Counting Sheep

by Philip Walling

  Other ewes are obsessive mothers, continually fussing over their children and hardly daring to let them out of their sight. This type would lick and paw the body of their dead lamb for a long time after birth, in a pathetic effort to get it to stand up. James Hogg tells of a ewe that stood over the body of her dead lamb for weeks on the open hill:

  It often drew the tears from my eyes to see her hanging with such fondness over a few bones, mixed with a small portion of wool. For the first fortnight she never quitted the spot, and for another week she visited it every morning and evening, uttering a few kindly and heart-piercing bleats each time; till at length every remnant of her offspring vanished, mixing with the soil, or wafted away by the winds.

  There was also the occasional earth-mother type that never had enough lambs. She would entice away from their mothers any lambs whose maternal bond was slightly tenuous, such as the weaker of two twins, and allow them to suckle from her. I had one older ewe that had borne four sets of twins in previous years and was disappointed to give birth to a single lamb after her fifth pregnancy. She ranged round the lambing field and persuaded four more lambs, each one of a pair of twins, into believing she was their mother. It took ages to match them up again with their real mothers because it was hard to work out which twin belonged to which ewe when they were too young to have formed an attachment. The ewe never recovered from her perverted urge to steal other ewes’ lambs, and she was a nuisance all summer.

  The Hindhope flock only receives hay when the snow is too deep for them to forage. Surprisingly, a blizzard can be better than a heavy, even fall of snow, because a blizzard will blow the snow off the hill and leave areas exposed for foraging. Over the last few decades, since the ubiquity of the quad-bike, it has become easier to feed hill sheep in winter. But the traditionalists believe hill sheep should only be fed in the direst emergency, and some would say not even then. Those who routinely feed see no harm in it. In essence it comes down to an argument between the purists and the pragmatists, and they both have a point. For the purists hand-feeding undermines a flock’s integrity, making it something less than a hardy hill breed, and destroys its independence. Breeding from sheep that have survived on hand-feeding tends to soften them, and create sheep dependent on expensive bought-in feed. If you’re going to feed sheep with feed carried in from somewhere else you might as well not keep hill sheep at all. For the pragmatists it’s simply about current profit. Taking a long view is all very well, but if you make more profit by feeding than not feeding there can be no contest, especially in a really bad winter when losses of hill sheep that are expected to fend for themselves can be very large indeed.

  The Borders moors have long had some of the worst weather in Britain. Snow has been recorded, at the weather station on Eskdalemuir, falling on every single day of the year. James Hogg describes the terrifying storm that arose in January 1794:

  But of all the storms that ever Scotland witnessed, or I hope ever will again behold, there is none of them that can once be compared with that of the memorable night between Friday the 24th and Saturday the 25th of January, 1794. This storm fell with peculiar violence on that division of the South of Scotland that lies between Crawford-muir and the Border. In these bounds seventeen shepherds perished, and upwards of thirty were carried home insensible, who afterwards recovered. The number of sheep that were lost far outwent any possibility of calculation. One farmer alone, Mr Thomas Beattie, lost seventy-two scores [1,540 animals] – and many others in the same quarter from thirty to forty scores each. Whole flocks were overwhelmed with snow, and no one ever knew where they were until the snow was dissolved, and they were all found dead. I myself witnessed one particular instance of this on the farm of Thickside: there were twelve scores of excellent ewes, all one age, that were missing all the time that the snow lay, which was only a week, and no traces of them could be found; when the snow went away they were discovered all lying dead with their heads one way as if a flock of sheep had dropped dead going from the washing. … When the flood, after the storm, subsided, there were found on that place, and the shores adjacent, one thousand eight hundred and forty sheep, nine black cattle, three horses, two men, one woman, forty-five dogs, and one hundred and eighty hares, besides a number of meaner animals.

