My boots are covered in sawdust. I am standing in a pen, jostling with other shepherds, where the ewes are held momentarily before they go into the ring to be sold. It is where we can inspect them for the last few seconds. As one lot is let into the ring, my attention either follows them, if I am interested in buying them, or turns down the alleyway for the next consignments coming towards me. I got home from Oxford late the night before, after being there for about a month. It feels strange to be home, as if I am now just a visitor to the land that I love, no longer really part of it. But I got up early and shepherded, and half an hour of work makes me feel part of it again, like I can shed my other skin. There was a heavy dew, or “rime,” on the grass, and the ewes’ backs silver. My boots were sodden when I came back in for breakfast. We then drove up the Eden Valley through an autumnal landscape, through air with a bite to it. Sunlight lay like smoke in the hollows, resting, before it made the long afternoon trek up the fell sides. The lichened stones shone silver in the thinning light. The hedges flecked with the blood red spots of rosehips. The chimneys of the farmhouses marked again by first whispers of wood smoke.
My heart aches because I know that in my new life I am divorced from the changing of days and the seasons. Things have changed a great deal in the month I have been away. I see big changes instead of the little ones I have always lived with. Autumn comes quickly here. The life bleaches out of the leaves and grass with each passing day. A landscape of green turns brown. The heather on the fells turns until it is the russet of a kestrel’s wing.
As the ewes come down the alley to the bustling ring in their different consignments, interest in them grows, until in the last section of the alley where I stand to inspect them with other shepherds. This sale is when we buy the draft ewes from the fell farms, the ones we breed the hybrid mule lambs from to sell. My father (like my grandfather before him) travels to the sales at little auction marts like Middleton-in-Teesdale and Kirkby Stephen. We go to buy ewes that have lived on the Pennines but which are now sold for a new life at a lower, less harsh altitude. The fields and streets around the auctions fill up with badly parked Land Rovers and wagons. You see as many as three generations of the same families, trooping down the streets to the auction. Little fell-bred old men with bent backs and bandy-legs, flanked by strapping, beefy grandsons about two feet taller. Traditionally it was a day to wear your good clothes. My grandfather would cast an eye up and down me to make sure I was properly turned out. He’d have on a tweed suit and a tie. Boots polished. I could get away with jeans if I had a shirt and tie on under a jumper.
I feel the sheep’s backs for condition; decide their quality with a glance at their colour, fleeces, legs, and heads; and check their teeth by grabbing a sheep and peeling back its bottom lip (sheep only have teeth on the bottom jaw). The teeth tell me a lot. A sheep as a lamb has baby teeth, little sharp needlelike teeth, but then at a year old, the two central teeth change into broader white teeth. A year later the next one on either side of the central two change to adult teeth; and the year after that the whole mouth is in its adult form, like a tight little row of tombstones made of white Portland stone meeting at the edges. As the sheep ages, the teeth get longer and start to weaken, with gaps between them, until eventually they become wobbly and fall out. They can actually graze with no teeth at all, but there is a stage when the mouth is broken when they struggle and lose condition. When ewes are broken mouthed, they are sold for meat because their ability to feed themselves and produce lambs has gone.
So, on days like today my job is to stand and check the mouths of the ewes. I was taught to do this by my father over many years until he decided I was a good judge and now he takes my word for it and sits across the ring from where he can see the sheep and bid if he wants to. Because of their age, these ewes’ mouths will be mature, but the art is to judge from these teeth whether the ewes will last several years or just a year or so. Our judgement of their value is in many ways a judgement about their age and durability largely based on their teeth. A good mouth might mean you get three years from the ewes; a bad mouth may mean just one year. I check hundreds through the day, and my dad watches from the other side of the ring, questioningly, wanting me to ask whether the sheep in the ring have good mouths or are to be avoided. A little smile or a wink and they know these sheep will wear well. He buys some of these if they are at the right price. A tiny shake of the head or turning away tells him to leave well alone. The difference in price might be £20 per ewe, and a large farm might sell hundreds of draft ewes each autumn, so little things like teeth matter. A lot of my farming friends see me at the sales, and are none the wiser that I am now at university. I don’t tell them. Others know, and are watching to see if I have lost the plot. One or two folk are not sure what I am anymore. They start to say, “I thought you were…” then realize it is still me and we talk sheep.
The draft ewes from the most prestigious flocks are coveted because, although they are not young, they represent an opportunity to purchase ewes that can breed exceptional offspring. They may live for only two, three, maybe as many as five or six more years, but in that time they may breed for you lambs that are better than your own ewes are capable of breeding. For all these reasons, anyone starting to breed fell sheep seriously has limited chance to get among the best bloodlines. Sales of genuine stock ewes in their prime from a respected flock are few and far between. So this sale is of many run-of-the-mill sheep that are effectively commodities, many bought to breed lambs for meat, but also a good number of higher-quality sheep that are the object of keen competition and immense pride. The sheep being sold are actually the oldest ladies in the fell flocks (albeit with some miles left in the tank) or those sorted out because they don’t breed as well. A fell flock is like a conveyor belt with the oldest (five to six years old) ewes moving off each autumn at the top, and new, younger, home-bred females (in their second year of age) pushing on to the bottom to take their place. Every year the flock is renewed by fresh young ewes, and through the sale of the older ewes.
