15
For the last half a mile before I reach home I am following lanes flanked by drystone walls, lined with pink foxgloves and ferns. I am now passing between the fields of my neighbours. There is no common land down here. Lake District farms like ours tend to have a small amount of privately owned or managed inbye land, or pasture, in the valley bottoms, divided by drystone walls, hedges, fences, or thorn dykes, giving it that patchwork green-and-pleasant-land effect. This is our land, owned by us, or rented, and where we have to grow any crops we need for winter and where we can best look after young lambs on the ewes in spring. These meadows are vital to the working of a fell farm, and were created so that winter could be survived here. A huge amount of work was invested in making this place farmable, a lot undertaken in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: clearing the fields of trees and boulders; taming the becks and channelling them so they drained the land and didn’t wash away the topsoil with each flood; and, building the walls and boundaries, grabbing new bits over time from the forest and scrub, draining the boggy valley bottoms. Without the walls, hedges, and fences, this land would have been grazed all the time with no hay made for winter. It would have been a boom in summer, then a bust in winter. Lack of fodder would have brought starvation for cattle and sheep, and ultimately people.
16
As I pass down the lane, I see a wall by the lane that I helped build with my grandfather.
I remember him teaching me to wall, starting me off at maybe eight years old, filling in the gaps in the middle with poor little stones, whilst his mole-like hands faced the wall with hard blue stones. Summer is a time for repairs and maintenance. Making good on the damage of the winter passed.
The American poet and sometime farmer Robert Frost wrote a fine poem about mending walls:
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
It is true here that “good fences make good neighbours.” My grandfather knew that and wanted me to know it too. I watched him turn the stones over in his hands, looking for walling edge, and place them each in turn into the gap. The plain unloved side of each stone to the interior of the wall, and the “walling face” to the outside edge. He placed in some through stones across the wall to hold it from bellying out in the years to come. He’d encourage me to backfill behind them with smaller stones. Using my smaller hands to make it solid and wedged in place with fist-sized lumps of slate and rock.
He patiently saved some of the best stones for the coins on the wall top, and placed them back as they had been before with the silver, yellow, and sun-bleached green mosses and lichens facing the sky once more.
Once some people stopped a car to take photographs and he turned and walked away. He murmured “bugger off” under his breath. He regarded the tourists that swarmed past on sunny days as minor irritants, like ants; they got in the way and they had strange ideas, but a little bit of bad weather and they’d be gone again to leave us to get on with stuff that mattered. He found “leisure” a strange, modern, and troubling concept—the idea that anyone would climb a fell for its own sake was considered little more than lunacy. So he suffered tourists but found them incomprehensible. I don’t think he understood that those people had another perception of ownership of the Lake District. He would have found that as odd as him walking into a suburban garden in London and claiming it was sort of his because he liked the flowers.
Much of the day-to-day work on a farm is spent on the hundreds of little un-newsworthy jobs that are required in managing the land and sheep. Mending walls. Chopping logs. Treating lame sheep. Worming lambs. Moving sheep between fields. Running sheep through the footbath. Laying hedges (only in months with an “R” in them, or the sap will not run and the hedge will die). Hanging gates. Cleaning the rainwater gutters on the buildings. Dipping sheep. Trimming sheep feet. Rescuing lambs from being stuck in fences. Mucking out the dogs. Trimming the muck from the tails of ewes and lambs. As you drive past, you wouldn’t notice them, but they add up over time. Landscapes like ours are the sum total and culmination of a million little unseen jobs.
The sheep ahead of me have stopped now, having met some walkers coming the other way. They thread through the sheep looking nervous and pass by me. They say hello. So do I. Then they pass onwards, one of them clutching a copy of a Wainwright guidebook.
I wonder whether any of them see the wall my grandfather built, or care that it stands, or wonder who built it.
17
We are nearly home now.
The sheep can sense it.
Some of the older ewes have threaded ahead. They fan out to graze where the lane opens up by a stream. They are reluctant to cross it, and pause on its banks. I send Floss past them with a curt command of “away.” She nudges through the lambs and away past the ewes and jumps the beck. I tell Tan to lie down and he holds the back door shut. I walk past the flock and open the wooden gate to our land. It is held with a rusting length of barbed wire twisted tight. I untie it and swing open the gate. The eldest ewes know they are back on our farm, their other home, and start to jump the beck and thread into the field. Five minutes and they are all back on our own land. They find their lambs and head off to graze.
Floss and Tan lie down in the beck, wallowing with only their heads out of the water, their long pink tongues panting. Blue-green dragonflies zip to and fro above them.
