He catches the sheep from a pen, and turns it with a twist of its neck over his leg, onto its bum. His hand reaches up and pulls the rope, worn shiny silver with use, that starts the motor. The other hand tucks the ewe’s leg behind his bum, and picks up the clipper hand piece. The stomach is clipped first, with a hand reaching down to protect the teats, or the penis. Then the wool on the back leg is opened out round to the tail and the backbone. The machine sweeps the fleece, in successive blows of the arm, from the sheep’s bodies. Dad is like a machine, the sheep sort of entranced by his movement, an all-consuming dance between him and the sheep. It is a carefully choreographed thing in which the sheep is turned, shuffled, and rolled in clever purposeful ways so that each sweep of the shears takes a full clipper comb–width of wool from the body, with that part of the body stretched safely so there is no vulnerable clefts of skin caught and cut by the shears. The ewes are ready for clipping so the fleece rises from the skin, lifting away from the body with the comb of electronic shears gathering it in and the cutter cutting it cleanly and neatly from the body. The ewe loses its fleece without stress and is back with its lambs before it knows what is happening.
Dad will shear maybe two hundred sheep in the day. He wears moccasins sown out of a hessian wool bag and rough stitched across the top of his feet. These help him to feel the sheep, to caress them round his legs to get the cutting comb full of wool without cutting loose folds of skin. You can clip in boots but you will lack the feel of the sheep and the flexibility needed to bend in all the right places. His motor hangs from a ladder that is jammed between two rafters in the barn. From it hangs a driveshaft that powers his hand piece that is silvery smooth from heavy use. Once or twice a summer a ewe will struggle, and be nicked by the clipping machine. My grandfather would sew the wound up if it were deep with the thick needle he used to sew up the wool bags, or, if just a nip, he’d send me up the hay mew (the thirty-foot-high block of small hay bales, stacked carefully and methodically in the barn—built like a house’s walls with crossed joints to stop it sagging and falling down) to gather cobwebs which he would then press on, helping the blood to coagulate and stop the bleeding.
* * *
A few years later, when I am in my midteens, I learn to clip from my father. It feels like it is impossible. I am awkward and clumsy, and the sheep feels like it is fighting me. I have no stamina, and my feet are not moving when they should. My knee bending, steps, and rolling somehow not quite in sync, I can’t find the rhythm I need. I try to fight through it and it just gets worse.
He is always faster and fitter than me.
I feel like giving up. Walking away.
It is cruel work for men.
I get tired and the sheep feel it and fight the process.
But tough work knocks the silliness out of you when you grow up in places like ours. It teaches you to get tougher or get lost. Them that are all talk are soon found out. Left sitting feeling sorry for themselves exhausted by mid-afternoon whilst the older men are grafting away like they have only just started.
Dad would look across, mid-sheep, and ask if I was tired, a taunting question. I felt like punching him. I couldn’t keep up with him for years. I hated that, and fought it, and I got beaten worse. Later I stopped trying to race him. I found I was beating him sometimes. He got older. I’m not the fastest clipper around, but I’m not bad, make a tidy job. After a few days to get my fitness up I’m reasonably fast.
* * *
The ewes are plagued with flies by clipping time, and flick their ears to shake them off. Our farm has lots of trees and woodland so we get lots of blowflies and bluebottles. By July the flies are at their worst, and we cannot wait to get the sheep clipped and dipped (soaked to the skin in a chemical “sheep dip” to repel flies), so they can look after themselves better. A handful of ewes each summer have fly strike (maggots). Creeping, hungry, vicious little bastards. They take hold in a soiled patch of wool, then in the flesh, or in a foot. We first know when a ewe holds a leg up as if in pain, twitches, tries to bite her side, or simply gives up on the way home and lies down. A struck foot is sometimes a mass of wriggling maggots; a tail or patch on the wool is harder to spot and can spread across the body. Left untreated, the maggots can kill and clean a sheep to the bones in a month. The flies swarm around an affected sheep, the smell making them desperate. Clipping these is unpleasant because flies bite your arms. A horsefly leaves a red swollen welt on my father’s arms, and he curses like a demon. My grandfather takes a struck ewe to the side and pours on Battles Maggot Oil. The maggots wriggle out, abandoning ship at the smell of the noxious stuff. The floor becomes flecked with dead and dying maggots. Away to the side are the ewes in wool, waiting to be clipped. The shed is a cacophony of sheep noise as they shout to the lambs that are waiting noisily for them to emerge into the sunshine. The clipped ewes find their lambs by their calls, but the lambs often seem confused by the skinny bald creature that greets them. Rushing off again to find a mother that looks right.
