1. 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 their 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 represent the accumulation of countless achievements at these shows and sales over many years. Each year’s successes or failures layer up like chapters in an epic novel. The story of these flocks is known and created in the retelling by everyone else. 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, as great examples of the breed.
2. 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 taller 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, that 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 believe, 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.
3. Sometimes these things work, sometimes they don’t.
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 around 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’d better watch out. Away in the next set of pens, my father is showing his Swaledale sheep. 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 little 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.
4. 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 on to the fell that starts the other side of the fence or wall. Other flocks like mine need to be walked miles to their head. 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 they haven’t been to the mountain for three or four years.
5. Weeks later we are clipping a batch of ewes in our barn. They are Herdwick ewes that came down from the fell a few days before. These days I am a lot faster than my dad. I can do nearly two sheep to each one he does. That is as it should be, because he has reached retirement age, and I am in my clipping prime.
He knows that I’m still 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.
6. 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 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 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.
7. 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 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 realize that a neighbour was still working and might 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 not to hear the question. Then, when the work was done, he’d drive me mad by waving away the suggestion that the neighbour might pay us.
8. It was like his code of honour. Work that needs doing should be done. Work is its own reward. Never step back from work or you look bad.
But something was different now. My dad just walked away from work. It is the most un-him thing I have ever seen him do. He straightens his back and walks away – and we both know that IT is in him again.
The days when we walk the sheep back to the fell are the best moments of my year. There is nothing like the feeling of freedom and space that you get when you are working with the flock and the dogs on the common land. I escape the nonsense that tries to consume me down below. My life has a purpose, an earthy, sensible meaning.
9. 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.
10. 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 North-amptonshire 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 got 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.
11. 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, in a hundred years’ time, no one will care that I owned the sheep that grazed part of these mountains. 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 that came before a debt for getting it this far.
12. When I leave my flock in the fells surrounded by grass and come down home, I leave something of myself up there with them. So I look away to the skyline where they graze several times a day. 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 sheep’s evident satisfaction at being 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 cusp out a handful of water. I slurp it. There is no water tastes so sweet and pure.
13. 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 no other.