21
My mother says we get tup fever. A kind of insanity takes over starting in the spring and building to fever pitch by the autumn, until the shows and sales become all we think about. She could be right. Suddenly one evening in late spring or early summer some sheep-breeding friends will call round; they profess to being just out for a “ride out.” But they haven’t really come to socialize. They have come to have an early look at the tups and to check out whether our lambs look like they will be good in the shows. A proud shepherd never wants anyone to see his sheep when they are not at their peak. We suffer each other’s nosiness and play all sorts of games: hiding the best in fields far away from the road and prying eyes, pretending to show people our best, keeping the stars hidden until it matters.
There is great skill in the preparation of these special sheep for the shows and sales. Herdwick tups (and the best ewes) are not sold with their fleeces in their natural slatey blue-grey colour, but are, as they have been since time immemorial, “redded.” No one knows for sure why it is done, or when it started. It is just done and always has been. There are two theories for why we do it: first that shepherds some centuries ago wanted to see their most valuable sheep on the fell sides with ease, so they coloured the tups with the brightest natural colour they could find; or second, that this is some ancient form of animism, that people here might have worshipped their sheep in some way as far back as Celtic times and coloured them as some form of ritual. Knowing the way people here think about sheep to this day, I find the second explanation very easy to believe.
22
The palms of my hands are red like they have been soaked in the blood of a mountain. The raddle has deep iron-ore tinge to it; once the colouring would have been taken from the rusting rock faces, the brightest natural colour they could find. In front of me is a Herdwick tup bristling in its blue-grey coat. He is held by my father. He bridles as I step towards him, and I see my father’s knuckles whiten as he takes hold tighter. I place my redded hands at the base of his neck where the grey of his mane starts. I pull my redded hands back along the wool of his back. The paste leaves a track of colour along his back. I push and pull my palms back and forth on his back until there is a two-hand width of raddle.
All of the traditional breeds of sheep have these strange ceremonies. The red changes a Herdwick sheep, helps the contrast between the fleece and the snowy head and legs. When we wash their faces and legs the day before a show or sale, they come up bright white, and the sheep take on a noble and handsome appearance. They have transformed from their work clothes to their Sunday best. Herdwick Show Red, a dark rusty red powder, is now bought in a bucket. The Swaledale equivalent is to colour the fleece of the tups and ewes for sale in peat, often dug from some special secret location on the moor that has been shown to provide just the right tint of peat bog to meet the ideal of beauty required.
23
All thoughts through the spring and summer lead to the autumn, when everything the shepherds know is tested in the shows and sales, in the full glare of scrutiny and the judgement of peers.
I once bought a little Herdwick shearling tup (in his second autumn) from Willie Richardson from Gatesgarth at the sale at Cockermouth. He was by popular consent agreed to be a beautiful stylish little sheep, perfect white in his head and legs and where his legs met his body. He had only one fault, that he was probably a bit too small. So he cost me just £700; if he had stood a few inches bigger he might have cost me another thousand pounds or so. I shared him with a young shepherd, but three weeks after the sale he decided we had made a mistake: the tup was too small, so he never put any ewes to him. Before long I was being teased about this little tup, the consensus being that I was wrong, he would breed too small. I nearly listened to everyone pulling him apart, but something told me not to, so I gave him the best of my ewes the first autumn. A gamble. That was six or seven years ago, and now his daughters are, I think, some of the best-looking and breeding ewes in the Lake District. That little sheep was one of the best we have ever had. He mated with just ten ewes last autumn, and then was found lying, old, worn-out, and dead in the middle of the field. Some of the best shepherds who once dismissed him now admit, when I remind them, that they were wrong about him.
Sometimes these things work, sometimes they don’t.
24
Bea climbs over the pens, and quietly but determinedly takes my show lamb from my hands. We are at one of the shows we try to win each year. The judge, Stanley Jackson, comes along the line and smiles when he sees she is holding it tight round its neck. She is cute, so the other shepherds tease me and say it is just a way to sway the judge. I tell them to bugger off, that there is a new shepherd on the block and they better watch out. Away in the next set of pens my father is showing his Swaledale sheep, and my other daughter, Molly, is holding one of his, and it wins its class. Three generations of us doing what we do. Other families are spread out like this around us. The lamb Molly is holding was sired by the tup that my father and I bought the year before, the one that he had admired on Christmas day from the window, when I thought he was going to die. He has seen this dream come true. He looks suntanned and happy. The cancer may still be inside him, and may someday have the final say, but for now he is alive, living a life he would not swap for all the riches in the world.
25
Summer starts when the last of the sheep have lambed, and the marked and vaccinated flock is driven up the valley sides, either to the allotments or intakes if they have twin lambs, or to the fells if they have single lambs.
Many fell farms are located at the bottom of the fell that they have grazing rights on, so it can be as simple as opening a gate and letting the ewes take their lambs onto the fell that starts the other side of the fence or wall. A trickle of ewes and lambs will make their way up the sheep trods, paths worn by the sheep over the centuries, and slowly spread out across the mountain until they find the place where they belong. Their sense of belonging is so strong that some have been known to go straight back to where they were heafed with their mothers, an irresistible urge within them to head home to their “stint,” even if some haven’t been to the mountain for three or four years.
