1. I start work in the barn, a modern steel-frame building, before daylight, often with the previous day’s ongoing troubles that still need help and the routine jobs like feeding the sheepdogs. The barn is like the maternity ward and A&E rolled into one. Because of the electric lights, I can work in there before dawn. Everything in the barn has ‘issues’ and needs the closer supervision or the shelter it offers.
2. As I step inside and turn on the light, the ewes in the pens call for their breakfasts. I rush around them with a hessian bag of feed to quiet them, and to prioritize problems. I soon see the most pressing cases. A young ewe has got herself bothered and turned on her own lamb that was born last night. She has lamed it, probably broken its leg. She is confused and may settle down later, or she may never mother it again, despite my efforts. I curse at her for being so mindlessly stupid and cruel. She tries to jump out of the hurdle pen and I wrestle her roughly back. The lamb needs a splint. I could jump in the farm truck and drive half an hour to the local vet, but that would mean I’d be away too long, and the lamb isn’t worth enough. The vet will charge me several times the lamb’s worth to mend it.
3. So I do what the vet would do: I’ve watched him plenty of times. I create a splint, padding on the inside and some strips of plastic to take the weight. It’s a respectable job and has worked before. I capture the ewe’s head into a head trap (like a medieval stocks), which gives the lamb a chance to steal milk for a few days, until she might start to mother the lamb again. She throws herself down in a sulk and nearly smothers the lamb that is displaying a complete lack of good sense by suckling at the wrong end, sucking a dirty piece of wool and not a teat. I curse at her again. Lambing time tests your patience and your goodness.
4. The length of time a newborn lamb can stay warm and alive varies a lot depending on the weather and how good a mother it has. A bad mother on a snowy or raining morning and it can be ‘starved’ (our word for frozen cold) in minutes, but with a good mother and on a sunny day it can be OK for two or three hours. My stress levels rise and fall in relation to that survival period.
Mountain sheep like ours are healthiest and most settled lambing outside, but that means I have a lot of ground to cover each day in the valley bottom fields. Many of our ewes lamb in the first two to three hours of daylight, so I need to get around every ewe on the farm as soon as possible after daybreak. I load the quad bike and trailer with feed each night, ready for the morning. Every minute’s delay in getting around the pregnant ewes increases the chances of a disaster.
5. A lamb in a neighbouring pen, brought in last night because it had become separated from its mother in the field and got cold, has started with an ailment called ‘watery mouth’, and requires treatment. Lambs that get this start to slaver at the side of their mouth, and can be dead within an hour or two. I find the grey and red antibiotic pills that we treat them with and stick two over its little tongue with my first finger. The lamb gags and slavers them out again, and I curse and fumble about in the straw to find them. This time I push them over the top of the tongue and it swallows them down. Away at the end of the barn, an old ewe I had brought in days earlier, because she looked worn out, is lambing and doesn’t have the strength to push it out. After a fight, I get two dead lambs out of her and she looks so sick she may die. I prick her with antibiotics, but I fear the worst. There is no romance in a morning like this. I haven’t even got to the fields and most of the sheep.
The sun is only just rising over the edge of the fell.
6. By the time I get to the first field of lambing ewes, I am already wet. I look into the field and can tell immediately that all hell has let loose. The rain is biting cold and hillsides are just sheets of water. It is a disaster zone. A first-time ewe (a shearling) has dropped her lamb, when giving birth, into the beck, where it is stumbling and falling back into the shallow but deadly water. It is tough, but looks close to giving up, as it cannot climb up the bank. I lift it out and put it in the trailer. I send Floss to hold the ewe up, and after some slipping and sliding in the mud I have hold of her. I will take them home to shelter. The ewe looks uncertain of her lamb now, like the thread between them has broken. A hundred yards away, on either side of me, lie new lambs that look as if they are dead or dying. There is nowhere for even the experienced ewes to hide their newborn lambs from this downpour. Normally dry places behind walls are streams, sheltered spots have turned into ponds. The temperature is murderous. Cold. Wet. Windy. My neighbour says later this is the worst lambing weather she has ever experienced.
