1. When I was a child, towards the end of lambing time the men circled the woods and shot crows, shouting, excited like boys, sociable again after the testing weeks. The whole valley echoed with cawing and the thuds of cartridges, twelve-bore retribution for one-eyed lambs and maimed corpses. Shattered twigs blown skywards, as nest floors crackled back down through the branches. Ravens, rooks, dopes (carrion crows), magpies and jackdaws … all wanted for murder or GBH. Anything with black feathers was a ‘dope’ – a robber, a killer and a cheat. In a valley where men lived for their sheep, these shadows of the lambing field were guilty. The morning after, there were black specks in the rushes by the wood’s edge: crumpled wings, perforated flight feathers, specks of blood, porcelain legs twisted and broken like cocktail sticks. The angry caws of the survivors reprimanded the valley and its shepherds.
2. A dope rose and twisted like a broken kite, before crumpling to earth like a bi-plane with torn canvas wings. ‘Look at that murdering bugger, hoppin’ about,’ Granddad said. A length of hazel, skin shining and soft to the touch, was sitting idle by the Land-Rover gearstick. My staff. My chance. We exchanged smiles that we both understood. ‘You’ll be wet to the skin,’ he warned. But it was said as encouragement. I tore off across the pasture through a scattered lake of puddles, racing with the clouds reflecting beneath my feet. The crow rising and falling in desperate leaps to the sky. Wailing, thrashing wings, only one of which now held the air, the other failing, a deep black shimmering force like the wrath of God, and with one wing it still had me beat. But, legs pumping like pistons, I got almost within stick-reach. I caught the crow with the staff somewhere above its failing wings. It dropped like a toy into the standing water, suddenly small, and ended. I held it up in my hand, a trophy, and turned back to the gate, stick aloft. The old man didn’t mind at all that I was soaked to the skin.
3. As lambing time peters away, and with plenty of grass and warmer weather, our focus changes to working on the ewes and lambs and getting them to the higher ground so that the meadows can be cleared for growing our hay. Last year’s ewe lambs return from their wintering grounds and are driven to their home on the fells, holding there because that’s what their mother taught them. In the valley bottom we have hundreds of sheep on the farm, each of the breeding ewes having either a single lamb or twins, and we need to begin the work of sorting them.
4. The crossbred lambs that will be grown and fattened for meat are castrated and have their tails docked (tails or testicles were cut off with a knife, or twisted off, with a spray of blood when I was a kid, but now it’s done with an orange rubber ring that slowly stops the circulation and lets them fall off). Lowland sheep need their tails docked to stop them getting fly strike (maggots) on the damp and dirt that accumulates on their tails. The castrated lambs lie down for a few minutes, wincing, and then go off to find their mothers and seem fast to forget about it.
5. The fell lambs keep their tails because mountain sheep need them in bad weather, and can keep them because they don’t scour on the fell-grazing or have mucky backsides that attract flies. The lambs all have to be ‘doctored’; injected with vaccines for preventable illnesses, wormed with an oral drench (as the parasites come to life again with the warmth), marked, tagged with their two fourteen-digit micro-chipped tags (a legal requirement), and notched in their ears to show they belong to our farm. We use a spray to stop blowflies laying eggs on our sheep, as in June and July some would be ‘struck’ without this and would eventually die a horrible death.
So in early May we gather the sheep into the pens or the barns. It is work we have always done as a family, because many hands make light work, although there is a clear pecking order amongst us.
6. The oldest members of the family always claim a kind of authority based on their experience, as I will when it is my turn. So my father reckons he is the boss, even though he is weaker after months of chemotherapy. Those of us in our prime do the catching and rougher work and work our dogs to get the sheep in and out of the pens. My mother gets the job of writing in the messy old textbook the individual tag numbers of each of the lambs so that we can always trace their ancestry. The children hold orange rubber castration rings, or the ear tags, and enjoy passing them to us. It is a day of trying not to forget what each ewe and lamb needs, with everyone given a task. But it is also a chance to identify the breeding decisions that have worked, and which haven’t, so there is a lot to talk about. We can now see the quality of our lamb crop and which ewes have bred well and which have not. We spend the day forming judgements. Everyone has an opinion. Tups bought the autumn before are now cheerfully damned.