* * *
A good clipper can shear as many as four hundred sheep a day (some more), but two hundred is a respectable score and would break most people. My father would sometimes help neighbours in a gang. A team of four men can shear well over a thousand in a day. This requires a whole bunch of other people to gather the sheep, sort the lambs off, push the ewes onto the clipping trailer, wrap the wool, mark the sheep after they are sheared, lead the batches of sheep away, and generally keep things moving. It’s the time of year when tempers are short, the buildings alive with the hum of the shearing machines, sheep baaing, dogs barking, and men shouting. Some years are a bloody nightmare for shearers. Wet sheep cannot be clipped, so you try and get them in barns before it rains. But many are sheared in fields with mobile clipping trailers being erected, so weather can ruin a day. Today we use electric clipping machines, but it is still bloody hard graft, and as many helpers as possible is a good idea. Lots of young, and not so young, shepherds earn their keep through the summer in gangs of shearers that travel from farm to farm doing the work. Some farmers’ wives still compete with one another to put on the best clipping-time tea (no one has the heart to tell them that being full of cakes and scones is not great when you have to bend double all afternoon).
The only thing wrong with clipping time is that wool, one of the great products of the world, is sold for so little. Once wool was a key cash crop from farms like ours, a major part of the income. They say caravans of horses or donkeys led bales of wool across the fells to Kendal (which was built on the wool trade) until late in the nineteenth century. Much of the wealth of the monasteries that owned much of the Lake District in the Middle Ages was created from wool. Today, if we paid someone to shear them, it would cost about £1 per sheep. The fleece is only worth maybe 40p. So we don’t count on wool generating us more than a token payment. Some years we don’t bother to sell wool because the price is so bad, and burn it. Herdwick wool is wiry, dark, and hard (which makes it ideal for sheep on mountains and for tweed type jackets, insulation, or carpets that last for a very long time, but less than ideal for competing with fleece and other man-made products). Look at old pictures of Herdwicks and you will see they had more wool than they do now, because farmers respond to market incentives and have bred sheep with less and less wool, and we clip to help their welfare, not earn a living.
But my grandfather would still scold me if I didn’t tug off the dags of dirt, or failed to pick up the lockings (handfuls of loose wool) from the floor.
As my father releases a clipped ewe, he throws the fleece to the side. My grandfather sweeps it up and casts it like a fisherman’s net across the wrapping table. The fleece lies for a second like a coat inside out. He pulls any dirt from it and picks out any straw or twigs. He rolls the outsides of the fleece inwards so the fleece forms a foot-wide rug. He rolls it into a ball starting at the neck end until he reaches the tail. Then with a pull and a twist, he turns the tail into a kind of rope. In one movement he would bind t
he tail rope around the bundle and tuck it firmly beneath itself on the other side of the roll. The fleece now was tied and would be thrown to my mother to be stuffed firmly into the corner of the wool bags. When I was small and too young to work, I’d be in that wool bag, greasy with lanolin. I’d just lie there as the shed hummed to the sound of the motor of the clipping machine and the sheep calling each other. I can remember lying there, looking up at the swallows coming and going to the nest on the beam above me as if nothing were happening, the young birds occasionally peering over the edge to watch the commotion. I’d fall asleep in this woolly cocoon to be woken later by my fussing grandmother who then plied me with shortbread or something else she had baked. She’d spit on a hanky and rub my face clean.
