The Shepherd's Life (31 page)

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 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. These 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 a fault; a twined leg (slightly twisted); bad mouth (teeth twisted or gapped, or overshooting 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 these things, and then be little more than a half-educated amateur.

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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 tucked amongst the rocks and the trees of its rugged stony valley. But out of those humble fields come some of the best Herdwick sheep each autumn. 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 like he is thinking something through.

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 the barn on their walks and never know they exist.

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. Their 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 to sell at 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.

 

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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.

 

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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.

 

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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.

 

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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.

 

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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.

 

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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.

 

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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.”