7. ‘That one’s far too white out of that old ewe.’
‘No it’ll be alright … You wait and see.’
My grandfather would tell you where each lamb was born, or how it was bred: ‘This one was born under that Scots pine at top of the horse pasture … I thought it was dead … But look at it now.’
These days of stories and chatting often threaten to take attention away from the confusing number of jobs each sheep needs done. My father will periodically shout, ‘Oh fucking hell … We better stop talking, I’ve let that bugger off without marking it.’ But the error will be corrected, the lamb caught and marked. Then this is followed by ten minutes of focused work, before the chattering cycle will be repeated.
8. We have some tremendous family rows on such days, but we get over it. When all is said and done, we are working as a family, and that is a special thing. My children now have opinions, and want to tell everyone how their sheep have bred, and how they are going to beat their dad with a tup lamb when it grows up. My son is two years old and hangs over the rails, waving a crook, shouting instructions and offering unwanted advice. My dad smiles as if to say, ‘Here we go again.’ Nothing changes. Grandfathers. Fathers. Sons.
Once the ewes and lambs are ‘doctored’, they can be moved to the higher ground. As we push them out, the valley echoes with ewes and lambs calling for one another, all of them carrying our blue and red smit marks on their shoulders, as dictated since time immemorial in the Lake District Flock Book.
9. Beatrix Potter wrote about the smit marks on sheep in The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. She has the little girl asking the washerwoman hedgehog about the lambs’ coats she is washing and is told:
‘Oh yes, if you please’m; look at the sheep-mark on the shoulder. And here’s one marked for Gatesgarth, and three that come from Little-town. They’re always marked at washing!’ said Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle.
Beatrix Potter knew the three farms around the Newlands Valley where the tale is set: Skelghyl, Littletown and Gatesgarth. She knew their flocks, their ‘smit marks’, and would have known of their shepherds. More than a century after she wrote those words, we still know those flocks, but God only knows what they think of these references in Japan, where her books sell so well.
10. When the fell flock I bought from Jean were walked back to their fell from our farm after their first winter, they remembered where they were going and streamed away at a trot to their summer home. The whole fell side seemed to sigh with relief at their being home again. The next winter they were fine on our farm, too, as though they had adjusted to the change.
Wordsworth may have ‘wandered lonely as a cloud’, but shepherds are social animals once winter is through. We come back together at the spring sheep shows in May, where we show the best of our tups (or ewes as well in the Swaledale events).
11. Hundreds of Swaledale shepherds congregate on a windy bit of moorland next to Tan Hill Inn. The tiny road that winds over the moor is shadowed with parked cars for half a mile or so on either side of the show field, an area shaped out of wooden hurdles that springs up overnight and vanishes as fast afterwards. It is one of the great achievements of that breed to ‘win Tan Hill’. But truth be known, it is also an old-fashioned coming together. I understand that, in ancient times, places like ours were governed at gatherings like this, big fairs where people came together, showed or traded livestock, raced horses, got drunk and made friends or found wives or husbands. At Tan Hill, shepherds chat with their friends from across the Swaledale lands that they have not seen since the autumn sales, comparing notes about their lambing and how well the tups have done. There are other smaller spring fairs like this across the fell country. Without these gatherings we would drift into being strangers divided up into the different valleys, and our breed communities would drift apart.