My grandfather would mark the ewes with our farm’s smit mark as they were released. Our smit mark is a blue mark in front of red on the sheeps’ shoulders that tells everyone they are our sheep.
A few days later we would dip our sheep. The ewes start to resist at the slightest smell of the stuff. So we have to manhandle them into the dipping tub. They are tossed into a grey chemical soup that repels flies, then swim around, looking for a way out. One of the men dunks them with a long staff with a metal prodder on the end. We children would go down to the river and admire the dead fish downstream from where the trickle of dipping flowed. Their upturned twisting bellies flash silver in the stream. No one worried about such things too much back then—but basically we were dipping them in chemical agents developed to kill people in World War I.
12
Clipping days are long hard days. They start early with bringing the sheep into the yard. The sheepdogs toiled hard to gather them up. I remember my grandfather working his dog like this on clipping days. He was struggling to move fast enough, but he had a great sheepdog. His dog, Ben, was a beautiful strong-boned black-and-white Border collie, a strong dog that could work a big flock of sheep. He even trained Ben to catch a single ewe on command without hurting it, holding the fleece without nipping the skin and using his strength to anchor the ewe, until Granddad could hobble closer and grab it. But Ben was cheeky; he knew he couldn’t be caught by the old man so he would taunt my grandfather by bouncing in front of him as they went to do some work, and my grandfather would shout blue murder at him.
F this. F that. Threatening the evilest of punishments if he caught him.
Ben just bounced and smiled.
But once the work started, Ben would focus and together they could do almost anything. After he’d worked well, all the cheek was forgotten and never mentioned again, until the next day, when they would repeat their act. Later when my grandfather was older and had had a stroke, we made a bed for him in our front room in the farmhouse. We brought Ben in to see him, and he was so happy to see his beloved sheepdog that he cried.
13
A black lamb breaks back past me and bolts off up the road. I shout at Tan to go and fetch it back. He heads off with his long loping stride after it and passes it in a few seconds. At the point where dog and lamb are side by side, Tan kind of nudges it off-balance with his nose as they gallop, and it tumbles in the grass and turns over. It comes back to the flock, parting the foxgloves and thistles by the roadside. I breathe out, because a lamb can, if it panics and decides its mother has been left behind, go all the way back to the fell with its head down, oblivious to dogs or men. I have eaten my sandwiches at the fell gate, and the day has cooled. Clouds appear in the western sky. Goldfinches trill excitedly as they flit from one patch of thistle fluff to the next. The long straight road falls away in front of me.
Then the lanes take me down through the allotments or intakes. This is privately owned or farmed land on the lower slopes of the fells or on the moorland (common land once that was divided up so the commoners had an allotment of land each). They are often rocky, heather-covered, semiscrubland and steep. The intakes look similar to the fells but are divided by snaking drystone walls reaching up the fell. Many of these fields were enclosed from the seventeenth century onwards. These were often used for grazing cattle, and unlike the common, these rough fields are farmed by just one farmer.
Taking my sheep down those lanes is what people have done here since it was first settled. That is what these lanes, or outgangs, are for, to let the little farmsteads access the mountain grazing. I am walking in the footsteps of my ancestors and living a thing they lived.
14
The farm I am heading back down these lanes to was, and in some ways still is, my grandfather’s farm; he bought it in the 1960s. It is also my father’s farm; he kept it going, paid for it, and added to it with extra land in the 1970s and 1990s. It is also my farm, because I’ve worked on it with them both since I was a child, and because I have built on it a new farmhouse and buildings and taken my family there to live and spend the rest of my life keeping it going.
The farm we are returning to with the flock is already partly my three children’s farm too; they share in its day-to-day life now. They have their own sheep in the flock, so they can start to build them up and learn about the highs and lows of farming. They are expected to work with me as I did with my grandfather and father.
Their sheep are called Moss, Holly, and Loopy Loo. Who am I to argue? It is the same as it was for me when I had two sheep called Betty and Lettuce. It goes on.