  6

  THE SCOTCH BLACKFACE

  The day will come when the jaw-bone of the big sheep (caoirich mhora) will put the plough in the rafters; when sheep shall become so numerous that the bleating of the one shall be heard by the other from Conchra in Lochalsh to Bun-da-Loch in Kintail … and henceforth will go back and deteriorate, until they disappear altogether, and be so thoroughly forgotten that a man finding the jaw-bone of a sheep in a cairn, will not recognise it, or be able to tell what animal it belonged to … and the whole Highlands will become one huge deer forest …

  Coinneach Odhar, the Brahan Seer

  IN THE NEWLY OPENED-UP HIGHLANDS MATTERS TOOK an entirely different course. The primitive crofters’ sheep had been as unsuited to the new eighteenth-century imperative as were their keepers; no amelioration could have turned them into the kind of sheep that would pay the rents demanded by the Highland lairds of their commercial tenants. They were too small, too slow to mature, too ill-shaped and, ironically, too prolific, and had lost any hardiness they might once have possessed by being housed at night (to preserve their manure for the crofters’ crops). They were simply not the ovine material needed to exploit the Scottish wilderness. For that, a wholly different type of sheep was required and in the Scotch Blackface the new flockmasters found it.

  At one time, the ‘Blackie’ dominated all the harder hills in Scotland. Its range was huge, from Northumberland, across into Ayrshire and Lanarkshire, Argyll, Perthshire, Ross and Cromarty, and far out into the Western Isles. It also adapted itself to the hard wet areas of Ireland and the moors of the West Country, where few other sheep could be as productive. In fact wherever the soil was thin and acid and the winters long and hard, millions of these sheep ate their way across hundreds of thousands of acres of mountain and hill grazing. Their output of wool and meat over the last two centuries has been nothing short of stupendous.

  These are the ‘short sheep with the lang thing’. And although Cheviot devotees will hardly be brought to admit it, the ‘Blackie’ is tougher than the Cheviot. Their wool is not as valuable as the Cheviot’s, and they are slower-growing, but taken year on year the weight of sheep meat and wool per acre is probably not much different from that produced by the Cheviot. For sheer survival on the hardest of black heather hills, with little or no supplementary feeding, through some of the worst weather in Britain, these sheep have no rival. By about 1850 the century-long competition between the two breeds was settled by the Blackface establishing itself in the Central Highlands and Islands, where the Cheviot could not survive. The true difference between them eventually became clear; it was the quality of the grazing and not the severity of the climate that determined which of the two would do better upon a hill. And, unlike Cheviots, Blackfaces can live on heather.

  Nobody is really sure where it came from, this horned, black-faced, active, shaggy-woolled, resilient sheep. It seems not to be part of the mainstream of ancient British sheep; rather it is a later arrival in Britain than the Celtic sheep. Some commentators have given it an exotic Argali ancestry, but apart from the heavy horns it is hard to see any resemblance to the Argali. The best guess is that it was of Saxon origin. There were certainly black-faced horned sheep in medieval Norfolk – corn growing on the hungry sandy Norfolk soils depended on their manure – and during the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth the same type metamorphosed into the Swaledale. It first spread from the eastern side of the Pennines into Westmorland and Cumberland, so that by the beginning of the eighteenth century it seems to have ousted most of the primitive sheep from the hills of Galloway and Ayrshire and contended with the Cheviot in south-west Scotland.

  By the end of the eighteenth century it was so well settled in its te
rrain that the Westmorland farmer, in answer to where his type of sheep came from, could confidently reply, ‘Lord Sir, they are sik as God set upon the land, we never change any.’ From that time onwards the type spread so rapidly that by 1794 it was described as the original breed of sheep of Selkirkshire and became called the ‘Linton’ after the great sheep market at West Linton in Peeblesshire, and it was only a short time before a huge number of Blackfaces were settled into the Highlands. George Culley in 1807 described them as having ‘large spiral horns, black faces and black legs, a fierce wild-looking eye and a short, firm carcass … covered with long, open, coarse-shagged wool … they are exceedingly active, run with amazing agility, and seem best adapted of all others to high, exposed, healthy mountainous districts.’

