The Yorkshire Shepherdess

by Amanda Owen

  It was his father who had plumbed in the first water supply to the farmhouse from a spring high up on the hillside; previously they had faced the constant, laborious task of drawing water from a well at the back door. It was only recently that the same spring moved to below the water tank, which was bad news as gravity dictates that the water source needs to be above the tank. A lot of digging was needed, with spades, sweat and curses, as the hillside is totally inaccessible by machine. A new tank was installed and, as long as the spring stays in situ, we will keep our running water.

  Tom’s memory was lucid and after talking to him at length about life back then I remembered the tale of the little girl.

  ‘Do yer know owt about a lal’ girl who died here?

  Silence . . .

  ‘How’s ta know about that?’

  ‘I’s read ’bout it in a book.’

  He sighed, looked to the ground and chewed his lower lip. ‘That were a varry lang time sen.’

  He said that the story was true, that the old arthritic man was his uncle Willy and that the little girl was his younger sister, Hilda. He said that she was buried in an unmarked grave at the chapel at Keld, and even he did not know exactly where. The family had no money for a headstone to mark the spot. You could see the sadness in his face as he recounted those unhappy times. To romanticize about the old days is all well and good, but life was certainly hard back then.

  It wasn’t long after that the family left Ravenseat, never to return. I reasoned that this was due to the tragedy that had befallen them and that perhaps the memories were too painful. We kept in touch until he also passed away. A part of me feels good that a forgotten little girl now lives on, if only in my memories of Tom. She, too, is part of the history of Ravenseat.

  Another visitor was a well-spoken, dignified, elderly gentleman who drove up our road one day with his wife. He introduced himself as Ingram Cleasby, and I knew from my research that Cleasby was one of the family names from Ravenseat’s past. Our visitor had been brought up at Sedbergh, but he told me that his name, Ingram, is Anglo-Saxon for raven, or raven’s nest, and that he was named this because his family had farmed here. It was a Cleasby who built the house behind ours, in 1820.

  As he was leaving he took a photograph of a double rainbow over Ravenseat, and later sent it to me, with a letter. I didn’t know until someone told me later that he was a very distinguished clergyman, who served as the Dean of Chester and the Archdeacon of Chesterfield.

  There is a track that runs down through Swaledale called the Corpse Road, which dates back to the sixteenth century and was the route the locals had to take to give their relatives a proper burial at Grinton church. It is twenty miles long, and the journey took a day and a half from the upper dale with the dead body carried in a wicker coffin, and then the mourners had to make the return walk. We have a small field at Ravenseat that is known as the ‘graveyard’ and is rumoured to have been used to bury the bodies that didn’t make the arduous journey to Grinton. After all, if you didn’t like someone much in life, you might not want to walk for a day and a half there and then back again just to give him a Christian burial.

  The illicit burials became such a problem that a church at Muker was built in 1580, during the reign of Elizabeth I. A special dispensation was given for it, because folk were becoming desperate about not being able to give their nearest and dearest a proper burial.

  The ‘barn’ where I serve the cream teas when it is raining may at first glance look like a traditional stone barn, but if you look inside you can see that it has slit, arched windows. It was once a tiny chapel, used by a group of Inghamites, who were a nonconformist sect who followed the preachings of Benjamin Ingham and broke away from the Methodists and Moravians in the middle of the eighteenth century. After it stopped being a place of worship, a pair of large doors was added to the front and it was used as a cart house. Jennie’s grandfather remembered a pulpit in the corner. I don’t think it was ever ornate, but still, nobody knows what happened to it.

  We know that the barn was originally thatched with ling (heather); you can see the line of the steep pitched roof at the back, and we know that the barn was once used as a house, before it was a chapel. We’ve had an architectural historian up here looking at the buildings, and he wrote in his report that the barn is the second oldest building in Swaledale, to his knowledge. I forgot to ask him which is the oldest.

