A Year in the Life of the Yorkshire Shepherdess

by Amanda Owen

  Actually, I didn’t want to go anywhere much – but there was one job that I needed to do. One of my other employers, Pat Bentley, an alpaca farmer, had kindly offered me the chance to graze one of her fields with my mini flock of sheep – the pet lambs I’d been given and had hand-reared on the bottle. There were Connie and George, the Swaledales; Peter and Paul, the Suffolk crosses; and the mules, who were affectionately known as the princesses. Flymo the goat had not been included in the invitation, as her reputation as a ratcher and wanderer went before her. She was staying at home, which was just as well, as there was little room once the sheep had been tempted into the back of the Astra. It was standing room only in there, so I hastily shut the double doors before jumping into the driver’s seat and setting off. I drove slowly, suspecting that I was seriously overloaded as the brakes didn’t seem to be working so well. The noise was deafening, the bleats reverberating around the inside of the van, sounding as if they were in a tin can. There was no mesh grille between the cargo area of the van and the cab, so I wasn’t surprised when one of the princesses appeared and rested her head on my left shoulder.

  ‘Yer a softy,’ I said, glancing at her. Her dark eyes stared fixedly ahead, so bright and clear that I could see a reflection of the world passing by the window. I drove along back country lanes and then a short distance along a main road before a right-hand turn off to Newby. I soon backed up to the field and let them go. They hardly moved away from the gate, putting their heads down to graze straight away, pleased to be out of the cramped van and delighted with the lush grass. That was it: job done. I tied the gate and set off back home, already thinking about the valet required in the van back. A bucket and brush would clean it up sufficiently, as it had not exactly been spotless before the sheep-shifting job. The following day I turned up at work in the van with the items needed for the fencing job.

  ‘All reet?’ said Mike, the farmer I was working for.

  ‘Yep,’ I replied.

  ‘Do yer knaw owd Willy?’ he said. ‘I seed ’im last neet, an’ I sweear ’e’s getting a bit too much pop these days.’

  He told me that Willy, the odd job man who knocked about the village and was often found propping up the bar in the Sun Inn, had been telling a tale that he’d been walling a gap along the main road and had seen a van being driven by a sheep.

  ‘Honestly, I’m tellin’ thi,’ owd Willy had been saying to anyone who would listen. ‘As plain as day I see’d a van, ’twas stopped, turnin’ reet an’ there was a mule in t’drivin’ seat.’

  ‘Oh, aye,’ said the doubters.

  ‘An’ I’ll tell thi summat else – it looked like thy van,’ he said, wagging his finger at Mike.

  September is the beginning of the ‘harvest of the hills’, when sheep off the moors and fells of northern England are gathered in and prepared for sale at the auction marts. The crop of lambs that are not required as replacements for the flock and the older yows (known as draughts) are sold in the coming weeks. It is now that the lambs are taken off their mothers (speaned) and the yows sent back to the moor to get into peak condition for the next breeding season.

  The land that was haytimed earlier in the summer will now be flush with a regrowth of grass, and the lambs go into these fields. The change from grazing on sparse moorland to the lush green meadows gives them a lift, and makes them bloom ready for sale. It’s important to get the lambs gathered in from the moor and weaned, because a male lamb left wandering among the yows can be a problem if he starts doing what comes naturally. All thoughts of carefully selecting which yows are going to which tups go out of the window if a nameless tup lamb gets there first.

  The first sales are those of the mule gimmers. A mule is the result of crossing a Swaledale yow and a Blue Faced Leicester tup. They are a very popular breed, the females primarily used for the breeding of fat lambs. We dip them with golden bloom, which pearls their coats and turns it a pale biscuit colour, and we shave their necks and bellies to make them appear taller. Then their brown and white mottled faces and legs are washed and they are sorted into smaller groups: a pen of light ones, a pen of dark ones, a pen of strong ones and a pen of lesser ones. Once upon a time we tied strands of different-coloured wool into the fleeces to identify the different groups, but this has been outlawed, and we now use small pots of coloured paint instead. Apparently the strands of wool stayed in the sheep’s fleeces until clipping time, and when the freshly shorn wool was being processed, the ‘foreign’ wool strands contaminated the batch.