  It is believed that the importation of Blackface sheep into the Highlands began in 1752. Their amazingly rapid advance followed hard on the heels of the Clearances, when it became profitable to keep sheep in those mountainous places which up to then had only been thinly stocked with crofters’ black cattle and household flocks. There were many farmers from the Borders and plenty of skilled shepherds willing to travel north with their families for the work. By 1795 the breed was established in Ross in large commercial flocks and within little more than fifty years it had colonised more than half the Scottish hills; and its origins in the north of England seem to have been forgotten, because by the middle of the nineteenth century William Youatt wrote: ‘Lanarkshire may be considered as the nursery of the black-faced sheep for the more northern counties [of Scotland].’ How this sheep from the peaty limestone rocks of the Pennines, with no known crosses, adapted itself to thrive on the thin, wet, acid soils overlying granite, and the pure heather hills of the Grampians, is nothing short of marvellous.

  As it has become widely dispersed subtle regional variations have emerged reflecting the differing soils, climate and, of course, the fancies of breeders. To the inexpert eye these variations are hard to detect. The Perth type is large-framed with a medium-to-heavy fleece, whereas the Lanark is a slightly shorter sheep with a closer, denser coat. The original Newton Stewart, or Galloway type, from the hills of the southwest of Scotland is a finer-boned, compact sheep with a short, thick, rain-resistant fleece; this is the type that is found in the Western Isles, where it is called the Lewis. It has the finest wool of all the sub-types, perhaps because it was crossed with the native Hebridean when first introduced, or it may simply be the effect of the soil, or probably a combination of both.

  But it is not all plain sailing for Blackies. In this hard country, much of it strewn with granite boulders, like icebergs, whose red tips poke through the surface everywhere, Blackface sheep face many challenges. One is being poisoned by eating Bog Asphodel, Narthecium ossifragum, ossifragum meaning ‘bone-breaking’ and coming from the ancient belief that the bones of animals that ate it became weak and brittle. This might be because animals grazing acid soils are unable to get enough calcium. Ingestion causes a severe photosensitive disorder, variously called ‘alveld’ in Norway, ‘plochteach’, ‘yellies’ and ‘head greet’ in Scotland, and ‘saut’ in Cumbria. The plant is a member of the lily family and is commonly found in boggy places on moorlands on acid soils in Western and Northern Europe. Its yellow flowers are borne on spikes, about six inches high, during July and August. The flowers close up and turn a brilliant orange just before they fruit, giving the impression that the plant is still in flower. Eating it causes the animal’s tissues to become sensitised to light, they lose their wool, their skin seeps fluid which dries into yellow crusts, and then the tissue dies and is sloughed off. They can die of liver failure. Sometimes lambs’ ears curl up and drop off and in a bad season as many as 10 per cent of lambs can die. They can occasionally be saved by shutting them up in the dark for about three weeks, although it is not sunshine that causes the illness, but a build-up of light-sensitive toxins in the tissues which react with sunlight to cause tissue damage; by then it is often too late to reverse its effects.

  Much of Scotland is also infested with ticks. There is an old hill shepherd’s saying that ‘sheep brush the hill’, meaning that grazing sheep will attract ticks, which will then be killed by dipping. Where the sheep have gone the ticks feed on deer and other smaller wild mammals and birds, and proliferate without check. The explosion of the deer population has caused ticks to be carried into parts of Scotland where they were unknown before. From Scottish sheep farmers’ point of view, ‘the deer has destroyed Scotland’.

  Towards the end of the eighteenth century, half a century after the Blackface began to colonise the Highlands, a number of enterprising farmers and landowners saw the opportunity of importing Cheviots from the Borders into Sutherland and Caithness. In 1792 Sir John Sinclair, of Ulbster, who later became the first President of the Board of Agriculture under George III, took 500 Cheviots up to his estate at Langwell in Caithness.

  There had been intermittent acts of opposition to this new farming throughout the eighteenth century, but in 1792 open conflict broke out when some crofters were evicted to make way for the new sheep. Many landowners, who could see that the old communal society was no longer sustainable, hoped that sheep farming would form the basis of a sustainable new Highland economy that could co-exist with the old ways. But this was not a realistic solution because the old ways could not survive the profound onslaught of entrepreneurial capitalism that swept through Scottish society after 1750.