  It is only one of many barns on our land. A famous feature of the Swaledale landscape are the stone barns, seen in almost every field. The barns were used for the storage of hay and the over-wintering of cattle and sheep. Some of the barns are known as hog houses and these have two storeys, with flagstone floors to the upper level. They needed flagged floors because of the sheep peeing: wooden floors would have rotted away.

  Most of the barns are between 200 and 300 years old, although they were still being built up to the late 1800s. When the farmworkers had cut the hay by hand with scythes, it was stored near to where it was needed later in the year to feed the animals. Most of the barns had stalls where cattle were tied up by the neck and fed on the hay until spring. We still sometimes overwinter stirks and tup hoggs in these barns if there is a spring or beck near enough to make it easy to water them.

  Many of the barns had, over the years, fallen into disrepair, but nowadays there is a grant to restore and maintain them, which has enabled us to return all our barns to their former glory. Most of the barns and fields have lovely names, some referring perhaps to their original owners: Miles’s cow’as, Peggy Breas, High Bobby Dale. Others relate to their topography or position: Round Hill, West End, Close Hills. Now, sadly, the maps show only the hectarage and field numbers, not their beautiful names. We prefer to use the original names and encourage the children to do so as well, aware that there is a real danger the names will be lost forever.

  As for the farmhouse, I’ve traced it back to 1580 when there were two houses and six cottages at Ravenseat. The house is a typical Dales building, with thick outer walls, low ceilings and small windows. Not a grand affair, but warm and homely.

  That’s a small sample of the history of this place and I like the idea that we, too, are making a living in pretty much the same way as the people before us. Sometimes the walkers who pass through ask, ‘What does a hill farm do? How does it work?’

  I tell them, ‘We’re very good at rearing animals. There’s not much point up here trying to fatten them up, we haven’t got the crop for grazing and our seasons are too short. But what we are good at is rearing first-class animals.’

  We sell them to lowland farmers to either fatten or to use as breeding stock.

  We have about 900 breeding yows, and every year we keep 250 gimmer lambs (a gimmer is a young female sheep) to replace the older yows, which are sold, so the stock numbers and ages remain constant. In September and October there is the ‘harvest of the hills’ when all the hill farmers gather their sheep and sort them out, then take their surplus to auction. We sell gimmers, keeping only the best to replenish the flock, so the standard stays as high as possible. Other farmers buy them because hill sheep are hardy and healthy and thrive well in kinder climes.

  Out of the tup (male) lambs born at Ravenseat, we keep about thirty as potential breeding stock. Then gradually they get whittled down to four or five of the best which go to the tup sales every autumn. Clive can often be found studying his tups, sometimes for hours. It beats television . . .

  The tup lambs that aren’t good enough to keep are fattened and sold during the winter. We lamb late up here so these lambs are nearly a year old when they go to the market, having spent the summer with their mothers high up on the moors amongst the heather. We believe this gives the meat a superior flavour to more intensively reared lambs.

  We bring the yows down off the moor into the fields near the farm to lamb, then afterwards they go back to their heafs with their offspring, to teach the little ones their heaf. We only let those with a single lamb go back to the moor as
the grazing is too sparse for a yow to be able to rear twins and there are many perils up there – gutters (water channels and small becks), rocks, grips (drainage ditches) and bogs. A sheep can only keep her eyes properly on one lamb. Hill sheep do not have as many multiple births as lowland sheep, but we do always have plenty of yows with twins, and we summer these up in the ‘allotments’, an area above the farm that was allocated to Ravenseat in 1828, when parcels of land were handed out to local people. It was at the time of the battles against enclosures, and it was done to give poor farmers a chance to work their own land.

  Our allotments are kinder and sweeter grazing than the moor, and make it easier for us to keep an eye on the twin lambs. In September we gather in all the sheep and the lambs are ‘spained’ (weaned). At this stage the lambs will come into the meadows, the land close to the farm where the grass is growing again after haymaking, and the new grass, which we call ‘fog’, is particularly nutritious and good for fattening them and getting them ready for sales.

