Counting Sheep
Page 9
Private Derby has a Ram Major and a Ram Orderly, appointed from the Drums Platoon, who are responsible for his welfare. He has a regimental number and draws his rations like any soldier. When on parade the Ram Major and the Ram Orderly lead him, one on either side, by two white ornamental ropes, attached to a leather collar. He wears a scarlet coat, with buff and gold facings, emblazoned with the regiment’s battle honours, which include his Indian Mutiny medal, his General Service Medal 1962 (with Clasp Northern Ireland, where he has been stationed over the years), a silver plate on his forehead embossed with the Regimental Cap Badge, and a pair of silver protectors on the tips of his horns.
5
THE CHEVIOT
In all the different districts of the kingdom we find various breeds of sheep beautifully adapted to the locality which they occupy. No one knows their origin; they are indigenous to the soil, climate, and pasturage, the locality on which they graze; they seem to have been formed for it and by it.
William Youatt, Sheep: Their Breeds, Management and Diseases, 1837, p. 312
IT IS IN SCOTLAND THAT THE SHEEP PYRAMID BECAME refined, almost to the point of perfection, and was developed on a huge scale. To understand the way this played out it is necessary to see Scotland as a tale of two very different halves: the land south of the central lowlands and the Highlands. Although a type that is the Cheviot – white-faced and fi ne-woolled – had been grazing the grassy hills of the Borders and the Southern Uplands for many centuries, in the rest of Scotland north of the central lowlands the indigenous sheep kept by the crofters had not changed much since the Iron Age. They were not numerous, because the predominant domestic livestock was cattle, but they had a valuable place in the crofting economy for their exceptionally fi ne wool, and would have been found, with regional variations, all over Scotland.
In 1746, after the Battle of Culloden, when the clan system was swept away, the crofters and their seana chaorich cheaga (little old sheep) rapidly followed. Huge tracts of the Highlands and Islands were emptied of people. And rather in the same way that the American prairies, once denuded of their native inhabitants, were exploited as the bread-basket of the society that replaced them, the empty land in Scotland was rapidly colonised by the caoirich mhora (the big English sheep) that fed and clothed the growing towns of the British industrial revolution. From the second half of the eighteenth century there flowed from the hills of Scotland a bonanza of sheep and wool that lasted almost two centuries, and has declined only in recent decades.
The two breeds of big English sheep that have vied for supremacy in the Highlands of Scotland are the Scotch Black-face and the Cheviot. They are the yin and yang of Scottish hill sheep, and descend from entirely different ancestors. The Cheviot is the northerly representative of a dun-faced type kept by the Celtic peoples long before the Romans came. It is native to the Scottish Borders country, very hardy, with probably the best shortwoolled fleece of all the hill breeds. The ewes are hornless (polled) with erect white ears, white faces and legs and black noses and feet. Even as early as 1795 one observer wrote of the Cheviot, ‘the same kind of polled sheep have fed in this district from time immemorial; nor does anybody alledge [sic] that they were ever natives of any other region.’
In the south of Scotland the Cheviot was distinguished from the Blackface by being called the ‘long sheep’ and the ‘short sheep’. There is an instructive anecdote in The Domestic Manners of Sir Walter Scott where James Hogg recounts a meeting between Scott and Mr Walter Brydon, a renowned breeder of Cheviot sheep, on one of Scott’s excursions to the Ettrick Forest to gather stories and ballads:
The original black-faced forest breed being always denominated the short sheep and the Cheviot breed, the long sheep. The disputes at that time ran very high about the practicable profits of each. Mr Scott … felt himself rather bored with the everlasting question of the long and short sheep. So, at length, putting on his most serious calculating face, he turned to Mr Walter Brydon and said, ‘I am rather at a loss regarding the merits of this very important question. How long must a sheep actually measure to come under the denomination of a long sheep?’ Mr Brydon, who, in the simplicity of his heart, neither perceived the quiz nor the reproof, fell to answer with great sincerity, ‘It’s the woo’ sir; it’s the woo’ that maks the difference, the lang sheep hae the short woo’ an’ the short sheep hae the lang thing, an’ these are just the kind o’ names we gie them, ye see.’