  In Easter Ross-shire crofters were enjoined to mobilise and gather up the sheep by a melodramatic handbill posted on church doors throughout the region: ‘That the curse of the children not yet born, and their generations, would follow such as would not cheerfully go and banish the sheep out of the country.’ About 200 men responded and rounded up a large flock of about 10,000 of the hated sheep intending to drive them from the glen. But the authorities feared this was a harbinger of revolution spreading from France and mobilised the Black Watch to arrest the ringleaders and quell the uprising. The court dealt with them leniently by the standards of the times, which suggests there was some sympathy for their cause. 1792 is mythologised as am Bliadhna nan Choirich Mora, the Year of the Sheep, but it may well stand out because it was the only violent protest by disaffected crofters against the introduction of the hated English sheep.

  The effect of the clearances is more obvious in Sutherland now that the sheep have gone and the land is virtually deserted. Spread out OS sheet 9 for Cape Wrath and, apart from the road in and out, there is nothing. Not even the ruins you would expect if farms and villages had been abandoned within the last 200 years. The people and their settlements have gone just as if they had never existed and now the sheep have all gone too. All that remains is the empty hills scarred with rocks and studded with tarns, and the wild beauty of the sea, its towering cliffs, white beaches and dunes thrown up by centuries of storms. Every feature on the map bears a Gaelic name, the melancholy ghosts of a dispossessed people in an empty land. Once they had been uprooted from their land, most crofters did not stay long in the new coastal places the landlords tried to settle them in. The New World beckoned with far more enticing prospects than eking out a desultory living in a place where the winters last for eight months and the summers sometimes never come.

  Patrick Sellar, the Duke of Sutherland’s agent, and an enthusiastic early promoter of the Cheviot in Sutherland, wrote that by 1820:

  100,000 Cheviot fleeces were annually sent from Sutherland to the manufacturer, and 20,000 ewes and wethers to the grazier; this annual extraction from the Alpine plants of 20,000 carcases of mutton and 100,000 fleeces of wool is indeed most wonderful.

  By 1874 this annual extraction had reached a peak of 240,000 fleeces and carcases before its long decline in the face of the competition from cheap imports from the New World. The irony is that barely a century after the crofters had been replaced by the Big Sheep their descendants in the New World were sending back, to the old country, chilled lamb and fine wool that undercut the very men who
had displaced their grandfathers.

  Despite its apparent climatic disadvantages the imported Cheviots adapted well to their new home in the northern wilderness. Flockmasters found that if the ground was not stocked too thickly, their sheep could live off the land throughout the year. This was helped by the moors of Sutherland and Caithness enjoying one great advantage almost unknown outside hill sheep-farming circles, which is that in the second half of the winter, from about January or February, the draw-moss comes. Cotton grass, Eprihorum vaginatum, is known to hill shepherds as draw-moss because when they are eating it the sheep draw the tip of the emerging succulent leaves up the sheath-like stem from the rhizome beneath. It is a species of sedge that grows on wet acid soils across the hilly and mountainous parts of Britain. A cold winter will delay its emergence, but when it comes it can mean the difference between life and death for many sheep. Where it is available they come through the winter in better condition than those fed on hay or other foodstuffs, because the highly nutritious plant has an almost miraculous effect, acting as a tonic to in-lamb sheep that have subsisted on winter vegetation for three or four months with a growing lamb inside them. There is a saying amongst hill shepherds that a good draw-moss year is a good sheep year. And when the tips first emerge the whole flock can be seen ‘working the moss’ – spreading out across the boggy ground, busily drawing out the blanched stems from the peat and consuming them with relish.

  Through domestic selection and the influence of the terrain and climate, the Cheviot in the north has evolved into a different sheep, the North Country Cheviot, and has even divided into two distinct strains: the Lairg type, from Sutherland and Wester Ross, and the Caithness type, a bigger, heavier sheep that reflects the better going it enjoys. These are long ‘stretchy’ sheep probably the longest-lived and most productive hill sheep in Britain and much in demand from farmers on lower ground for crossing with Border Leicester rams to produce another hybrid, the legendary Scotch Half bred. These are prolific when moved to good land, and they consistently rear two lambs a year when mated with a meat sire such as the Suffolk or a Texel. They also have one of the best carcases of any hill sheep and tend not to lay down fat before their carcase has matured.