  Our lambs are not reared intensively on feed and cake. They grow naturally, running around, doing what lambs are supposed to do and eating what they are supposed to eat. It’s a longer process, our lambs take time. I truly believe that animals reared in a natural environment are happier, and this is reflected in the taste. We eat them ourselves, of course, and the meat is delicious, but how many I keep for our freezer depends on the price they are making at the market: if they’re fetching good money I only get to keep a cronky one; otherwise, when prices are not so good, I fill the freezer.

  There is far more to lambing than the arm-length rubber glove. As we are lambing a pedigree flock, a large amount of recording takes place. Each lamb is given an ear tag with an individual number, and its sex, sire and dam, and its heaf are all recorded. Before they go out to the moor we mark them on their shoulder, the middle of the back, the back of the head or the loin for our four different heafs. The yows are horn-burned, the initials AC or CA being burned into their horns when they return from wintering away as hoggs at about twelve months old. This tells everyone that they are our sheep. Even if the heaf mark is lost or the ear tag falls out, the horn burn will remain. We don’t really know the origins of the initials, but we know that Ravenseat was occupied by farmers with the surnames Alderson, Cleasby Campbell and Coates at different times in the past. It’s probably their initials immortalized on our sheep, but, of course, being Clive and Amanda these initials relate to us too.

  We have what is known as a closed flock, which means we don’t buy in any breeding yows. We introduce new bloodlines through buying in tups from other pedigree flocks. To some extent we can use our own tups, the ones we breed, but this has to be done very carefully to avoid inbreeding.

  Every autumn we sell draught yows, our older yows that have bred three crops of lambs for us. They are still good breeders, have still got their teeth and two working tits, but we like to keep our flock young as Ravenseat is a tough place to live (for sheep and people). Clive says, ‘There’s only yan thing better than a good old’un, and that’s a good young’un.’ I’m not entirely sure that it’s just sheep he is referring to . . .

  There are some yows we never sell, a small flock of sheep who live out all their days at Ravenseat. We call them the ‘crusties’, because they are old and decrepit and suffer from similar problems in old age as humans do. They are greying, have arthritis, no teeth, and they’re skinny with saggy udders. Just looking at them, nobody would understand why we keep them, but in their time they were star breeders and show winners. They have earned the right to live out their days here.

  We had a really old tup who lived to the ripe old age of thirteen. His pedigree name was Rasputin, but we called him Mossy because he came from a farm called Mossdale. He sired many show winners and was a real character. Mossy was troubled for most of his life with a problem foot that would regularly require a pedicure, which he disliked intensely. One day Clive was trimming his foot and somehow accidentally wounded him quite seriously with the foot shears, and Mossy never forgave him. He mortally hated Clive, and would head for the hills whenever he was near. I looked after him for many years and would hand feed him twice a day. Then one day he wasn’t waiting at the gate for his usual morning feed and I found him dead in the snow. It was only when we looked up his date of birth that we realized what a great age he was.

  We know our sheep, even though there are a lot of them. It’s just like running a big school: a head teacher gets to know all the children, though some are more memorable than others, sometimes for a good reason and sometimes for a bad reason. Some sheep are escape artists, some are incredibly greedy, some are flying machines and can jump (ratchin), some are always straying, some are wild, some are friendly, some make good mothers, some not. We ken (know) our sheep. In these parts it’s the most heinous of crimes to not ken yer sheep.

  Sheep are just like people: you get nice ones and you get nasty ones. People use sheep as an analogy for placid creatures that always follow each other. It’s not true, you just have to take the time to stand and watch them to learn their personalities. Clive once did an advert for Xerox photocopiers, supplying a line of sheep looking exactly the same. The tag line was ‘It’s not just nature that can make perfect copies.’ But they don’t look the same, not if you look properly.