18
My grandfather had nearly been crippled as a boy with cerebral palsy osteoporosis. The doctors had said he would never walk again. For months he was pushed around in a wooden wheelchair. But after several weeks in a care home in Carlisle and some wonder drugs he had slowly recovered. But when I remember watching him dress he had a hole through one of his white legs where it had eaten lumps out of him. They say that after months of being spoiled and doted on by his mother, Alice, he was “wasted something rotten,” “spoilt,” and “impossible.” He’d got a sense of himself from his mother, and illness had freed him from being broken into an obedient son.… He was, after that time, never really likely to play a secondary role to his father. Like lots of lads in places like this, he would have to find his own farm. So when he was about twenty years old he borrowed money from his mother to take a rented farm in the Eden Valley from the Lowther Estate.
19
The Eden Valley is a wide fertile plain that extends on its eastern boundary from the Pennines across to the Lake District fells in the west. It stretches from the Solway plain in the north, and the city of Carlisle, down to the Howgill fells and the Yorkshire Dales in the south. It is, and has long been, famous across the UK for the quality of its livestock, for being a place of great sheep and cattle, and for having some of the best grazing land in Britain. When I stand in the sandstone villages in the fertile plain at the bottom of that valley, a lowland area, a place for arable farming or dairy cattle, it feels a bit like a place disconnected from the fells in the distance, but it isn’t—it is bound to the mountains through the movement of sheep downwards each autumn. The fells and wide lush river valley are all part of one ancient interconnected farming system.
20
The farm my grandfather rented was nestled below one of the limestone ridges that fall away from the eastern Lake District fells. It was exposed, windy land. To work there could leave your face chapped red like it had been sandpapered. From the highest fields, nine hundred feet above sea level, you looked over the valley stretching miles away from you below. It meant we were kind of halfway between the fells and the valley bottom. The old men said the farm was no good, too steep and hilly, it “would wear out good horses.” Maybe he was foolish and lucky, or maybe he was wise, but soon horses disappeared, replaced by tractors, and this age-old constraint no longer mattered.
Tough farms were not places to get rich, but they offered opportunities to those willing (or forced by necessit
y) to take a chance: the young, the keen, the poor, the proud, maybe the foolish. If you had a big lowland dairy farm with good soil, you probably looked down your nose a bit at these farmers on marginal land. These tough farms are two months behind in the growing season and don’t even clear their meadows of sheep until well into May, by which point the lowland farms just ten miles away are almost ready to mow their grass. The timing of everything—from lambing time to making hay—is determined by where you farm and the quality of your land.
My grandfather worked hard and turned that run-down farm around. He supplemented his farm income by working on other neighbouring farms. He was a good horseman. He dealt in livestock. Was an opportunist, like so many of his peers: If pigs paid, breed or fatten pigs. If Christmas turkeys paid, fatten turkeys. If selling eggs paid, get hens. If wool was wanted, grow wool. If milk paid, milk cows. If fattening bullocks paid, buy bullocks. Adjust. Adapt. Change. Do whatever you needed to—because you stood on your own two feet, there was no one to pick you up if you fell down. The geographic constraints of the farm are permanent, but within them we are always looking for an angle.
His pride and joy was a beautiful horse called Black-legged Boxer that pulled his trap. You could see it shining black in the sunshine, muscles rippling, as he described it years later. But there were bad times too. He suffered a disaster when his horses died of grass sickness. He still sounded devastated forty years later when he told me about it. He would drive into the village of Mardale to buy sheep (now deep under the dark blue water of Haweswater reservoir, a valley drowned to supply Greater Manchester with water), or to sales at Ambleside, or Troutbeck, in the Lake District to buy sheep from the fells. To buy sheep profitably you need to be smart, aware of the price of them in different markets. He’d turn up in the farmyards and would be invited to inspect their lambs, feeling their woolly backs to see how much meat covered their backbones and ribs, and judging whether they would grow well. Then he’d make them an offer. He had to be able to see the opportunity for profit over these hill farmers who didn’t often leave their valley. But he had to try and be fair as well because otherwise you couldn’t come back. He had to know how to manage livestock to get them ready for the markets when they were most valuable, and how to buy stock that would improve on his land: taking sheep to worse land would ruin them, and his profit.
21
Soon there was a family to fill the white-painted farmhouse, and by the 1960s he had worked and grown the farm business to the point where he could borrow money to buy his own farm. He borrowed £14,000 and bought a run-down and badly fenced hill farm in a little valley called Matterdale. The farm he bought, which is now my home, was a step backwards in some ways even from the quality of his rented farm. Hilly fields, brown patches of sieves (rushes), thistles, small fields surrounded by fells that seemed to anchor rain clouds, hardly an efficient farm for an age that was demanding farming must become ever bigger and more efficient, but it was what he could afford.
This land required a different kind of farming with different breeds of sheep, because it has an even shorter growing season and more rain. But he knew that owning a small hill farm was more secure than renting one. Owning his own acres gave him freedom and a secure asset that could grow in value. You could be put off a rented farm by your landlord. So my grandfather took us back into the hills, taking his chance. He kept the rented farm and farmed it as a unit with his new land in the hills. There was a farmhouse for sale as well, but he couldn’t afford that, so he farmed the land from a distance at first and then later built a bungalow next to the old barns and sheep pens.
