The North Country Cheviot’s success partly derives from one of the truths of plant and animal breeding, which is that foundation stock always does better if it is moved from high to lower ground and from the pole towards the equator – north to south in the northern hemisphere. If an animal or plant (British seed potatoes are a good example) is reared in the harsher climate of the north of Britain, particularly in the hills, then it will perform better if it is moved downhill and south. With our large range of climate and topography we are well-placed to take advantage of this phenomenon. That is why Cheviot draft ewes from the far northern hills of Scotland have been in such great demand for over 200 years.
There are few places further west on mainland Britain than Cape Wrath, which is on nearly the same longitude as Penzance. But that is where the climatic similarity ends. In Cornwall the daffodils flower in mid-January; in Sutherland they do not emerge for another four months. Even in mid-May you still need an overcoat when people in the south of England are brushing off their garden furniture. For although the harshness of the northern climate is tempered by the Gulf Stream, the winters are long and for two months either side of the solstice the sun barely rises above the horizon. There is not much snow – at least on the lower ground – but there is not much shelter from the gales that sweep in from the Atlantic across the mountains and the wide Flow Country.
Balnakeil, ‘the village of the church’, is the last estate in the north-west of Scotland before Cape Wrath. Once the summer residence of the bishops of Caithness, it is one of the most valuable and productive sheep farms in Sutherland, one of a diminishing number still fully stocked and so remote that it can take five hours to make the hundred-and-twenty-mile round trip to Lairg along a single-track road with passing places. The underlying rock on the northern part of the farm is limestone and, as the old saying goes, limestone makes bone. It also makes the huge white dunes and sands of Balnakeil Bay.
Andrew Elliot’s great-grandfather was one of the enterprising Borders farmers who leased the 20,000-acre estate from the Duke of Sutherland in the early nineteenth century, shortly after the railway reached Lairg from Inverness. It was a considerable journey to reach his northern enterprise. He had to travel from his farm in the Borders by pony and trap the thirty or so miles to Edinburgh, then by train via Inverness to Lairg and then again by pony and trap sixty miles by Loch Shin and Loch More, through the wild Sutherland hills, to Balnakeil.
In its heyday Balnakeil employed eight full-time shepherds to manage 4,000 ewes. Most of the year’s income came from the great annual cycle of sheep sales at Lairg, once the largest sheep market in Europe, where sheep from Balnakeil consistently topped the market. The sales began in August with 100,000 wether lambs straight off their mothers on the hill and sold through two sale-rings throughout one long August day. The lambs were sold in scores (twenties) from pens that covered the hillside behind the mart. Buyers knew the improving potential of these sheep and came from all over Britain. The most mature lambs could be transformed into prime butchers’ animals simply by moving them to better pasture for a few weeks; while the smaller ones would be fed on root crops in the lowlands and sold during the winter.
After the lambs, in September, came the sales of draft ewes, when tens of thousands of four- and five-year-old ewes, with all their lives ahead of them, were sold to farmers on lower land to breed the Scotch Half bred from a cross with the Border Leicester. Later in September the ram sales attracted the throng of farmers and shepherds from all the lonely places in Sutherland and Easter Ross, taking a last chance to get together, do some business and renew old acquaintance, before the shadow of the long northern winter once again fell across this bleak country.
Until comparatively recently all the sheep that left the hills of Sutherland travelled on their own four feet. It took the shepherds and their dogs over a week to drive the Balnakeil sheep to Lairg, stopping off every night in places where the sheep could graze and be safely contained. Hamish Campbell was head shepherd at Balnakeil for twenty years until he retired in 2010 on the ‘traditional day’, i.e. 24 November: ‘The sheep’s feet had to be right to walk that far without losing condition – as had the shepherd’s. We took great care of our feet, with the best sprung boots and wool socks. Our tweed breeks buckled just below the knee with plenty of cloth to hang well down the calf, so that when it rained the water simply ran off.’ A shepherd was paid twice a year. And by the time he had settled his tailor’s and his boot maker’s bills, as well as the other trades-men he owed money to, there was little left. ‘He just started all over again until the next six months had gone by.’
Now the huge sheep flocks have mostly gone from the Highlands and are rapidly going from Sutherland and Caithness. It seems that the Brahan Seer’s prophecy is being fulfilled as the land becomes wilderness, the life slowly draining from it. There are even suggestions of introducing wolves and beavers, last seen many centuries ago. On present trends it will not be much more than a decade before the flow of sheep meat and wool dries up and the huge acreage is lost to agricultural production. This is probably the first time in British history that agriculturally productive land has been deliberately given back to the wilderness. But if sheep keeping ceases in the Highlands it is hard to see the clans returning to take undisturbed possession of the lands of their ancestors, as the Seer foretold. The most likely outcome will be that nobody will live here and nothing much will be produced. It seems perverse, to say the least, that humanity should retreat from half of Scotland and abandon such a resource of meat and wool.
