The Yorkshire Shepherdess

by Amanda Owen

  We were both very busy, Clive farming Ravenseat and me still contract shepherding and milking, but one evening we made a decided attempt to take some time off from farming and went out on a date for dinner. I made an effort, prised off the wellies and overalls and put on a dress, my one and only dress, and we went to the Red Lion pub at Arkengarthdale for a meal. I think it was the first time Clive had seen me scrubbed up and turned out, and he may have been impressed, but he’s a true Yorkshireman – they hear all, see all and say nowt . . . On another occasion we went to Tan Hill, the highest pub in England. It’s only three miles from Ravenseat as the crow flies but, as is often the case in the Dales and Lakes, it’s a whole lot further by road. I even invited him for a meal at my place once. In hindsight this was a mistake . . . I couldn’t cook at all, but decided that a shepherd’s pie would be appropriate. Now when I say I knew nothing about cooking, I really mean nothing. I had survived on a diet of pasta and CupaSoup and had never made any attempt to up my game. So when it came to concocting a shepherd’s pie my lovely elderly neighbours were not only the suppliers of the shopping list but also the necessary pots and pans. It was only at the final assembly of my culinary masterpiece that I asked, ‘How do you make mashed potato?’

  I can’t believe now that I genuinely didn’t know.

  ‘You’ve got a fork, haven’t you? That’s all you need,’ said Ruth.

  Clive says it was the worst shepherd’s pie he’s ever eaten. If our life together had all rested on the shepherd’s pie then it would have been over before it had even begun. Clive was a terrible cook too, living on his own, surviving on cornflakes, shop-bought pies and Silk Cut Extra Mild. Thankfully, I’ve moved on from the shepherd’s pie, learning how to cook by trial and error, and I’m now a dab hand at feeding the masses. Clive, on the other hand, has remained completely useless in the kitchen department and would revert back to pies and cornflakes in an instant. Even after all these years, he still cannot turn on the grill.

  Clive, like me, started life as a townie. He was born in Doncaster, where his father, a joiner, built his own bungalow. His dad got a job over this way, working at a power station, and the family moved to Gaisgill, near Tebay in Cumbria, when Clive was seven or eight. His dad sold the bungalow for £3,000 in cash to a butcher who had won the money at Doncaster races. Gaisgill is a small farming community, and Clive’s friends at school all came from farming families, and before long Clive was spending all his spare time with a farmer called Edward Metcalfe, known as Ebby, who was a renowned sheep breeder and sheepdog handler.

  ‘I was the kind of kid who always wanted to know what was over the next hill, and the hill after that,’ Clive says. ‘I kind of had two homes: one where I slept and the other on the farm, where I spent all my time. I got the bug. He was a good farmer, a great stockman, and a grand fellow. He inspired me. There was never any doubt what I was going to do.’

  Clive’s parents’ house had a field and a shed, and from the age of twelve Clive was buying and rearing calves. He’d do work for people and they’d pay him with a calf or a recklin pig that needed hand-rearing. (The recklin is the smallest in the litter, the one people call the ‘runt’, but I hate that word, it’s an insult to the animal.) He worked one Christmas Day mucking out a loose box for a local farmer, on the promise of the next calf that came along. There used to be a baby milk factory in Kendal, and some of the women from the village worked there, so they’d bring back supplies of rejected powdered baby milk for Clive and his brother, Malcolm, who was in the little business with him.

  Clive was much younger than me when he started farming. When he was fourteen he left school and home, and went to work on a farm in Arnside, on the Lancashire coast. The people were pleasant enough, but he was very young and homesick, and after a year he moved back and started working on a farm near his parents’ home. But he didn’t want to work for someone else: he dreamed of a farm of his own, and he knew he had to raise money, and to do that he had to work where there was money to be made. He worked at walling, fencing, road building and, during the summer months, sheep shearing, while all the time building up his own livestock. An old retired farmer in the village rented him more land and buildings.

  Clive was desperate to be farming in his own right full time, and he applied for many tenancies, but it was difficult for a young fellow, as not only do you need a good reputation but also a substantial amount of money. A steadfast determination, saving every penny he could, eventually secured his first small hill farm, on Stainmore, which is in Cumbria but close to the borders with Yorkshire and County Durham.