7. The first lamb I touch feels stiff and cold. Just a faint touch of warmth on its bluing tongue, I lower it despondently into the trailer. The next two, on an older ewe that has tried to get them up and licked dry, have some life in them but are fading fast, their core temperature dropping. Desperate measures are needed. I do what I have never before done and decide to save the lambs quickly and worry about the ewes later. If I have to catch all the mothers, these lambs will be dead. I will lose too much time. Two minutes later, I have gathered up five lambs and am on the road home.
Another ewe has lambed under a wall and had two proper strong lambs with big bold heads and white ear tips visible even in the mud. With a full trailer, I have to leave them to their mother’s attention, but she is an old experienced ewe and knows the game. I meet a friend coming the other way from his own flock. We exchange blasphemies about who has experienced the worse mess.
8. Minutes later, I have the lambs tight under a heat lamp, hung so low it is burning off the slime, mud and afterbirth. I haven’t much hope for any of them. The first one is stiffening like a corpse. There doesn’t seem to be much to lose, so I stomach-tube it with some warm artificial colostrum, figuring something warm inside might help. But I may kill the lambs, because the shock of the milk is sometimes too much for them – I am gambling. I leave Helen drying them with towels from the bathroom. The children get themselves ready for school. Chaos. I go back for the mothers.
The fields are so sodden I am on my backside more often than I am on my feet. Only the bravery of Floss lets me catch them. All are hellish to catch because with no lamb to hold their attention they are free to gallop off. I fill the trailer with the required ewes (making a mental note which lambs they have each given birth to). Telling which ewes have lambed is made easier because they usually have a bit of blood or afterbirth on their tail, and they will usually hold to the place where they gave birth. Some of the ewes use their last bit of energy trying to evade being caught and look fairly weather-beaten and worn out.
9. I go back to the barn where Helen has managed to get some life into the lambs, and an hour later, miraculously, they are all sitting up and warm. Each of them is penned with its mother, bedded with clean straw, and still with a heat lamp on it. The one that was in the beck is suckling its mother. By the time we have tended to them and had a bit of breakfast, shoved the kids on the school bus, wearing the wrong clothes, it is time to get back to the first lambing field to do the rounds again. The first time round in the morning is mostly about feeding the ewes, identifying any problems that can’t wait, and then getting to the next flock. An hour or so later, we go round again and sort out the less urgent issues. But some days the troubles snowball, one damn thing after another into a furious blur of activity that makes a day feel like a week in normal time, with the stress mounting with each successive hold-up.
It can take one of us all day to look after the problem cases in the barn. If it can go wrong, it will go wrong at lambing time (imagine a couple of adults looking after several hundred new-born babies and toddlers in a large park).
10. I see an old ewe hanging determinedly to a sheltered place behind a hillock. When I get close, she stands and her waters break. She is not paining and is in good health. So I know it is fairly safe to leave her for maybe an hour to lamb naturally, then I will return and check all is well. I am now juggling in my head a bunch of things that need doing, being pulled in different directions.
I have a mental map of the sheep lambing at different places, and when I need to check again on each of them. It is like having a series of egg-timers in my brain for a number of ewes around the farm at different stages of giving birth. If this ewe hasn’t lambed in an hour’s time, I will catch her and see if there is a problem. I see another has had twins. I catch them and hold them up by their front legs so I can see how full their stomachs are. They are swollen, full of milk and warm. I don’t need to worry about these lambs apart from a quick check later in the day. A few hundred yards away, I see another younger ewe stand up and a lamb fall out of her. She turns and licks it, mothering well. I can leave her for an hour or so to get suckled naturally. Then I need to check it.
11. The egg-timers in my head are always trickling away, reminding me of things I need to return to. Knowing when it is best to interfere and when it is not takes years of experience. My grandfather and father taught me that we have a range of options and the trick is to know which one to resort to, depending on the situation. A wild or stressed-out ewe might be best left alone, so that you don’t make things worse. You can do more harm than good, they say, unsettling the ewes. My grandfather had incredible patience with the lambing ewes, and would leave them and leave them as long as all seemed well. He’d stand and watch, leaning on his crook, seeming to know when it was better to act, or when to leave well alone. I’d stand with him, wondering if he was right, and whether we shouldn’t just catch the ewe and help it.
