prince Charles who caught a glimpse of me, in a wetsuit and wellies, standing at the side of the road after taking a dip in Wainwath Falls. I like to imagine that I looked rather like Ursula Andress emerging from the sea in a Bond movie, but it’s more likely that I just looked a twit . . .

  There are farmers’ days when we are invited to go and shoot, but it’s not our thing. We are usually presented with a few brace of grouse but, despite it being a sought-after delicacy, we find the dark, strong, almost soily flavour quite unpalatable. Rather than waste them I take the breast meat off and wrap it in streaky bacon to disguise the taste.

  Although neither Clive nor I were born into farming families, we both understand the feeling that farmers have of preserving the land and the way of life for future generations. Clive says, ‘I am honoured and privileged to have Ravenseat for my time, and so I see it as my duty to keep it as good as I can for whoever comes after me.’

  So we are connected forwards as well as backwards with the story of the place. Even when the weather is filthy and horrible, and I’m having one of those days when things are not going to plan, where else would I rather be? Nowhere.

  Some of my favourite books about this area were part of a series written by two ladies who were travelling the Dales in the 1920s and 1930s. They were visiting the area at a crucial time, just as some of the old traditions and equipment we
re being abandoned and newer methods were being adopted. They collected much of the old farm memorabilia which is now in the countryside museum at Hawes. They wrote about visiting Ravenseat, where they were made welcome and ate trifle with the family. They described an old man, hunched over and crippled with arthritis, sitting by the range, and they talked of the feelings of sadness that permeated the house because of the recent death of a young child. She had fallen ill so the family had taken her by horse-drawn sledge to see a doctor at Kirkby Stephen. I imagine that if you weren’t dying already, that journey would certainly finish you off. The little girl had peritonitis, and it proved fatal.

  I asked the Whiteheads whether they had any recollection of the tragedy but they didn’t remember anything being said. It was, after all, before their time, but I reasoned that it would have been spoken about. Jennie suggested it may have been a tale made up just for the readers of the book. But a few years ago we had a visit out of the blue from a man called Tom Cox. He came back to see his childhood home for the first time since leaving as an eight-year-old in the late 1930s. His family had come over from Orton in Cumbria with all their possessions on a horse-drawn cart when he was a babe-in-arms. He remembered life here: the long walk through Close Hills laden with eggs and cheese to meet up with the butcher’s trap, the return journey carrying flour and sugar, and during a heavy snowstorm filling the boiler at the side of the range with armfuls of snow gathered through the living-room window.