  There’s something very special about hill farming: the sheep go with the farm. Centuries of breeding mean that the sheep have an inherent homing instinct, a knowledge that means they will stay on their patch of moorland even though there are no physical boundaries to retain them. It’s a unique situation: the sheep belong to certain parcels of land. Even within one farm, certain sheep will go, every year, to the same patch of moorland. They know it, and they will travel miles to get back to it. They teach their lambs that this is their home. The word for this is ‘heafing’ and the sheep are ‘heafed’ or ‘hefted’ or ‘hoofed’ onto their part of the moors, for life. It’s remarkable, because the moor is bare, without trees, just large expanses of heather and wiry, blow-away grass punctuated by peat bogs, nothing much to distinguish one area from another, and yet the sheep know their territories as well as any city dweller knows the suburb where they live.

  Neighbouring farmers can turn their flocks out into thousands of acres of land with no boundaries between the flocks – and yet, remarkably, each group remains intact. There are occasional strays, of course, and a little bit of blurring at the edges. But for some deep, primeval reason, the sheep know their heaf, and they stick to it. When a tourist drives through the beautiful Swaledale countryside, they may wonder how the individual farmers sort out their sheep on these huge tracts of unfenced land, and the answer is that, by and large, the sheep do it for them. They stay on their own territory. When it’s time to gather them, the farmers work together, each rounding up their own flock and passing over any that have strayed. The heafs all have their own names. We have four at Ravenseat: Black Howe, Side Edge, Robert’s Seat and Midtown, three of them on Ravenseat land and one (Black Howe) on Birkdale Common, which we share with five or six other farmers. The sheep have different marks on them to show which heaf they are from.

  The farm at Stainmore wasn’t the farm of Clive’s dreams, but it was a start, with a flock of 120 yows and forty gimmer hoggs, and twenty cows to milk. He married for the first time and had his older children, Robert and Rosie, while he was living there. Robert has caught the farming bug and works with us now.

  Then, in 1989, the tenancy for Ravenseat came up. Ravenseat is on the 32,000-acre Gunnerside grouse-shooting estate: all the land for miles around is owned by Robert Miller, a multi-millionaire who made his fortune by co-founding Duty Free Shoppers, which pioneered duty free airport shopping. He is American by birth but an anglophile who has British citizenship. He comes in at number 91 in the Sunday Times Rich List, with an estimated £967 million. His passion is grouse shooting, and it’s a hobby you have to be very wealthy to pursue because, unlike pheasants, grouse cannot be artificially reared as they feed on heather and the insects that flourish in the wild sort of terrain we have here.

  Back when Clive applied for the tenancy the landowner was Lord Peel. This was the farm of Clive’s dreams, a proper hill farm with a noted stock of sheep. Farms like this didn’t come up to rent very often. He put his application in, but after three weeks or so he’d heard nothing. He rang up and was told that a shortlist had been drawn up, but that his name was not on it. He was very disappointed.

  The very same day he heard he wasn’t on the list he met up with Johnny Beckwith, another farmer, who said, ‘Has ta gotten that farm tekken yet?’

  Clive told him he wasn’t in with a chance. Johnny said, ‘I’s gonna mek a phone call tonight.
’

  Later that night John Porter, another Swaledale farmer held in high regard, rang Clive.

  ‘I’ll have a word with Lord Peel. He doesn’t always listen to me, mind.’

  That’s all that was said. A day or so later Lord Peel’s agents rang and asked Clive to go for an interview. Before he saw them, Clive came to Ravenseat and he walked the entire perimeter of the farm. It took most of a day. He said he wanted to have a proper look, get the feel of the place. When he got to the interview, he was the only candidate who had done this and, what with the recommendations from other farmers who respected him, he got the farm. He brought his cows with him, walking them eight or nine miles across the moor to get here. In the old days people walked their stock everywhere. There is still a field at Kirkby Stephen owned by the church in Swaledale, bought centuries ago to give the Swaledale shepherds somewhere to turn out their flocks overnight when they’d walked them all day to the market.

  Unfortunately, Clive’s marriage started to go wrong, and by the time I met him his wife had been moved out for more than a year, and he was living at Ravenseat on his own. As he says, ‘T’last thing I needed was another bloody woman.’

  Then I turned up . . .