There was an almost palpable fin de siècle feeling everywhere I went in Sutherland. Farmers and shepherds are growing old and retiring, with no young people to take their place. The solitary shepherding life no longer appeals to a sedentary and gregarious youth seduced by the bright lights of the towns, and unbroken to manual labour. All over Britain sheep are leaving the hills, but nowhere is the loss felt more acutely than in the northern counties of Scotland, where the income and social structure depend to such a large extent on sheep farming. Steadily and inexorably a whole way of life is drawing to a close: the camaraderie, competitive rivalry, collective gatherings and shearings – they all become a memory that lives only until the last one to remember dies.
All manner of things are to blame: the price of sheep for the last two or three decades; the EU paying farmers not to keep sheep; the difficulty for young people to get a start in farming because few tenancies are available; the shortage of labour. Whatever it is, it seems irreversible and it is tempting to see it as part of a wider decline that is causing us to abandon our remoter places, to retreat from the edges to a comfortable centre. Whatever the causes, there seems little doubt that two and a half centuries of commercial sheep-farming in the Highlands is drawing to a close. If all agricultural financial support is removed, or, more likely, the payments become social subsidies, the end cannot be far away.
7
THE LEICESTERS
‘You can’t breed rats out of mice.’
Jim Brown, Border Leicester breeder from Mindrum
ROBERT BAKEWELL’S AIM TO CREATE A BREED THAT would provide meat for the toiling industrial masses did not quite work out as he intended. As we have seen, his New Leicester was not a success as a pure breed and in the form that he bred it has virtually died out. Its direct descendant, the Leicester Longwool, is so far out of favour that it is on the ‘endangered’ list of the Rare Breeds Society, with fewer than 500 breeding females left in the hands of a few faithful breeders.
But the value of the Dishley Leicester lay in its legacy, because its descendants are the Longwool breeds that form the male half of the first cross in the sheep pyramid. There was something about the animals that Bakewell chose to breed from, some characteristic, that has endured in their cross-bred offspring; it gave almost every breed they were crossed with a superior carcase, earlier maturity, more lambs, and a greater vigour and fitness to survive. In short, they tended to imbue their progeny wit
h just those qualities that made them suitable for meat production. And such was the fashion that there was hardly a breed or type of sheep that did not receive its share of the dominating New Leicester genes, with the result that nearly every sheep in the Western world has some Leicester blood, however dilute, running through its veins.
Many breeds did not derive any lasting benefit from this infusion; for some it was little short of disastrous, ruining their wool, making them run to fat before they had grown to full size, or turning frugal sheep into high-maintenance prima donnas. Such was the faith in its enhancing powers that many breeders believed that simply introducing Leicester blood to their own indifferent animals would have an almost magical effect, transforming them into a superior type by some form of alchemy.
However, in a way that Bakewell could hardly have foreseen, his New Leicester’s legacy has proved to be of the most enduring importance to modern fat-lamb production because the modern British sheep pyramid owes its existence to his work. For not only did a cross with the Dishley Leicester transform the old Longwool types (not then breeds) into the modern Longwools – the paternal side of the first cross – but it also gave the Down rams used for the second cross many of their enduring qualities.
The four most prominent modern descendants of the New Leicester are the Border Leicester, the Bluefaced Leicester, the Wensleydale and the Teeswater, all of which are hugely important to modern British sheep production. Each breed has been developed to have qualities that nick with its corresponding hill breed, and which bring out the best of the hill ewe in its hybrid female offspring.
The Border Leicester goes back the furthest and owes its existence to two of the great eighteenth-century pioneers of English farming and Bakewell’s most well-known pupils, Matthew (1731–1804) and George (1735–1813) Culley. They were the sons of a farsighted yeoman farmer from Darlington in Co. Durham, who was well enough off to send them in 1763 to be pupils to Bakewell to learn the new farming and stockbreeding and maintained a close friendship, bordering on hero-worship, which lasted to the end of Bakewell’s life. They had been on the yeoman farmer’s version of the Grand Tour – a trip around Europe to observe and absorb its agriculture – and upon their return, in 1767, took a lease of Fenton, a 1,100-acre farm in Glendale, in the fertile valley of the River Till in north Northumberland. The Culleys rode the English eighteenth-century agricultural revolution and made a fortune from progressive farming, ending up as substantial landowners. When they moved to Northumberland they not only imported the new optimism that gripped English farming but, more importantly for the future of English sheep breeding, they brought their stock of Dishley Leicester sheep.