The Cheviots’ grazing over millennia across the Southern Uplands probably destroyed the Wildwood – the ancient natural woodland that had clothed Western Europe since the last ice retreated about 15,000 years ago – and prevented its regeneration by eating the seedlings that would have replaced the trees as they matured and died.
We know from Roman writers that the pastoral Celts had considerable flocks in the Borders and practised a short-distance form of transhumance, a system which endured almost into living memory. During the winter the sheep grazed the low-lying fields in the ‘winter town’. Then in spring they were taken up to the ‘spring town’ in the hills to crop the high-lying grazings. This annual migration began on the same day every spring when the young men took up the cattle. The young women followed a few weeks later with the ewes, which they milked in ‘yowe buchts’– low, turf-walled enclosures – to make hard cheese (‘white meat’) for the winter. In parts of the Borders cheese from Cheviot ewes’ milk was made well into the nineteenth century.
After the Conquest, when religious houses acquired large estates in the Borders, they encountered an existing pastoral economy of ancient standing, and often found themselves in competition for grazing rights. The Cistercians began by keeping sheep to produce undyed wool for their clothing, particularly their habits, hence their sobriquet ‘the white monks’. Then, almost incidentally, their prowess at sheep keeping provided them with a large income from the surplus of wool that far exceeded their own needs. Francesco Pegolotti recorded in his handbook that wool from the Cistercian house at Mirososso (Melrose) was of the highest quality, better than the other abbeys from which he bought wool, at Ghelzo (Kelso), Guldingamo (Coldingham), or Gridegorda (Jedburgh).
These monastic sheep flocks grew to be considerable. The Cistercian houses alone produced 20 per cent of Scottish wool. Melrose had 12,000 sheep and Kelso Abbey’s Rent Rolls for 1290–1300 record that they had between 7,000 and 8,000 sheep on the open hills around the Bowmont valley. The records suggest that there were about a quarter of a million sheep in the Borders at that time, with wool of such quality that European merchants were prepared to forward-buy it a number of years ahead. In some seasons when the wool-clip was deficient, or failed to make the grade, the abbeys would have to buy wool in the domestic market to honour their contracts. Their wool was shipped out down the Tweed to Berwick, the main Scottish seaport at the time – probably in shallow-drafted coracles which could negotiate the river – from where it went by sea to the manufactories of Flanders and Italy.
Wool became so valuable in the early Middle Ages that every available acre in the Borders (and in many other places in Britain) was grazed by sheep, hundreds of thousands of them, relentlessly eating their way across the wide hills. This increase in the sheep population may have coincided with a period of warmer weather, the ‘medieval warm period’ that is supposed to have lasted from about 1000 AD until the beginning of the fourteenth century.
But all this came to an abrupt end with the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314 when the Borders descended into 300 years of lawlessness that destroyed civil society and all hope of a settled agriculture. It was not until 1603, when James I acceded to the throne of England, that peace was restored. But even then it took the Act of Settlement in 1707 before farmers could once again keep sheep on the Borders hills without the constant fear of having them stolen, their families murdered or their houses and lands laid waste. The peace allowed the Borders flocks to regenerate and set in train a zeal for land improvement and livestock breeding that endures to this day.
The wool was sorted into hanks of natural shades and woven into the weft and warp of the cloth (rather like a dog’s-tooth pattern) in a design that was known as ‘checks’, or ‘Galashiels Grey’ in the Borders. A similar type of cloth, although in a plainer style, called ‘Hodden Grey’, was made in Cumberland from the wool of Herdwick sheep. Each region had its distinctive traditional design that would have advertised its wearer’s origins just as surely as would his accent.
