Counting Sheep

by Philip Walling

  This high-lying land is good for nothing much except the extensive grazing of hundreds of thousands of Swaledale sheep. Swaledales are the supreme moorland sheep of the Pennines, so well adapted to the terrain and climate that even their short, loose fleece seems to have taken on the colours of the limestone and the peat as it turns from cream, just after clipping, to weathered ivory later in the season, when it has been darkened by the peaty soil and bleached by the elements.

  ‘They just don’t look right anywhere else; if they’re bred on different soil they begin to look different – particularly in their wool,’ said Matt Mason, whose pedigree flock grazes the moor above Appletreewick in Wharfedale. ‘It’s hard to know whether they look right because that’s what we’re used to, or because they really do take their nature from the soil.’

  They are very active sheep, with long legs, predominantly white at the front and black on the back, a jet-black face with a white muzzle and white patches around the eyes. Both sexes are horned: the rams’ extravagantly curled in up to three spirals, while the ewes’ are lighter and more feminine, sweeping back as if they had tucked them behind their ears. They have a remarkable ability to forage and survive on wild moorland and are rather easier to shepherd than most other black-faced, horned hill breeds, because their light, open fleece dries out rapidly after a soaking and makes them less top-heavy and prone to rolling onto their backs and being unable to stand up again. The ewes are tremendously attentive, devoted mothers, capable of producing enough milk to rear a strong lamb from moorland herbage upon which other breeds would struggle to survive.

  The Swaledale’s characteristics are common to the many breeds of hill sheep in Britain, albeit each is adapted to its particular terrain. In common with all hill breeds, although they do provide meat and wool from poor land, exceeding anything that any other creature or activity could produce for human benefit, they are slow to mature and do not grow very big. But their value has been transformed over the last century or so, by what has come to be called the sheep pyramid. This is our unique national system of cross-breeding which uses the innate genetic potential of hill sheep to extend their productive lives and produce more lamb for the national larder.

  Diagrammatically this could perhaps be represented by two flat-topped pyramids – one inverted, with its top resting on the one below – in a shape like an egg-timer. At the highest level are the millions of pure-bred hill breeds, and in the middle the half-bred ewes from the first cross with Longwool crossing breeds, and the wide lowest band represents the millions of meat lambs born to those half-bred ewes that have been crossed with a meat-producing Down ram (the ‘terminal sire’). The effect of this arrangement is that most of the lamb produced for the table in Britain is descended from one of our pure breeds of hill sheep, which form the genetic reservoir upon which the productivity of the modern British sheep industry depends.

  The system is based on a genetic phenomenon called hybrid vigour, or heterosis. This is the effect of the first crossing of two pure breeds which combines and enhances the best characteristics of each parent and subordinates their less desirable ones in a hybrid that is superior to both parents. Every time the cross is done the progeny always have the same characteristics, so long as their parents have been bred pure for long enough. Most enhanced agricultural production across the world depends on hybridisation. Nearly all our eggs and poultry come from hybrids, as do most of our commercially grown vegetables. For example, the grapefruit is a hybrid of a Jamaican sweet orange and a south-east Asian citrus fruit called a pomelo, or pompelmous (French pamplemousse); and peppermint is a naturally occurring sterile hybrid of spearmint and water mint. This first cross of two pure breeds is an F1 hybrid – ‘F’ meaning filial and ‘1’ the first generation.

  One of my farming neighbours used to refer to the beneficial effect of ‘highbred vigour’, which inadvertently catches the essence of its invigorating effect. When it works, the first cross always inherits predictable and recognisable characteristics. So, crossing a Swaledale ewe with the Bluefaced Leicester ram, for example, always results in the astonishingly successful hybrid called the Mule, from the Latin mulus, via the Old French mule, meaning hybrid. It is not clear why the Blue-faced Leicester × Swaledale is the only hybrid to have been given the name Mule.