  A few months after meeting Clive I was still living in my little cottage, working wherever I could, splitting my time between home, work and visiting Ravenseat. When I wasn’t with Clive, we’d talk endlessly on the telephone. But typically for us, even a romantic chat on the phone could turn into something else. Once I was house-sitting at an old vicarage for an eccentric old lady who had gone into hospital for a hip replacement. She had a real menagerie: two dogs (a crazed ex-police dog German shepherd and an incontinent Boxer, both of whom wanted to tear me limb from limb), fifteen cats, all living in en-suite bathrooms (must leave a tap running as the cats don’t like drinking from bowls), two donkeys and a flock of chickens. I didn’t particularly relish spending my nights there. In its heyday the house was an imposing and splendidly grand Gothic edifice but it had fallen into disrepair, its past glories hinted at by the dusty leather books, heavy lacquered furniture and grand piano. Still-life paintings, intricate and beautifully realized depictions of dead birds, adorned the walls of the hall and staircase. Clocks in every room chimed constantly throughout the day and night, never quite in unison.

  Having spent my second sleepless night in a four-poster bed, trapped under a cumbersome bedspread with the heavy tapestry curtain pulled tightly shut around to try and insulate me from the draughts and the sounds of the house, I persuaded Clive to join me for the evening. He was just as nervy as I was and the following morning was eager to leave, so much so that as he hastily pulled out of the driveway in his old Land Rover he hit one of the large stone gateposts with the pineapples on the top. The metal hanging gouged through the door panel and scraped down the entire side of the motor. This was especially annoying as he had earlier that week negotiated a deal to part exchange the Land Rover for a newer one. That was his first and last visit to the vicarage and I had the feeling I was being held partially responsible for this mishap. It wasn’t long after this that I rang him.

  ‘How’s things? Sorted t’Landy?’

  ‘Job done, took a lal’ bit less for her on account o’ t’damage but I’ve got a better, newer yan now.’

  Then silence.

  He’s cut me off, he must be really pissed off with me.

  It wasn’t many minutes before the phone was ringing.

  ‘You’ll nivver guess what I’ve done.’

  As he’d been talking to me, gazing through the kitchen window, he had seen his pride and joy, the new Land Rover, not where he’d parked it, but perched on the edge of the stone bridge twenty yards away, its front end concertinaed into the wall.

  ‘I munt ’ave put on’t handbrake.’

  I couldn’t help laughing and soon we were both laughing together. There was no way he could blame me for that one . . .

  It was the following spring, March or April 1996, when I actually moved in with Clive. I was lambing at Ash Fell for Martin and with lambing being an all-consuming job, there wasn’t time to be going to see Clive at Ravenseat. One day he said to me, in his most romantic way, ‘Don’t yer think tha’ it’s time tha’ you (and yer dogs and tha’ bloody goat I suppose) gotten yerselves moved in here?’

  So that’s how I came to live at Ravenseat, and to live with Clive. I had loved and been intrigued by the place since my first sight of it, but I didn’t come with ideas to change anything: Ravenseat moulds the people who live here. I didn’t feel isolated or lonely, just deep contentment. As far as me and Clive went, it was all very understated. Clive says, ‘I didn’t exactly sweep you off yer feet, did I? It just kind o’ happened. And I still marvel at how well suited we are.’

  Moving here meant giving up my cottage, but the actual removal wasn’t hard: whatever sticks of furniture I had were only fit for the tip. The main job was my animals. Through a friend of Clive’s I’d bought another horse, Stanley, as a companion for Bruno. He was a Cleveland Bay crossed with an Irish Draught horse, a really big lad. Clive had to bring his trailer to take the sheep and, begrudgingly, Flymo the goat, and then returned for the horses. Deefa and Red came with me wherever I went, both riding in the back of the open-top pickup and never, ever jumping off unless given the command, even when we were stationary. Deefa barked every time we drove over a cattle grid – she knew that where there were cattle grids, there were sheep. Red would stand majestically with the wind blowing through his coat, surveying all around him.

  Now, at this time Clive had a really good dog, Roy. He was far bigger than an average sheepdog, had a smooth tri-coloured coat and half-pricked ears, and was a wonder dog who knew everything about Ravenseat and could interpret all of Clive’s moves, the sort of dog every shepherd needs. Roy was as loyal a dog as you could wish for. He was never tied up and never confined in a kennel; a short sharp whistle and he would be at Clive’s side. He could fly-jump any fence, gate or wall with ease and when off duty would often swing by his teeth from a branch in the sycamore tree below the farmhouse. This was part of his daily routine; he spent many a happy hour swinging, accompanied by a deep growl of pleasure. Clive was genuinely concerned that Roy might not be willing to accept me or my dogs on his territory: he wasn’t known for being overly friendly. As it was, he took it all in his long, lolloping stride and accepted both me and my two with a good grace.