One of the stranger features of a fell farm is that your best females are rarely ever seen by anyone but you and your neighbouring fell shepherds.
Shepherds compete with these draft ewes at the autumn sales for the prestige of securing the highest prices because, although they are not our best ewes in their prime, they still have significant sale value and form a big chunk of our annual income, and they make a very public statement about the quality of our flock. If they have poor teeth or are old and lean, then the quality of our breeding is thrown into doubt. If they are still great ewes, with good teeth and have worn well, then our breeding looks desirable to other shepherds. So some of the old shepherds say that you can only really judge how effective a tup is when his daughters are sold as drafts maybe six or seven years after he is bought.
Men and women crowd five deep to peer through to the sheep in the sale ring. When a notable flock comes to be sold, the crowds follow them. Our friends the Lightfoot family are heading to the ring with their ten best ewes, their ewes sparkling black-and-white against their fleeces. These are highly respected shepherds with sheep that have a depth of breeding that everyone here knows about. The names of the great flocks are uttered reverentially here. Such sheep are presented and treated with great respect. Hours of preparation have been invested in getting them into prime condition. They have been dipped and coloured with peat (in line with the tradition that they should be a certain colour from the moors), their black-and-white noses and legs washed, stray white hairs or black ones “tonsed” out with tweezers. The great-looking ones with a track record might make £600 each, the run-of-the-mill ones £100. The best ewes are even spoken of affectionately: “She’s special, that old lass, bred me a tup I sold last year for three thousand pounds.” These ewes can never be put to the fell again, because they are hefted to another piece of land, so they are farmed with care on the lower fenced ground.
33
My father is wielding a white-
handled meat saw usually used by a butcher to cut through bones. I am holding a very-much-alive tup in the corner of the sheep pens, his backside in the corner. His head twisted strongly up around my body to present his horn at an angle my father can cut it at, my knee in his chest. The tup is angry and throws us forward a few inches with each thrust of his body, and I counter it to keep him as still as I can. With each wriggle my father curses.
Swaledale tups have curled, ammonite-like horns, curling once or even twice round before they are old. In the autumn when their blood is up, they back away from each other, then charge with their heads down until they meet with a vicious crack that is like two great rocks smacking together. Sometimes one will be found lying peaceful, and ended, neck broken. Most of these tups have horns that curl safely away from their eyes or from their heads, and can be left alone. But some of these horns break, twist the wrong way, or can grow into the tup’s head; others grow so fast that the flies aggravate the base of the growing horns. So we train the horns of some sheep, and have to be vigilant to others. Sometimes we have to cut off a sliver of horn nearest the head to stop its boring into the flesh. Or we occasionally warm a horn to bend it to a more harmless course. We have even used a contraption that bends the horns slowly away from the head by tightening a bolt a little bit each day to apply slow pressure to a chain between the horns until they hold right naturally. Sometimes the horns are just too tight to the head, and we will take them off as the lesser of two evils. Sometimes there is some blood, but it soon stops, and the end result is safer for the sheep.
When the tups are old or dead, the horns are sawn off to make the varnished, soft, curved handles of the shepherd’s crooks, attached to a staff of hazel with a seamless joint. Nothing was wasted in the old days. Some of the old shepherds or men in the villages carve ornate sheep or sheepdog heads in these horn handles to decorate their crooks, though the best of these are never used for work, but are simply for show. I will wave my crook to get the tup’s attention in the sale ring, and tickle it gently under its nose to get it to raise its head to look prouder and full of character.
A crook is as essential now on our farm as it ever was. My crook is an extension of my arm, letting me catch the sheep. Sheep are faster than a man, but will let you within a distance they feel safe at. The crook is used to take advantage of that and snag them round the neck. I use a crook almost every day in winter and dozens of times a day in the spring when we are lambing and need to catch ewes at regular intervals. We also carry with us a medicine box with all the tools and potions that our trade demands—penicillin, purple foot spray, foot shears, multivitamins, hand shears, needles and syringes, wormer, and fly repellent (in summer).
34
My two-year-old son, Isaac, understands that a stick is part of what makes you a shepherd. He has his own made for him by a distinguished shepherd and stick maker. Each autumn at the sales the auctioneer sells a handful of this shepherd’s fine crooks. They are keenly bid for. Some have the classic, horn-curled crook handle; others are wooden and in different styles. They are beautiful sticks and much admired, and the shepherd who makes them has made and sold many hundreds for charity. Last year I had to go and see the old shepherd who makes these sticks; we had some sheep business to attend to. I loaded my son in his car seat and we drove off across the mountain passes that take you to Langdale. An hour or so later we pulled into the farmyard, and my son woke up. We were ushered into the kitchen of an old-fashioned but picture-postcard-pretty farmhouse, and then the shepherd showed me his sticks, dozens of them, many carefully laid out for the day when they would be sold, others hanging upside down from the black oak beams so their varnish would dry right. He tells me that his sheepdog is so good on the fell that he thinks he could send it from the kitchen table to gather the crags above the house, and carry on his breakfast whilst it worked in the rocks above.