  Not every first cross produces better offspring than its parents. Crossing a Swaledale ram with a Bluefaced Leicester ewe, for example, gives a decidedly unsatisfactory result. And although many first-generation plant hybrids are sterile, animals are often capable of breeding a second and subsequent generations from the F1 offspring (the F2 generation and so on), but neither does this give a predictable result, nor preserve the vigour of the first cross. Sometimes the less desirable characteristics of the pure breeds can resurge in the third and later generations, when an unwelcome trait is said to have ‘skipped a generation’, or an individual is described as a ‘throwback’.

  The important point is that crossing to create predictably uniform hybrids requires a continuous supply of parent breeds that have been bred pure for many generations on both sides. And that is why the pure hill breeds are such a valuable resource and why distinct sheep breeds emerged about 150 years ago. Breeders strove to fix the characteristics that had emerged as a result of long association with a particular locale, because they needed to create a more regular uniform type than when the emphasis had been simply on wool.

  The British Isles are ideal for this kind of integrated system because we have a larger climatic range in a smaller area from north to south, and sea level to mountain-top, than nearly any other country in the world, including some of the best land in Europe with a good deal of the worst. The genius of the sheep pyramid is that it brings all our nation’s land into a productive whole: the tracts of semi-tundra on our mountains (with a climate similar to the Arctic Circle’s), the uplands and the lush pastures of the lowlands. The railways in the nineteenth and the motorways in the last century also played their part by shortening the distances and making it possible to move livestock, in better condition, at a fraction of the cost of droving.

  Imagine you are the owner of a flock of 1,000 pure-bred Swaledale ewes which have become acclimatised to your wild, windswept farm on the high Pennine moors over innumerable generations. Each ewe rears, on average, one lamb each year – rather fewer than the 125–30 per cent that would be usual, but it makes the maths easier – half and half males and females. (In fact slightly more males than females are born – the ratio is about 53:47). Almost all your male lambs will be castrated (made into wethers) soon after birth and be sold as the grass stops growing in the autumn, as stores, i.e. animals that are not yet ready for the butcher (finished). They will be bought by farmers with better, lower-lying land, for further feeding.

  Apart from the wethers there will be 500 ewe lambs, and of course you will still have your original 1,000 breeding ewes – less the 3 per cent that have died during the previous year from various causes. If you were to keep all the ewe lambs your flock would double in size in two years. So what do you do? The answer depends on a judicious balance of youth with quality, and the success of your enterprise depends on how well you weigh one against the other.

  The objective is to keep the flock as young as possible, because young sheep are healthier and more resilient, and always to strive to improve the quality of your flock. You would not want to sell off strong, well-bred older ewes if their teeth and feet were still good, so you might keep them for a year or two longer than others. Whatever your policy, you would have to sell about 470 female sheep every year just to maintain the size of your flock, and most of these would be the older ewes. So let us assume that you keep the best 370 ewe lambs and sell the poorest 130. You will also have to sell 370 of the older ewes to make way for the ewe lambs you have kept to replace them.

  In August, when the lambs are weaned from their mothers, you will decide which ewes and lambs to keep and which to sell. To do this you will gather up the flock, separate
the ewes from the lambs, and inspect each animal. The ewes are then dipped and taken back onto the moor without their lambs. This allows them to get over the separation and their milk to dry up. Once they are weaned the lambs become ‘hoggs’, until their first clipping next year, when they become ‘shearlings’.

  The lambs stay in the fields for a few days, on better grazing – generally the re-growth after the hay has been taken – until they, too, are accustomed to the separation. Once settled, they are sorted into four categories: the wether lambs for sale, the ewe lambs to keep for breeding and the poorer ewe lambs for sale. You might also have kept a few ram lambs for sale to other farmers for breeding. After two or three weeks, the ewe lambs you are going to keep will be sent back to the moor until tupping time, and those for sale will be kept in the fields until sale time. The ram lambs for sale for breeding will be preened and pampered like babies.