Then, in the eighteenth century, just as the dominance of wool was beginning to yield to meat in England, three Scottish inventions transformed the cottage weaving into a world-renowned woollen industry. These were the flying shuttle, allowing much wider fabrics to be woven, the ‘Teazing Willy’ (a machine that made wool easier to spin) and the water-driven power-loom. These caused a great building of water-powered woollen mills at Galashiels, alongside the Gala Water at its confluence with the Tweed, and set in train the huge international trade in tartan and tweed.
Tweed owes its phenomenal success to two Borders men: Archibald Craig and James Locke. Craig was already a moderately successful cloth merchant in London when he saw the potential in the metropolitan fashion for rustic checked cloth. The story goes that he received a stained, sub-standard sample of black and white checked cloth from one of his artisan manufacturers in the Borders. Rather than send it back, he dyed it brown to disguise the staining and turned it into a brown and black check. He then tried green dye, to make a green and black check, and blue for blue and black. These proved so popular that he had the weavers make cloths in various sizes of check and style experimenting with new patterns and colours.
But the real marketing genius was James Locke, an enterprising Scottish clothier, who traded from premises in Regent Street. The fashion at the time was for jackets and trousers made up from different patterns of cloth; morning dress is a survival of this. But when the Prince of Wales appeared in public in a jacket and trousers that ‘suited’ one another – made from cloth of the same pattern – a new sartorial fashion was set and Borders manufacturers satisfied it by producing lengths of ‘tweel’ (twill) ‘suiting’ in huge quantities. In 1847 Locke is supposed to have received a consignment of ‘tweel’ from Messrs. William Watson & Son of Hawick. On the note attached to the parcel the word tweel read ‘tweed’ because an ink blot at the base of the ‘l’ made it look like a ‘d’. Locke wrote back asking for some more of their ‘tweed’ and thus the brand was born. Sir Walter Scott had already done much to make the Borders and the Tweed valley famous all over the world, but making the name of the cloth synonymous with the river was a brilliant stroke and transformed tweed into a unique worldwide brand and ensured it a permanent place in the wardrobe of anyone who aspired to gentility. Tweed has never since lost its worldwide appeal.
Tartan has an even more fanciful origin. In 1815 the secretary of the Highland Society (a club of expatriate Scotsmen) wrote to every clan chief he could find, asking for a swatch of his clan ‘tartan’ so that it could be ‘registered’ and archived. It made no difference that most of the chiefs had never heard of tartan, and were baffled by the request, because there were plenty of manufacturers willing to remember their pattern for them. The enterprising Sobieski-Stewart brothers, John and Charles-Edward, half-Polish, half-Scottish adventurers, who claimed tenuous descent from Bonnie Prince Charlie, compiled a catalogue of all the ‘ancient clan tartans’ in their wholly invented book, Vestiarum Scoticum. This appealed powerfully to Scottish sentimental nationalism, both at home and abroad, and ever since tartan has been almost obligatory, at social events, for nearly all classes of Scottish society.
George IV sealed tartan’s appeal in 1822 by making the first state visit of a reigning monarch to Scotland since Charles II in 1651. Sir Walter Scott was deputed to organise the whole affair and is supposed to have persuaded the King to deck himself out in Royal Stewart tartan. When his Majesty’s portly figure proceeded down the gangplank at Leith docks it was swathed in a tartan plaid over a kilt, topped off with a matching bonnet. This set a trend that subsequent monarchs have followed, to considerable effect, as a unifying symbol. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were enthusiastic wearers of tartan, as have been many subsequent members of the Royal Family.
Sir Walter Scott himself would never wear tartan, particularly disliking the kilt. His habitual dress was ‘breeks’ made from the shepherd’s plaid. His son-in-law and biographer, J. G. Lockhart, shared Scott’s distaste for the kilt; he thought his father-in-law had created a caricature of the Scots as ‘a nation of Highlanders, and the bagpipe and the tartan are the order of the day’.