  All sheep must now be electronically tagged with a yellow tag containing a microchip, so that they are traceable back to the holding of birth. When electronic tagging was introduced farmers were naturally suspicious about how it was going to be implemented and, more importantly, how it would work in the field. For us, breeding pedigree, it is a great asset. We have a hand-held electronic tag reader that tells us a sheep’s parentage – and in some cases nowadays, the grand-parentage.

  Before electronic tagging, we all assembled in the pens before tupping time, looking up each individual yow’s pedigree and consulting a dog-eared flock book. It usually went like this:

  ‘Alec, read this tag, would ya? I cannae see it.’ Clive would have a yow caught in the corner of the pen and be rubbing its grubby ear tag with his finger. Alec would stride over and peer into the yow’s lug too, then start fishing around in his pocket.

  ‘Where’s mi glasses?’ he’d say, still rummaging. ‘I’s thinkin’ it’s 866 – nope, it’s mebbe 998. Or is that 8 a 3?’

  ‘Christ, I’ll just read it myself,’ I’d say. Then I wouldn’t be able to find the number in the book, and when I did, I’d be faced with an illegible scrawl where the sire had been hurriedly written down. Then it would start to rain . . .

  Now we just point the scanner at the sheep’s yellow tag and we find everything we need to know: date of birth, parentage and progeny. The only way the scanner could be improved would be to make it so sensitive it could read the tag of a yow moving at high speed up a field.

  Clive has flock books going back many years, and I have been lucky enough to see some of the sheep records that belonged to my neighbour Rachel’s forebears, which go back even further, with records of every sheep by name. The names were descriptive: coppy legs (a ‘coppy’ is a milking stool), yan ’orn, lang tail, for instance. The records included which heaf each sheep came off, and how it bred. Traceability may be a buzzword nowadays, but these ageing records show that it isn’t a new thing.

  I sometimes feel a touch sad that I personally do not have the same link with Swaledale that others do, to be able to say that I tread the same paths as my ancestors. But perhaps my longing to fit in to this landscape is what has spurred me on to write, record and absorb everything relating to Ravenseat that I possibly can. Traces of the past come to light all the time, small things of no real significance, but tangible evidence that this place has been a home to people for many centuries.

  We were lucky enough to be given a copy of a map of Ravenseat from 1771 with the springs, wells and stiles all carefully marked, so the children and I went to one of the spots marked and on the hillside we uncovered a hollowed-out stone that once caught spring water as it bubbled out from the ground. We followed a path shown on the map from the farmhouse to the West End field, the route taking us to a drystone wall. Sure enough, now that our eyes were opened we found the stone stoops and the iron hangings from which a small gate once hung.

  A fascinating and obscurely named book, A Bonny Hubbleshoo (dialect for ‘a complete jumble’) gives a unique insight into what life in this dale was like in the late nineteenth century. One of the passages, ‘Rambles in Swaledale’, was scathing about the area, and it’s not surprising the author chose to remain anonymous.

  Although in the matter of cleanliness the housewives of the working classes in Swaledale compare favourably so far as nattiness and general freedom from filth is concerned with the matrons of any other part of England, yet looking at the dwel
lings of the humbler classes suggested to us the thought that their mode of construction belonged to the dark ages . . . Their great want is ventilation. The rooms are too low and the windows too small . . . The window is seldom opened and rank odours are allowed to accumulate . . . So far as the outside is concerned, we noticed an attempt at external decoration which was not very artistic, giving them in a number of instances a grotesque appearance, suggesting a strangely heterogeneous combination of mingled barbarism and civilization . . . Probably one of the most unsightly and unhealthy appendages of the humble domicile of the Swaledale miners are the middens, or mounds of ashes and dung which are close to the door. Their peaked summits, constantly emitting a smoky vapour and a foul stench, poison the blood and render the neighbourhood very unhealthful.