  Once the ewes have had a few weeks back on the moor without their lambs, and they are in the best condition to face the winter, they are gathered again to draw out (thus draft ewes) those to take to the autumn draft ewe sale. These sales have been held all over the country for many centuries, usually in towns on the edges of the uplands. Nowadays they are simply sheep sales, but in times past they were fairs, great social events where people got together, transacted business, renewed their acquaintance and amused themselves. The autumn sales are still great events in the flockmaster’s calendar, when most of his income comes in, marking the end of the breeding year before the cycle begins again with the rams going in with the ewes. For pastoral people the end of October is the end of the year, when their flocks and herds are at their best and when the shepherd exposes his year’s work to the criticism of his neighbours and the hard evaluation of buyers from all over the country.

  Most of the draft ewes will be no more than five years old and will have had three or four lambs. Hill sheep of this age still have a lot of breeding life left in them. If they are off hard hills, many of the ewes will grow bigger when they get onto better land, where the climate is kinder and the grazing more nutritious. Before the development of the sheep pyramid, they would have been sold at modest prices for slaughter. But the buyers at the sheep sales know that the appearance of these ewes belies hidden qualities. They are about to begin the second stage of their lives, when they will not only improve in condition, but the more nutritious grazing will stimulate them to shed more eggs at ovulation, causing them to conceive twins and, quite often, triplets rather than the single lambs they bore on the hill.

  In early November the draft Swaledale ewes you have sold, to go onto better land, will be introduced to a Longwool crossing ram, usually a Bluefaced Leicester. If they are well-managed they will conceive, on average, and give birth to, two Mule lambs each. The male Mule lambs are all destined for the butcher. But the females, which are the object of the breeding exercise, will be pampered, preened and dipped, have their faces and legs clipped and washed, and be sold for high prices at the autumn sales. Lowland farmers with even better land can offer them still better feeding, either on the by-products of arable production – sugar beet residue, for example – or intensively grazed grass. These females are valuable for their inherited qualities: from their Swaledale mother they get their hardiness, and milking and mothering ability; and from their father, fecundity, size, conformation (shape of carcase) and their lustrous wool. That is the first cross in the sheep pyramid.

  For the second cross the Mule ewe lambs are mated with a specialised meat-producing breed such as a Suffolk or a Texel, or one of the new French importations like the Charollais (which inherited many of its qualities from a cross with the New Leicester). They will each produce two superb fast-growing butchers’ lambs for the table for five, six or more years. This third and final stage of the sheep pyramid is accurately, but rather indelicately, called the ‘terminal’ stage.

  This is how the classic sheep pyramid works with Swaledale sheep. All the other pure-bred mountain and hill breeds (with certain exceptions) are similarly managed and collectively they form the genetic source of pure breeding stock upon which the whole cross-breeding system depends. The extra profits it generates, derived from increased productivity, flow up and down the pyramid. The hill farmer with a pure-bred flock gets a much better price for his old ewes than he would if they merely went for slaughter, and their productive lives are extended (often doubled). The first-cross hybrid ewe is a much more productive animal than pure-bred hill breeds or Longwools would be on their own, and the farmer selling butchers’ lambs gets more lambs of better quality from his breeding sheep that live longer than pure-bred animals. There are other, more subtle benefits; for example, the annual sale of his draft ewes imposes a sort of discipline on the hill farmer to keep his flock young, through an autumn clearing-out of the older ewes. Rather like the free circulation of money being necessary for the health of an economy, the spreading of nature’s increase generates production and keeps its bounty flowing.

  In England and Wales there is a much wider array of hill breeds than in Scotland, partly because they have been developed over a much longer time, but also because there is a wider range of topography and soil types and a more variable climate than in Scotland. Although the different hill breeds are equally capable of turning the wild places into profit, some are better suited to hybridisation than others. Much depends on whether a suitable Longwool crossing breed has been found to match them and carry through their best characteristics into their cross-bred daughters.