As this wool boom went almost hand in hand with the growth in demand for mutton, Borders flockmasters contrived to respond to both. The Cheviot was so wonderfully well adapted to its native hills that it was a relatively easy task to modify it to satisfy the demand for meat by careful cross-breeding. They sought out ‘improving tups’ to put to their Cheviot ewes, to improve the breed’s carcase and bring it to earlier maturity and, in so doing, they achieved something that had eluded many other improvers, namely they managed not to mar the wool too much. In the 1750s three prominent Borders breeders, John Edmistoun, Charles Ker and James Robson, travelled to Lincolnshire and paid high prices for suitable rams. These were probably of the medieval Lincoln type, similar to those that Bakewell crossed with the native Leicester, to create his New Leicester. These farsighted breeders (particularly James Robson) are credited with being the creators of the modern Cheviot. It was probably at this time that the Cheviot lost its mottled tan face and acquired a pure white face and legs. Crucially, the improvements did not sacrifice the invaluable traits of the hill ewe: thriftiness, hardiness, devoted mothering and an almost preternatural ability to predict the approach of a storm and move to shelter from it.
Hill flocks in Scotland and the Borders are divided into hirsels. These contain an average of about 400 ewes, depending on the terrain. Hirsel derives from the Old Norse, hirtha, to herd or tend, and refers to that quantity of sheep a shepherd can comfortably care for on the hill. It has also come to be synonymous with the area of land upon which the sheep live. The daily management of a hirsel includes raking the flock in the morning and again in the evening. Raking comes from the Old Norse raka, to drive, which describes putting the dogs behind the sheep to drive them from the bottom of the hill to the top in the morning and leaving them to graze their way back down the hill during the day. In the evening the shepherd would then bring the flock together, gathering in any stragglers. Raking has a number of benefits: it encourages the flock to graze evenly across the whole hirsel and make better use of the land than the sheep would if left to their own devices, and discourages them from concentrating on the areas where they find the sweetest grazing; it also keeps them active, which is important during pregnancy, and allows the shepherd to see every one of his sheep twice a day, and by moving them and counting them the shepherd can immediately see if any is ill or lame or missing. Now that shepherds are expected to manage much larger flocks, they often do not have time for the intensive shepherding that would have been possible when each shepherd only managed his own hirsel.
As sheep proliferated and
became more valuable during the eighteenth century, it became necessary to find some way of protecting them from the dreadful weather that the Scottish hills can throw up. The answer in Scotland, but rarely found anywhere else, was to build stells to accommodate and shelter the sheep on each hirsel. Stell is the Scottish way of pronouncing stall (as in cow stall) and means a fixed place. These usually circular structures enclosed a few hundred square yards of land with stone walls five or six feet high, sometimes protected by a planting of trees, where the sheep and the shepherd could find protection from storms. In some places the stell was built in a cruciform shape, without outer walls, so that the flock could shelter out of the storm wherever it came from. Stells saved many thousands of sheep during harsh winters. Sheep are not forced into them, but they resort to them when driven off their grazings by a storm. They can be fed within the walls when the land is too deeply covered with snow for them to reach the herbage below. The walls were built so that driving snow in a blizzard would tend to drift against the windward wall, then blow right over the top rather than accumulate inside the walls. Even if it did drift over the flock sheltering inside, the shepherd would know where to find them to dig them out if he had to. The capital cost of erecting stells was small compared with the value of the flock, and was recovered ten times over by the numbers of sheep saved in a bad winter.
The centre of the Cheviot’s ancestral territory is the wide grassy hills around the headwaters of the River Coquet, where the land makes better Cheviot sheep than anywhere else. This is thought to be because the soil overlies an intrusion of red porphyry rock, which can be seen in the bed of the Coquet, hence its meaning, ‘red river’, the coch prefix coming from the Brythonic Celtic for red, as in cochineal. Porphyry is rich in dissolved minerals necessary for the health of grazing animals, and soils overlying it contain a mixture of them, particularly copper, cobalt, molybdenum and selenium.