  Clipping is one of the annual jobs I love the most. The first to be clipped are the hoggs. They have eighteen months of wool on them, everywhere: woolly bellies, woolly legs, woolly bums. And they have never been clipped before. Clipping is not at all painful but still they struggle. They are the hardest to clip but they produce the best wool in terms of quality and quantity.

  Over the years I’ve discovered that the noise of the clipping machine is a great soother for babies. You know you hear of babies that fall asleep to the sound of the Hoover? Well, ours have all fallen asleep to the sound of the clipping machine. It’s the one job I can’t do with a baby strapped to me, but they lie nearby amongst the wool and sleep as soon as I switch the clippers on.

  We usually clip in July, but like everything else, it’s weather dependent. Sheep are easier to get in dry than hay, so hay takes precedence. If hay gets soaked with rain it is probably ruined, so when the good weather comes that’s what we concentrate on. The wool also has to be dry, because you can’t sell wet fleeces: they rot, and the Wool Board won’t pay for the extra weight of water. It is also miserable clipping wet sheep.

  Clive used to be a contract clipper in his younger days and clipping can get rather competitive. I can’t decide whether he is slowing down or I am speeding up because occasionally I can beat him. We wrap the fleeces and pack them into large wool sheets that hold about fifty fleeces. When full, the sheet is sewn shut, labelled up and sent on a lorry, usually to Bradford.

  Swaledale wool is used for carpets as it’s very hard wearing, not the soft lustre wool that’s used for sweaters. Nowadays it’s also used for insulation: if you look in any DIY store you’ll find the most expensive insulation is wool. So it beats me how little we get for it: in our worst year, five or six years ago, I got a measly cheque for £65 for 2,000 kilos of wool. In a good year it’s about £400, but you can see that hardly covers the cost of clipping. We don’t farm sheep for their fleeces any more. Years ago the wool cheque used to pay the rent on hill farms.

  Our land and situation doesn’t lend itself to big, modern machinery. We do occasionally put on farm tours, usually for All Creatures Great and Small fans, but Clive agreed to another type of tour recently – a farming discussion group tour! Forty arable farmers from East Yorkshire arrived on a super-luxury coach, the ex-Tottenham Hotspur tour bus. It was a challenge getting this impressive vehicle up the dale, over the narrow bridges and winding roads. The locals must have thought the Rolling Stones were passing through.

  In his wisdom Clive decided that a sure way to impress was to line up his fleet of machinery. The overall effect was that our yard looked like the forecourt of an agricultural dealer in about
1972. There was a knackered haybob, a trailer, a very rusty digger, a tractor and a quad bike. That’s it. Quite honestly, it looked as if a visit from the scrap man was imminent. We’re a dog-and-stick kind of farm. The farmers were taken aback by how we do things and were intrigued by some of our age-old methods. We had a grand old afternoon, and they went away happily albeit with more passengers than they came with, as the children wanted a ride on the fancy bus.

  Clive has a love/hate relationship with horses – he’s accepted mine but I have a strict quota. I am allowed two, so I’ve got seven. Stanley, who came with me, didn’t like it here and we had to sell him. He was a big amiable fellow: he used to lean over the sheep pens and pick a sheep up by its wool, just out of curiosity. But he found it very cold up here and, even when rugged up, shivered and shook. Once he managed to squeeze himself into one of the barns through a doorway that was considerably lower than he was. He could not summon the courage to squeeze himself back out and remained in there for a couple of days looking forlornly out of the window. I wanted to go and feed him but Clive was having none of it.

  ‘Thoos not tekkin ’im nowt, silly bugger will come out when he’s hungry.’

  And of course he did.

  Otherwise, our only rule is that the horses have nice temperaments. We can’t have any that aren’t good around the children. Only the other day, the children were playing hide and seek and Miles won. No one could find him because he had found the perfect hiding place, underneath one of the horses in the stables.