  Upper Wharfedale, near Skipton, is at the south-western edge of the Swaledale’s territory. It has been sheep country for thousands of years – even Skipton, skip-tun, means sheep farm – which it was long before the huge monastic sheep-walks of the Augustinian monastery of Bolton Abbey carried thousands of sheep, producing wool for the medieval cloth trade. Since the Dissolution, Bolton Abbey and its beautiful 30,000-acre estate has been owned by the Dukes of Devonshire, whose tenants, until recently, kept flocks of Swaledales every bit as numerous as anything the monastic houses ever kept. But in recent years, for the first time in many centuries, about a third of the sheep have been removed from the moors to satisfy the EU policy of reducing the flocks of sheep on the uplands, causing large areas of moorland to be overgrown with knee-deep herbage.

  This part of Wharfedale is delightful: limestone houses with stone-flagged roofs and mullioned windows; everywhere the wide skies and sweeping moors above fields zigzagged by drystone walls and studded with field-barns. The Mason family has been farming at Appletreewick in Wharfedale since 1956, when Matt’s father bought the 380-acre farm (plus grazing rights on the open moorland) for £8,000. For months afterwards his father lay awake at night worrying how he was going to pay back the money. There have been Masons in nearby Dentdale since 1492. The first Mason is supposed to have been a bowman in Duke William’s army at the Battle of Hastings, and it is not hard to believe. Matt is a powerful, chestnut-bearded, forthright, independent man who has kept pedigree Swaledale sheep for over forty years. At one time he milked cows as well, but he gave that up a few years ago, ‘getting rid of that dairy herd was like being let out of prison’, he said.

  Like many other farmers in the northern counties Matt lost all his stock, except ninety sheep that were away from the farm, in the foot-and-mouth cull in 2001, which he thinks was a kind of watershed for traditional hill sheep farming. Many of the best sheep, descendants of flocks that had been in the hills for centuries, were lost. Matt was particularly hard hit because he had been selling very high-quality sheep of ancient pedigree. His rams regularly made £15,000 and his draft ewes up to £350 each – over four times the average. He has found it hard to breed back into the same quality of stock, let alone accustom them to his hill land. Farmers do not usually sell their best breeding stock, so it is hard to find high-quality sheep to replace them. It takes a long time to accustom sheep to the terrain by natural adaptation and domestic selection. Who now has the time, or the money, or the faith in t
he future, to acclimatise new sheep to the hills?

  Swaledale breeders were some of the first to recognise the value of organising themselves into a breed society and keeping a flock book to record the pedigrees of breeding sheep. The Swaledale Sheep Breeders’ Association was founded in 1919 by a group of breeders living within a seven-mile radius of Tan Hill pub, at 1,730 feet above sea level, the highest public house in England, where the borders of Co. Durham, Yorkshire and Cumbria meet.

  In the preface to the first Flock Book, the Swaledale Breed Association made an admirable attempt to describe the characteristics of a good Swaledale. But it is hard to know whether it is describing what the members of the Association were hoping to achieve by domestic selection or whether they were simply describing what Swaledales would look like if they were acclimatised to the moors through enough generations. Alan Alderson, the current chairman, explains rather enigmatically that a good sheep ‘just looks right’. Then when pressed he surprised me with a more lyrical reply:

  ‘If you were comparing the texture of their wool and the texture of the grasses they’re eating – if you were looking at it in black and white and you could put your hands into either, you would feel comfortable with the fleece or the grass, as if they were one and the same thing.’

  There are some privileged Swaledales that never have to endure the rigours of life in the hills. One such is ‘Private Derby’, the pampered ram that is the regimental mascot of the Mercian Regiment. The first Private Derby (not a Swaledale) was captured by the 95th Derbyshire Regiment of Foot in April 1858 at the siege of Kotah during the Indian Mutiny campaign of 1857–8. This ram marched over 3,000 miles with his regiment, fought thirty-three undefeated battles against other rams, and was awarded a campaign medal. Since then the regiment has had an unbroken succession of Private Derbys, the latest being Derby XXIX, presented to the Mercian Regiment in 2009 by the Duke of Devonshire, who since 1912 has presented to the regiment every Private Derby from his Chatsworth Park flock.