It is quite normal to have bits of land scattered many miles apart. The land directly next to the land you have rarely comes up for sale. So it is not at all unusual that my grandfather bought a farm fifteen miles away from his rented farm.
By the 1980s my grandfather had made it a fairly smart farm with good livestock. He was proud to be a good stockman, devoted to his stock; he could buy and sell things wisely, and was a good judge of breeding. At a glance, he could see little things wrong with sheep or cattle, like if they were wormy or short of minerals. Some faults meant they would lose money; others could be easily cured and transformed into profit. Men like that can judge the weight of a lamb by sight and roughly figure how much it will take to finish a bullock in a few seconds. He knew just when sheep were going stale and needed a change of pasture.
Being smart is held at a premium amongst farmers. You very publicly live by your decisions as judged and measured by those around you.
22
I sometimes think we are so independently minded because we had seen just enough of the wider world to know we liked our own old ways and independence best. My grandfather went as far afield as Paris for a trip to an agricultural fair once. He knew what cities had to offer, but also had a sense that they would leave you uprooted, anonymous, and pushed about by the world you lived in, rather than having some freedom and control. The potential wealth on offer counted for little or nothing set against the sense of belonging and purpose that existed at home.
As on a Scottish croft, there often isn’t a full wage available for farmers’ sons and daughters starting out, so many do something else for a few years to earn a wage before there is room and money for them to live from the family farms. Many of the older farmers often did decades of work in the mines, on the roads, splitting slate, walling, clipping sheep, or working for someone else. It is still common for young farmers to do all sorts of other work to make ends meet until they become the farmer. The parish records show that we were always tough people who often had more than one occupation. The farms were too small to keep everyone. There’s knowingness to our obsession with independence.
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 across the North Atlantic.
Unfortunately, it was normal for farmers like my grandfather to borrow money. It is how we buy land we can scarcely afford (“Well, they won’t be making any more of it, so we better had”), and this meant they were connected to the bank and the rest of the world through interest rates. So the waves of prosperity or hardship that affected farming here were often created by global events like the industrial revolution, world wars, the Great Depression, or the massive expansion of farming in the American West in the nineteenth century. It is a sad logic, but wars were generally considered by the old men to be “good for farming.” Events like the Napoleonic Wars had stopped the cheap imports that undermined our way of life and reminded politicians that producing food at home mattered. Then afterwards they’d forget and things would get gradually worse. But we too were often sucked into the wars that affected the rest of the world.
There is a little cemetery on the Somme, full of local lads, many of them farmers’ sons from here who enlisted and died together in July 1916. One of my grandmother’s uncles had been shell-shocked, recovered enough to come home and work on the farm, but had broken down a few years later when working in the fields pulling turnips with his brothers. He had lain down sobbing in the brown soil, surrounded by the turnip leaves. They had carried him back to the farm, and later, he was taken away to a lunatic asylum in Lancaster. The war went on for him for his whole long life. He was still spoken of affectionately when I was a child, because visiting him was a fresh memory for my elders. My grandfather’s uncle was one of the best shots in his regiment. My son now carries his name, Isaac.
23
As soon as I could toddle I’d be packed into Granddad’s Land Rover and we would go off to do a job on the farm. My mother would be left fretting whether I’d be properly looked after, and about what he would feed me. For some reason I never figured out, my granddad always called us “us two old men.”
> “Us two old men will go and get them sheep.”
I’d ride with him, looking out of the open Land Rover window. One day the door wasn’t latched properly and when he braked, I swung out, holding the window for grim death until I was rescued from midair. I vaguely recall escaping various other painful and imminent deaths at auction marts, clambering up the railings to escape wild cattle or feeling the air whoosh past as a bullock kicked out and just missed me.
The world I was born into extended between our two farms; the outer limits of civilization were friends who did similar things to us, some as far afield as the Pennines or the valleys of the Lake District. Those were the outer boundaries of my known universe.
I was always curious about other places, but I had no desire to go to any of them. And we didn’t do holidays. Instead, I’d be packed off with my granddad to stay on their farm, where I would follow him around all day, and climb into their bed at night.
24
Early summer has quieter moments when we all breathe a little easier after the slog of lambing. My grandmother and grandfather would “take the sheepdogs for a walk.” This was a walk for maybe a mile up the lane beneath the fell where they lived. In reality it was all about enjoying the sight of their farm in its summer mode of abundance. The ewes and lambs grazed contentedly below. The fells shimmered in the dusk, red, orange, and blue. The hayfields below like patches of purple with their flowered grasses headed up. I could almost taste the sweet hay smell, the pollen in the air. The valley echoed always to the sound of ewes calling their lambs.
There is a rusting metal gate halfway up that lane where they would stop and look over their home. The setting sun would bathe the valley, the fields a golden haze of insects, thistles, and flowering grasses. I’d listen to them talk, and feel their love of, and pride in, this place.
The Shepherd's Life Page 5