  I read it and looked out of my little kitchen window across to the muck midden in the yard, and smiled to myself.

  Tup crowning day falls roughly in the middle of September, about the time of my birthday. Tup crowning definitely ranks as the more important of these two events, and as time passes I’m inclined to agree with more emphasis being placed on it. The secretary and two elected members of the Swaledale Sheep Breeders Association visit farms in the district that hope to sell pedigree Swaledale tups, to check that they meet the breed standards.

  The Association was formed in 1920 and one of the founder members, Raper Whitehead, was farming at Ravenseat at that time. There have always been sheep roaming the moors but the association was set up to ensure the purity of the breed, and to set a standard for all breeders. The predecessor to the modern Swaledale sheep was described in 1794 by a writer called William Marshall:

  The moreland breed of sheep has always been very different from that of the vale and has not varied, perhaps during a succession of centuries. It is peculiarly adapted to the extreme bleakness of the climature, and the extreme coarseness of the herbage. They live upon the open heaths the year round. Their food, heath, rushes and a few of the coarsest grasses, a pasture on which, perhaps, every other breed of this kingdom would starve.

  Their horns are wide, the face black or mottled . . . their wool longer and much coarser than that of Norfolk sheep.

  You can see in his description that these were the forebears of our Swaledales: we may have refined their looks a bit, but that essential hardiness is what they are about and what we, and the buyers at the auctions, want from them.

  The procession of spectators following the crowners increases as they make their way up Swaledale, and as we are one of the last in the line, a cavalcade of trucks and Land Rovers follows them into our yard. Farmers want to see what other farmers’ tup shearlings are like, because they are looking for new bloodlines to introduce to their flock. Each tup is presented to the inspectors, who are looking for obvious defects and checking that it’s a strong, healthy animal. When they are satisfied that the tup fits the breed criteria the district secretary puts a tag in his ear with the association crown on one side and his official registration number on the other. Once upon a time, the crown was burned into the horn with a hot iron.

  Until crowning day, nobody knows which breeder has the best tups, so the day marks the beginning of the build-up to the tup sales. Whispered discussions take place over the pen gates: ‘A grand packet o’ tups,’ or ‘’E’ll be yan on ’em.’

  Or perhaps the understated: ‘Well, ’e ’asnt got one to just set ’em away,’ or ‘Mebbe not as strang as sometimes.’

  What we want is something to get people talking, to spark an interest for when our tups go to the auction. Word spreads like wildfire – they say that there’s only one thing worse than being talked about, and that’s not being talked about.

  We present our shearlings to the crowners in their natural state, just as they come out of the field. There is no beautification at this stage, because it is still a month to the tup sales. Of course, we want them to stand out as good tups, but the last thing we want is to stand out for the wrong reasons. One year, unbeknown to us, one of the children had been playing with the marking stick and had wiped it on the bars of the gate in the pens. Somehow, by the time the crowners and their entourage arrived, the tiny smudge of red marking had migrated from the gate onto two of the tups, which were now sporting red go-faster stripes down their sides. Clive was not impressed.

  ‘Them bloody kids,’ he muttered.

  It wasn’t the first time we’d managed to make a mess of things. A problem with horned tups is that as the horns grow and curl around, they can dig into the sheep’s face. It’s easily remedied by sawing a sliver of horn away from the inside, nearest the sheep’s cheek. The procedure is not painful, and is the lesser of two evils, because an ingrowing horn creates an open sore that attracts flies and, consequently, maggots. It is a two-man job to trim a horn, as the tup has to be held firmly with his head tipped back. Sitting him on his bottom is uncomfortable for him and uncomfortable for us, as he thrashes about and struggles. The concrete floor is hard and unforgiving, but we had a brainwave one year and decided to use one of the many full wool sheets that were sitting in the barn as a cushion for him.

  It was only after we’d used the cushion while trimming the horn of our first and best tup that we realized that someone (and it didn’t take much working out who, Edith . . .) had graffitied on the sheet with a purple spray marker. Our best tup was now bright purple. We tried to wash it out, but this made it worse, spreading the colour and giving the tup an Edna Everage style rinse.