26
We are clipping (shearing) a batch of ewes in our barn. They are Herdwick ewes. These days I am a lot faster than my dad. I can do nearly two sheep to every one he does. That is as it should be, because he is retirement age, and I am in my clipping prime.
He knows that I’m not as hardened to work as he is, and that if we kept going for hours I would slow down, that I’m not as fit as he was at my age. You can sense the person clipping next to you, sense when they are struggling, or when they are flowing well.
He knows I am clipping as well as I ever have done before. For many years I struggled to match his speed, and I would get frustrated or angry at my lack of stamina, or technique, so part of me enjoys letting him know that now, eventually, I can beat him as bad as he once beat me. I give him a cocky smile from time to time as if to say “You once tortured me like this and now it is your turn.” He smiles awkwardly back like you do when the speed isn’t there and you are beat.
Then I notice him stand up after finishing a sheep.
He walks quietly away, and I know that something is wrong.
I ask if he is OK.
He smiles as if to say everything is fine, but I know it isn’t.
He is feeling some pain, something that is robbing him of his strength.
He lets me shear the final few sheep.
I am forty years old and I have never once seen my father take a step back from work. Not once. My dad is one of the hardest men I have ever met. I have known days when we have worked like dogs and completed our own work, and I’d be dreaming of a hot bath or watching the TV, and then he’d realise that a neighbour was working and may need a hand, and he would go and help them, and he’d volunteer me, with no sense of it being of any kind of benefit to us whatsoever. I’d ask what we were doing, when we
had more than enough work of our own, and he’d pretend to not hear the question. Then when the work was done he’d drive me mad by waving away the suggestion of the neighbour paying us.
It was like his code of honour.
Work that needs doing should be done.
27
There is nothing like the feeling of freedom and space that you get when you are working with the flock and the dogs in the fells. I escape the nonsense that tries to consume me down below. My life has a purpose, an earthy, sensible meaning.
Gavin Bland, a friend of ours from the largest and thus perhaps one of the most important Herdwick farms of them all, West Head, summed it up when he told me recently that he could not farm a lowland farm now with small fields and fences everywhere.
“When you’re used to big spaces and having no one around you, you get used to it. I couldn’t be done with being fenced in among too many other folk.”
Ours is not such a large, or tough, fell farm as West Head—it is a cabbage patch by comparison—but when I go to the fell I know what he means. Once tasted it would be hard to walk away from.
This is an ancient, hard-earned, local kind of freedom that was stolen from people elsewhere. The kind of freedom that the nineteenth-century peasant poet John Clare wrote about. He lamented the changes in the Northamptonshire landscape he loved because of enclosure. He saw the disconnection that was being created between people like him and the land, something that has only gotten worse with each passing year since then. Across most of England, over the past couple of centuries, common land has been enclosed, until only islands of it have been left, in poor or mountainous places like ours where something older remains. Ours is a rooted and local kind of freedom tied to working common land, the freedom of the commoner, a community-based relationship with land. By remaining in a place, working on it, and paying my dues, I am entitled to a share of its commonwealth.
Working up these mountains is as good as it gets, at least as long as you are not freezing or sodden (though even then you feel alive in ways that I don’t in modern life behind glass). There is a thrill in the timelessness up there; I have always liked the feeling of carrying on something bigger than me, something that stretches back through other hands and other eyes into the depths of time. To work there is a humbling thing, the opposite of conquering a mountain if you like; it liberates you from any illusion of self-importance. I am only one of the current graziers on our fell (and one of the smaller and more recently established ones at that), a small link in a very long chain. Perhaps no one will care that I owned the sheep that grazed part of these mountains in a hundred years’ time. They won’t know my name. But that doesn’t matter. If they stand on that fell and do the things we do, they will owe me a tiny unspoken debt for once keeping part of it going, just as I owe all those who came before a debt for getting it this far.
When I leave my flock in the fells for summer and come down home, I leave something of myself up there with them. So several times a day I look away to the skyline where they graze. Sometimes I can’t help myself, and go back up the fell just to see that all is well. The skylarks ascend, singing, disturbed by my boots and the sheepdogs.
The sheeps’ evident satisfaction to be back where they feel at home means that winter and spring are fast receding behind us. The fell sheep can largely look after themselves in the coming weeks. So I lie down by the beck and cup out a handful of water. I slurp it. There is no water tastes so sweet and pure.
Then I roll over on my back and watch the clouds racing by. Floss lies in the beck cooling off, and Tan nuzzles into my side, because he has never seen me lazing about. He has never seen me stop like this.
He has never seen summer before.
I breathe in the cool mountain air.
And watch a plane chalking a trail across the blue of the sky.
The ewes call to the lambs, following them as they climb up the crags.
This is my life.
I want for no other.