  Bruno and Stanley must have been the first two horses here since the demise of the working horses and the advent of the tractor. Dales ponies had been used to fodder the sheep until relatively recently in the high dales because the rugged terrain makes it impossible to get a tractor to many places. But the quad bike rang the death knell for the working ponies. In some ways it was a retrograde step, because shepherding on a horse gives you a terrific vantage point as you can see a lot further, and the sheep do not take fright as they can do when approached by a vehicle. Horses seem to have a sixth sense for boggy ground, and we don’t bog the horses like we bog the quad bike. They pick their way, stopping every now and then, almost feeling whether the ground will take their weight. They hurry on through the wet ground and even take a leap, when necessary. Their instinct for self-preservation is something that no quad bike can ever match.

  There was an occasion when breaking in Bruno that I turned this to my advantage. Bruno was a feisty and headstrong pony, full of youthful exuberance, and he could go like a rocket, not always in the right direction. I decided to ride him around the moor, the same route that Clive walked before he got the farm, to – in theory – wear him down a bit. Off we went, through the sheep pens, turned right and began the steep ascent up to Robert’s Seat, Bruno showing his usual enthusiasm and me hanging on for dear life.

  I was relieved to reach the old gamekeeper’s hut, Bruno out of breath but still going strong. Here the ground changes to typical moorland, tussocks of wind grass, knots of heather and then blacker peaty ground. We picked our way as best we c
ould, Bruno now on a long rein, me whispering words of encouragement while his ears flickered with uncertainty. Suddenly, without warning, the ground fell away and began to swallow us up. Bruno floundered and panicked and although I was still in the saddle, I found my feet touching the churning, black ooze. Bruno was sinking, it was time to abandon ship. Keeping hold of the reins, I literally rolled sideways out of the saddle and onto all fours, levering myself out of the bog by grasping a clump of seeves (rushes).

  Once Bruno had my weight off his back he was able to get a foothold (or rather a kneehold) and hauled himself clear. He stood, panting, then shook. We were both covered with the stinking black mud. I decided it was time to head for home and after a few minor alterations to the saddle, which had slipped because of his thrashings, we were homeward bound. I removed my mud-plastered clothes on the doorstep and then hosed down Bruno and his tack, and all was back in order. It certainly knocked the wind out of Bruno’s sails: he was never any trouble after that and was always super cautious when crossing the moor.

  A few weeks later, over a pint of beer at Tan Hill, one of our neighbours, Alan, asked how the horses were coming on (they were still seen as a bit of a novelty by the locals).

  ‘Fine,’ I said, ‘comin’ on just fine.’

  ‘Really? Yer looked as if yer were ’avin’ a bit o’ bother wi’t baldi [piebald] t’other day.’

  I couldn’t believe that right up on top of Ravenseat’s open windswept moor, where you can feel so alone, I was being watched. But that’s what it’s like around here, the neighbours know more about each other than if we lived in a row of terraced houses.

  Not everyone looked upon the horses as an indulgence, though. Sometime later I had acquired an old pony, Boxer. He was tied up in the yard when a neighbouring farmer, Jimmy Alderson, came to see us. Jimmy was in his eighties and not in the best of health: he’d had a heart by-pass and had been instructed that a little gentle exercise would be beneficial. This was a green light for Jimmy to carry on farming the same as usual. He was the epitome of a true Dalesman. He could have walked straight from the set of All Creatures Great and Small with his long, weather-beaten kytel (jacket) tied at the waist with a length of baler twine, an oversized ex-army sweater swamping his wiry frame and forming a spider’s web over his checked shirt, coupled with heavyweight tweed trousers tucked into his rolled-over Argyll wellies. His gnarled, calloused hands told of a lifetime working the land and a flat cap worn at a jaunty angle partly concealed a shock of white hair. His face was furrowed and his skin nut brown from working outside in the elements for nearly eight decades. Even though I didn’t meet him until the latter years of his life, he was still an incredibly tough, deeply religious man.