  Determined not to make the same mistake again with the next tup, we went back to the old method of sitting him on the floor in the pen. Unfortunately, sometimes the horn grows at such an angle that the only solution is to remove the whole horn. It is a decision never taken lightly, for looks are everything with the tup shearlings. This one needed his horn completely removed, and after taking it in turns with the cheese wire, we soon had it off. His ear, which had been tucked under his horn, had not seen fresh air for a while and was decidedly stinky.

  ‘Pooh, that’s a bit rank,’ I said. ‘I’ll ga an’ see if I can find owt for it.’

  I went to the medicine fridge while Clive held the tup still and waited. I was soon back with various potions:

  ‘I’ve got blue antiseptic spray,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ Clive said, understandably. One purple tup was enough; he didn’t want another with a blue ear.

  ‘Green salve?’ I said. He raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I want ’em to look like Swaledale tups, not a bloody rainbow family.’

  ‘How’s about Stockholm Tar, then?’ I asked, holding the tin aloft and waving it.

  ‘If yer want a job doin’, then do it yerself,’ he muttered, letting the tup loose and going to look for something antiseptic and invisible. I decided I’d leave him to it, and went back to the house.

  It wasn’t long before Clive was back in the farmhouse, and he was fuming. The tin of Stockholm Tar that I’d left in the hook-over trough had been dislodged; whether by a chicken or an inquisitive tup, who knows? But the result was that we now had a pen full of tups smeared in sticky black tar, as well as one purple one.

  ‘We’el you’ve certainly got some strikin’ tups for us this year, Clive,’ commented one of the crowners. ‘These fellows will definitely stand out in a crowd.’

  10

  October

  October’s arrival brings a nip in the air and the first forebodings of winter. Shadows lengthen as a weak, low-lying sun casts a mellow light across the open moor. The days are shortening; but purple flecks of flowering heather remain on the drier slopes, contrasting beautifully with the overcast skies. It’s a good time of year for the amateur photographer, and I always have a camera to hand.

  It is a busy time for us. The main focus is still the sheep sales at our local auctions at Hawes and Kirkby Stephen. We sell our older breeding yows (draughts) and surplus gimmer hoggs (shots), and then the tup shearlings. It is only at the tup sales that we dip our hands into our pockets and make a purchase o
r two. How deep those pockets are is entirely dependent on how we fared at the sheep sales. We need to reinvest the money into new bloodlines, and make good decisions to improve our flock. Informal tup viewings before the sales are an opportunity to get a sneak preview of what will be coming, although you only get an invite to see something good. Anyone whose tups are just middlin’ won’t be so keen to show them off. These viewings are usually conducted after hours, when the work for the day is done. A driver will be nominated, as the whisky bottle is likely to make an appearance.

  Our friend Marshall was an enthusiastic participant in tup viewings. A big, jovial, ruddy-faced fellow with ginger curls, thick glasses and as blind as a bat, he worked for a local landowner and had always been involved in Swaledale sheep, at one time keeping a small flock of his own. Marshall had been married but now lived on his own, but he still had an eye for the ladies. Every Sunday morning he would come to Ravenseat for coffee and cakes, bringing a newspaper with him. He and Clive would go through the lonely hearts column, marking likely candidates with a biro.

  ‘This un’ don’t sound so bad,’ he said, with the paper just inches from his face. ‘Fun nights in, that’d do for me.’ He grinned, putting a circle around the telephone number.

  ‘Sounds promising,’ said Clive. ‘Are yer gonna ring t’number an’ leave a message?’

  Together Clive and Marshall composed a message that they believed would win her over, even if it wasn’t strictly true.

  ‘I laugh in the face of danger, and excitement is my middle name,’ Marshall suggested.

  ‘That’ll do nicely,’ said Clive.

  Marshall picked up the phone and reeled off the patter.

  He wasn’t very successful in his quest to find a lady, only on one occasion actually managing to arrange a date with a woman in Darlington. The following Sunday, Clive was very keen to find out how it had gone. Marshall thought for a bit.