The old shepherd is proud of his sticks, and rightly so. I asked him if he had learned from his father; and he said, no, he was self-taught. Outside, he showed me the workshop in the barn where sticks in various stages of creation are placed. Bundles of hazel or beech rods, tied round the middle with string, rest against the workbench. In the vise is a beautiful stick that he has been working on. He tells me that he is having a job to curl the horn how he wants to; it has a little twist in it. I tell him I like it just fine; it has character. He says it is mine. And a few weeks later it is put in my hand, beautifully varnished, and less crooked that it had been, because he wanted it to look right. Then he hands me a stick for Isaac, a boy’s crook, with a half-curled horn handle, the perfect height for him to stand and lean on.
35
My mother is sitting on a wooden chair in our barn, sunlight streaming through the doors. She is slightly hunched over a sheep’s face, her glasses perched on her nose, like she is reading some tiny writing. A Swaledale sheep is held tight in the crate that holds their heads as we prepare them for the sales (sheep tend to stand still if firmly held under the chin and with a rope behind their heads, to tussle a little, and then resign themselves to enduring the work we do on them). In her hands are a pair of tweezers, the kind a lady might use to pluck stray hairs from her eyebrows. She is tonsing a tup, plucking out some of the hairs on his face to make his black-and-white colouring look even more distinct.
There is an ideal pattern, colour, feel, and style to the face markings of Swaledale sheep that is aspired to and only very rarely achieved. So everyone cheats a little and helps with the definition of the pattern by plucking. In the barns across northern England everyone who breeds Swaledales is at it. I know a shepherd who spent more than forty hours once on one sheep, plucking; when he told me I laughed and said he was crazy.… His response was, “Aye, maybe … but you should have seen her. She was beautiful by the time I’d finished. Won every show that summer.”
The sunlight is lighting my mum’s hair. She is the most patient and careful of us. So she gets this strange job, my dad losing patience with it after twenty minutes. We have always done these little things, but I appreciate them much more now when I come home from university and see them with fresh eyes. I realize more than ever that these little things make us who we are.
36
I suddenly found, now that I was a student at Oxford, that when I am home I am for the first time interesting to middle-class English people. I am invited to book clubs in the village, and to dinner parties, and people want to talk about current affairs with me when I meet them in the lane.
Occasionally someone will ignore my friends if we are out and make a beeline to me to talk about something Oxford related, and my friends will just smile because they see it happening.
I have been reclassified as clever, and I am not entirely comfortable with it because it confirms lots of things I’d suspected.
37
Everything the shepherds were ever taught is tested in the shows and sales, in the full glare of scrutiny and the judgement of peers. This isn’t just vanity, though there is vanity in it, and it isn’t just pride, though you will never meet prouder folk. This is the coming together of everything, the ending of old stories and the beginning of new ones. The great flocks of sheep are the accumulation of countless achievements at these shows and sales over many years, each year’s successes or failures layering up like chapters in an epic ancient poem. The story of these flocks is known and made in the retelling by everyone else. Men, who will tell you they are stupid and not very bright, can recall encyclopaedic amounts of information about the pedigrees of these sheep. Sheep are not just bought: they are judged, and stored away in memories, pieces of a jigsaw of breeding that will come good or go bad over time. Our standing, our status, and our worth as men and women is decided to a large extent by our ability to turn out our sheep in their prime, and as great examples of the breed.
38
The fields are silver wet with a late-autumn dew, and where the sheep have run the grass has been shaken back to green. There is a nip in the air. We are workin
g in the sheep pens. My father’s dog, Mac, lies with his head under the wooden gate, keen to be in where we are working. Selecting which of the ewes will go to which of the tups is arguably the most important day’s work of the year for a shepherd. A complicated business of selecting animals with complementary characteristics to try and breed the best sheep you can. So we look at the ewes that fill the pen in front of us, weighing up in our minds which ewes bred best to which tups last autumn, and which ones might breed well to the new tups we have bought this autumn.
The ewes have the top of their tails sheared a week earlier to make it easier for the ram to get them pregnant (think removing woolly knickers). Then we dip them, worm them, give them a mineral supplement, and a dose to prevent liver fluke disease. A prenatal checkover if you like. Our job now is to ensure that the ewes are mated to the right tups so that they are a) in lamb, and b) in lamb to the right tup to produce the best possible offspring the following spring. We call it lowsing the tups.
At its simplest, it is just about putting a ram, or rams, with a bunch of ewes. Sex.
Then five months later, lambs.
Simple. But if you try to breed high-quality breeding stock or tups to sell to other people, and sustain the character and quality of a good flock of sheep, then it’s a whole lot more complicated.
Sometimes writers mention what we do as having a kind of wisdom of the hands; they mean it respectfully and as a compliment, like we are artisans, but I don’t like the phrase.
The Shepherd's Life Page 13