12. The Herdwick shepherds have their own spring tup fairs. Keswick Tup Fair takes place on ‘the Thursday after the third Wednesday in May’ (work that one out) on Keswick Town Field. The other tup fair takes place a week earlier in Eskdale in the field by the Woolpack Inn. Folk gather each spring from right across the Lake District, coming to return their hired tups and to show their best ones against each other, as they have for centuries. The field is divided by wooden or metal hurdles into a big circle of bale-string-tied pens, a makeshift ring in the centre. Sheep are unloaded from aluminium sheep trailers towed behind Land-Rovers, and walked to pens set aside for each farmer. The tups blink as they come out into the daylight, and strut as they realize they are amongst strangers, giving an occasional thump of heads and horns.
13. The sheep are in full wool, as befits the time of year; some might even be scraggy, having lost or rubbed off some of their fleece – but this is ignored because it’s irrelevant. At the western corner of the field is a large pen where the tup hoggs (last year’s male lambs) are penned together, their dark chocolate fleeces contrasting with their faces. They are penned together because one of the most enjoyable bits of the day is the open judging competition with everyone seeking to pick out of this mass of thirty or forty hopefuls the real stars. These youngsters are a year old, but in Herdwick terms they are mere babies, unproven, and not worth much until they mature out without faults. The best will go on to be stock tups and wield an influence on the breed for years to come. It is like sorting through the junk at a jumble sale looking for a Rembrandt. They are powerful and fit after wintering away in the lowlands, and are pawed over for any faults: a ‘twined’ leg (slightly twisted); ‘bad mouth’ (teeth twisted or gapped, or over-shooting the top jaw rather than nestling on its pad); a poor or ‘plain’ skin (a fleece too open and soft for this landscape). Some might dip behind the shoulder, or have a fleece that suggests it will go too white and lose its colour in the next year. The line between hero and zero is minuscule. It might take a person ten years to learn to see these things, and even then be little more than a half-educated amateur.
14. When I visit my shepherding friends, the walls of their houses, and their mantelpieces, are like shrines to the best tups they have bred. In the Herdwick breed, the most noted flock in recent years has been the Turner Hall flock from the Duddon Valley. Turner Hall was built by folk who intended staying put, built to last. The stone-built farmhouse and barns are tucked amongst the rocks and the trees of its rugged stony valley. But each autumn, out of those humble fields, come some of the best Herdwick sheep. The farmer, Anthony Hartley, knows more than I ever will about Herdwick sheep. I pick his brains endlessly, hoping to catch up in knowledge someday. For me, his sheep are the benchmark. Several generations of Hartleys have made it their business to breed great Herdwick sheep. Look at the old black and white photos and someone in them is usually a Hartley, often with a thoughtful expression on his face as if he is thinking something through.
15. In the old barns at Gatesgarth, where another of our friends, Willie Richardson, farms, the beams are adorned with a century of rosettes and prize certificates for great Herdwicks, some tattered and disintegrating, with fading colours, others more recent. Some of them date from when Mrs Heelis would have been showing her sheep against Gatesgarth sheep. In places like those old stone barns is the real history and culture of the Lake District. But only the shepherds and shepherdesses working on the sheep ever see them; thousands of visitors pass by the barns on their walks and never know they exist.
16. Town Field in Keswick and its illustrious Herdwick tup fairs go unmentioned in most books about the Lake District, but this modest and unheralded patch of grass by the River Greta is sacred soil, a theatre of shepherding ambitions, and perhaps the most important meeting place for the Herdwick breed. The historic function of the fair is to return the tups hired the autumn before to their owners, having been ‘wintered’ on another farm: it is a way to spread the bloodlines around the valleys and get young tups grown out at no cost to the owner by earning their keep elsewhere. But now it is spring they should be back on their own farms, so they can be shoved up the intakes to the coming grass, and later in the year made ready for the sales. I have never even come close to winning Keswick Tup Fair, or the Edmondson Cup. Someday I’ll win it, or at least die trying.
17. 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, professing 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 as if they will be good in the shows. A proud shepherd never wants anyone to see their 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.
18. 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: 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, secondly, 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.
19. The palms of my hands are red as if they have been soaked in the blood of a mountain. The raddle has a 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.
20. 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, the sheep come up bright white, and they 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.