Acknowledgements and Thanks
It is humbling to discover when writing your first book how many people work hard to make it happen. The words and photos are mine, but a lot of other people are responsible for the book being in your hands.
Thank you to all of you; I have loved writing this book.
Thanks to my agent, Jim Gill, of United Agents, who sold this book before I had even met him. Jim believed in this book and helped me find the right publisher. With a young family and other commitments, I needed an advance to be able to write this book, and Jim got it for me. I knew nothing about the world of publishing, so Jim guided me through that too.
Thank you.
Thank you to the other editors who tried to buy the rights to this book; your interest and kind words encouraged me and reinforced my sense that it mattered and could work.
Huge thanks to Helen Conford, my brilliant editor at Penguin. Helen was willing to invest in me to write a book that was then still largely in my head. Helen believed in it, and from our first conversation I knew she was brave and respected what I was trying to do. I needed a great editor and I got one.
Thanks also to Casiana Ionita, Stefan McGrath, and the rest of the brilliant team at Penguin.
Thanks to Colin Dickerman, James Melia, Martha Schwartz, and the rest of the team at Flatiron Books.
Thanks to Alexis Madrigal and Robinson Meyers at Atlantic Monthly who helped this book to happen by publishing an article in November 2013.
Thanks to Richard Eccles at Cumbria Life magazine for printing my monthly column, and giving me the freedom to do things that helped me write this book.
Thanks to the more than thirty thousand people who follow our farm on Twitter (@herdyshepherd1) and who have been hugely supportive and encouraging. I’ve learnt loads from you. You might be surprised my name is on the book.… I have clung to being anonymous as long as I could get away with it! I have no interest in personal celebrity; our way of life is much more important than me.
A lot of people have helped me to try to understand the literary and artistic history of the Lake District—I thank them all. Particular thanks are due to the following people:
Professor Angus Winchester, Lancaster University. Angus is a proper historian and has, in person and through his books, taught me a great deal about our landscape and its past. John Hodgson, Lake District National Park Authority, has been endlessly helpful and patient and has tried to help me to understand the evidence of the human history of the Lake District. Linda Lear’s excellent biography of Beatrix Potter was an excellent resource that helped me to write about her and her shepherds. I’ve also learned a great deal from the development of the Lake District’s World Heritage nomination process over several years; thanks are due the members of the Technical Advisory Group 2. Even when I sometimes didn’t agree with you, I was learning. My debates with Ian Brodie at Lancaster University helped me sharpen my ideas and understand better opposing or different perspectives, like those guiding the creation of Friends of the Lake District or the development of the national park. Thanks to Michael McGregor, Geoff Cowton, and the late Robert Woof at the Wordsworth Trust—who all helped me better understand Wordsworth. My friend Terry McCormick was crucial in helping me understand the writings of Wordsworth about farming and shepherds. Eric Robson was a great support and shared ideas and Wainwright anecdotes with me (he tells me Wainwright was fascinated by the fell shepherds when they met).
Any flaws and inaccuracies that remain are mine and mine alone.
Thanks also to William Humphries, Rose Dowling, Mike Clarke, and Emma Redfern, for reading the final draft and making comments.
Thanks to all the excellent people I have been fortunate to meet around the world at World Heritage sites and through UNESCO, who have helped me to understand why stories and rooted identities matter, and what a “cultural landscape” really means.
Heartfelt thanks go to Mrs. Judith Craig of Morland Primary School who helped me to love books and learning and who encourage
d me later on from a distance.
* * *
This book tells the story of me, my dad, and my grandfather—but truth be told I can’t credit them with the book itself. They weren’t book people. Instead the women in our family deserve some credit.…
Thanks for everything, Mum. You helped me to love books. And thanks for listening to me ramble on about books or ideas while we worked on the farm or while you were ironing or cooking, etc. I’m sorry I put you through stuff. I know you are deeply private, so I am sorry if the book embarrasses you. I felt it had to be honest and open or it wouldn’t work.
Thank you to my kids, Molly, Bea, and Isaac, just for being you and being there (even when I needed peace and quiet and didn’t get it … it still got done). I don’t care if you become farmers or not; I just hope this book helps you to understand us and go into the world knowing who we are. Proud. They can’t take away the stuff in your head and your heart. Hold on to it.
Thanks to my wife, Helen, for everything. You have always been my best friend. You worked so hard with me on this book, and on everything else we do. It’s been mad, a roller-coaster ride. Most people get beaten back by life, but your support helped me stubbornly hold on to the dreams I had. And someone has to pick up the pieces when I’m mentally AWOL. I could barely hold a pen when I met you, and I didn’t really understand grammar or the rules, so thank you for being patient and putting up with me.
Thanks to the farming people I grew up amongst and who I am proud to call my friends. There are too many of you to name individually, but thank you one and all. This is my version of the story of my family, but there is nothing exceptional about us—we are just one of hundreds of such families. This is just one story, one perspective, amongst many. I hope the book helps other people to see what we all do, and show it greater respect in the future. I don’t want to lose the amazing patchwork of family farms that make this landscape what it is, and I don’t think many other people do either. Keep going.
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