Some people’s lives are entirely their own creation.
Mine isn’t.
The sheep I am walking back, bought after my test from my neighbour, make it a true fell farm with its own fell-going flock. The sheep she had taken on in the early 1970s (from another noted breeder) were handed on to me. The flocks remain; the people change over time. Someday we will pass them on to someone else.
Like my grandfather, you can farm here on your own land in the valley bottom without taking sheep to the common land on the fells, farming “improved” sheep breeds that don’t need to be as tough. He farmed Swaledale ewes and bred hybrid North Country mule lambs to sell each autumn at the big sales at Lazonby in the Eden Valley. The farm he bought had no fell-grazing rights for sale with it. He wasn’t really a fell shepherd. He was one step down the mountainside from the fell flocks, buying lambs from the fell farms or selling them tups. He thought that just fine, because farther down the hill was better land and better sheep if you were a progressive mid-twentieth-century farmer like he was.
Swaledales are tough moorland sheep with thick wind-turning fleeces and bold black-and-white markings on the face and legs. These are originally, as the name suggests, the sheep of the Pennines but have become almost universal in the uplands of northern England because they have the ability to breed an incredible hybrid daughter (if mated to the improbable-looking bluefaced Leicester) called a North Country mule—a wonderful sheep with speckled brown, or black, and white faces, and perfect petticoat fleeces—that go down to the lowlands and provide the breeding flock for the rest of the UK. Swaledales are widely farmed in the Lake District. My grandfather kept these to produce lambs, which he sold each September. And because he produced these crossbred lambs, he had to buy in new draft ewes to refresh the Swaledale flock each year.
These daughters of the mountains are the best commercial ewes money can buy for a lowland farm. They inherit the hardiness and maternal instincts of their mountain mothers, but also the improved growth rate, body, and fine fleece of their lowland fathers. After their youth in the mountains they also do extremely well on almost any other land across the UK, because everywhere else is an improvement. They are a rich, productive harvest from these farmed mountains. So farmers descend on these little auction marts in droves, until the lanes leading to them are choked with traffic. The stereophonic din from the auctioneer echoes out across the pens and surrounding fields. The air is full of the smell we love, the smell of the dipping that crimps their fleeces and colours their wool the brown tea-stained hue that tradition dictates. Their black-and-white speckled faces are scrubbed sparkling clean, and little bits of red and blue woollen thread ha
ng from their necks to show they are the selected top pen or the seconds.
* * *
Farmers from elsewhere have bought the surplus breeding stock produced here for many centuries, as the northern fells are a kind of nursery for the national sheep flock. My grandfather sold sheep each autumn to farms as far afield as Somerset or Kent. It has long been a trading economy: a thousand years ago we were part of a Viking trading world that stretched north around the Atlantic coasts.
Each autumn, farmers from lower, kinder ground buy the spare ewe lambs from the mountains for their flocks, and the male lambs to fatten for meat. This movement is a simple necessity because the mountains can carry many more sheep in the summer than in the winter when the grass disappears. The mountains produce a vast harvest of breeding sheep, meat, and wool. In addition to the lambs sold, because they are surplus to the fell flocks’ needs, thousands of young sheep from the mountain flocks were, and still are, wintered on lowland farms with their owners paying by the week for their keep. These sheep go back to the fells the following spring to become the future of the flock, getting back to their heaf just in time for the mountains to turn from blue and brown into summer green.
But in the past decade or so my father and I have deliberately made our farming system more traditional and old-fashioned, returning to a system with minimal external inputs and expenditure because it helps us escape from the spiralling costs that are killing small farms like ours. And because we have slowly learnt that the traditional ways still work.
Taking those steps has been an education, taking us into the common farming life of the fells, and led us to learn a great deal about the system that has survived there. Our land is not one inch closer to the fells than it was years ago, but our relationship with them has changed. I am still learning about this landscape.
The Shepherd's Life Page 4