As I pass along the road between the fields, I see my neighbour Jean and she asks how the fell ewes I bought from her are doing. I call the flock I have bred for the last twelve years on our own land the ‘beauty queens’, and the new flock bought from her the ‘fell flock’.
12. I suspect I was on trial with Jean for a few years to see if I was ‘fit to look after her fell flock right’. She’d put thirty or more years into those sheep and she’d be damned if she was going to pass them on to some clown that would waste them. She knows enough about me to know I’m not a clown, but I’m also not a born-and-bred fell shepherd either, so I’ve been on probation. We spoke about this for two or three years, but then we needed to agree a price and terms.
I am in her kitchen, and the negotiations are to be done. Such haggling is part of the game, as long as it is respectful. She opens up with a cup of tea and some of her famous gingerbread; then a sermon she has clearly been thinking about for some time. She tells me how few flocks there are to match hers; that when she bought them she had to pay over the odds to the previous owner, Arthur Weir, because he knew they were good. She reminds me that it was when I was ‘in nappies’. He had no doubt scrutinized her for years before doing that deal. She makes clear that these sheep are precious to her and this is more than simply a sale.
13. They are sheep that show the effort several generations of shepherds have put into them. Each autumn for centuries, someone has added to their quality with the addition of new tups from other noted flocks. There is a depth of ‘good blood’ in them. They are big strong ewes, with lots of bone, good thick bodies and bold white heads and legs. They return from that fell each autumn with a fine crop of lambs that are a match for most other flocks in the Lake District. She tells me that she had to pay £20 a head more for their being hefted, a charge that is carried on to each successive shepherd (like a fee for the work done in keeping them well hefted, separate from the value of the sheep). I will have to pay that now. She lists the prices of good fell sheep sold at auction in recent years by her and others, and tells me that they were ‘drafts’, not the ‘stock ewes’ that remained on the fell. She tells me that she has sorted out the old ewes, and is only selling young sheep with long lives ahead of them. Her ‘good stuff’ is still in the flock, and I will have to pay handsomely for it, that I am buying youth and quality.
14. I know all this is true. It is my move. I tell her that what she is asking for them is too much, that I am young and not rich, that I have two jobs, three kids and a mortgage. I already have a good flock of Herdwick sheep on our land that were once hers, but which have more than a decade of my breeding decisions in them. I can manage without hers. They are good, but no better than my own. I tell her the prices of most of the draft ewes in the auction over the past autumn, which was about a half of what she wants for these.
I tell her that no one else will pay the price she’s asking for. I make it clear I respect her work and her sheep, but that the asked-for price is too high. She needs to come down.
15. She tells me that they are ‘an investment’. That they will look after me for many years to come, providing me with an income and producing good offspring and draft ewes to sell because of the quality of blood in them. I am paying for something a long time in the making that will in turn last me a long time. She tells me that when she started out with her husband, they were hard up too, had to stretch themselves, had to work hard, but that over time these things came good. She tells me that by selling a few good tups from these ewes, I will have paid off much of their value. She softens a little on the asking price, but looks a bit wounded by the compromise.
16. The lower offer hangs in the air.
I decide to let it.
I sip my tea, trying to look disinterested. Perhaps it is working as she seems a bit defensive. After a while, I suggest an offer about £30 per sheep lower than hers, tell her I can’t see them making more than that in an auction. But behind my mask I’m genuinely not sure; good stock ewes from respected flocks are rarely sold and can make good money. Still, I’m not being mugged on this deal if I can help it.
She now sits in silence, looking determined and tough.
No. No. No. The price I suggest will never do. It is robbery.
17. I soften and tell her that I will come upwards a little. I still think they are overpriced, but we have reached an impasse and someone needs to move. And I know that the chance to get a flock of sheep like this on your doorstep in the Lake District is rare indeed. I won’t ever get another chance like this. This flock has to have a future as well as a past.
The afternoon goes by in a series of bids and counter-bids, interspersed with long broody silences. My tea cup gets refilled from time to time, but as the price drops, she stops refilling, as if an extra cup of tea is adding further cost to these painful negotiations. In the end, we agree a deal and shake on it. I’ve still no idea who came out on top, which is perhaps how it should be between folk that respect each other.