This was a time of astonishing opportunity for commercial farming in England. It is hard to exaggerate the optimism, raw spirit of enterprise, and sheer effort that was poured into it. The stage had been set by a century and a half of protection from foreign imports, beginning in the second half of the 1600s with the first Corn Laws. Guaranteed prices boosted home production, and encouraged the landowning and farming interest to invest and innovate. Relatively high food and produce prices, throughout the eighteenth century and first half of the nineteenth, produced the money that paid for the enormous investment needed to transform British agriculture.
During these good times, millions of acres of what had been unfenced waste, or common, were enclosed, under-drained and brought into cultivation and the great landed proprietors consolidated their power by buying out thousands of smaller proprietors, and then let their enlarged estates to business-minded tenant farmers who could pay the highest rents and together become their partners in the great agrarian enterprise upon which their wealth and power were based.
During the first sixty years of the eighteenth century, the English countryside was ruthlessly transformed from the place where most people lived into an extensive, almost completely industrial system to supply the burgeoning urban demand for food. Farming became another mercantile endeavour and a source of profit to the nation. By 1764 England and Wales produced more cereals and potatoes per head of the population than at any time before or since.
It was not only the small proprietors who suffered; the village labourer was also dispossessed of his small inheritance in the open fields and on the commons that cushioned him from starvation when work was scarce and gave him a measure of independence. He was uprooted from the land and paid starvation wages, losing any direct interest in the produce of the soil. This huge rural labouring class suffered much misery and insecurity, and were severed from their roots on the land; this opened up a gulf in understanding between town and country, which endures to this day.
The Border Leicester is a product of this revolution. The Culleys most likely crossed the Bakewell sheep they took with them to Northumberland in 1767 with the local sheep they found there. It is not clear whether these were Cheviots or a longwoolled local type, called the Mugg, or another local woolly sheep, the Bamburgh (now extinct). A mug is a thick lock of wool that grows on a sheep’s head and often flops over and obscures its face. Before the emergence of distinguishable breeds, many of the big woolly types were collectively known as Muggs.
There is, however, a less plausible suggestion that its creation was the work of John Edmistoun of Mindrum and a few other progressive Borders farmers, who in the mid-1750s travelled into Lincolnshire to buy ‘improving tups’ for their flocks (probably Cheviots). They brought back a big heavily woolled type of old Lincoln from the Lincolnshire Wolds, almost certainly of the same medieval Lincoln breed that Bakewell used to create the Dishley Leicester. These Lincolns would have been crossed with the native Cheviots and it is probable that the sheep that eventually became the Border Leicester was created in this way.
The Culleys’ clear purpose was the same as Bakewell’s (and every other livestock improver’s at the time), to breed a more profitable type of meat sheep to supply the growing urban market. And it is more likely that the Border Leicester is the result of a cross between a Cheviot and a New Leicester, with or without some other Longwool blood. At some point it lost the long, lustrous wool on its father’s side and developed a shorter, tighter fine fleece, more like the Cheviot than the Leicester, and it also inherited the Cheviot’s distinctive cock o’ the lug. It is a tall, powerful barrel-shaped sheep designed to breed female hybrids by crossing with Cheviot and other hill ewes.
It is almost certain that the Culleys adopted Bakewell’s incestuous breeding methods to create their new breed: ‘inand-in’ breeding (fathers with daughters, mothers with sons, and siblings with siblings) until the characteristics of the new breed were fixed. Defective animals would be culled – and eaten. They kept the flock closed (did not buy any rams or sell any females) to preserve the purity of their bloodline and almost always refused, pace Bakewell, to sell their rams – preferring to hire them out, often at huge prices.
The following extract from George Culley’s letter to his brother Matthew on 24 December 1784 succinctly explains the difference in the meat between the old type of sheep and the new sheep they were trying to create. Having ridden through Norfolk, Culley wrote:
Much is to be done in these horned countries, but when I know not, the change is so very great that people cannot easily reconcile their ideas to a long wooled [sic] sheep with a thick carcase, who have been used to their deer kind of sheep, the more they approach to deer, the more lean flesh and less fat in proportion but more gravy of the claret kind, Mr Matt. Mr Bakewell and I have recommended this consequently gentlemens [sic] mutton and the manufacturers [sic] mutton are of two kinds, the one lean with gravy, the other fat with oil, the gravy meat open grained and porous, the fat meat fine grained and close.
The ‘deer kind of sheep’ is a reference to the predominant Norfolk breed which was one of the old types that Bakewell and his disciples thought ‘profitless’, and ‘vessels to carry manure from one field to another’, scathingly dismissing their value to the old Norfolk fold–course system, by manuring the land for the next
crop of corn. But perhaps more telling is the way Culley’s words aptly illuminate the new mercantile approach to farming. The profitable sheep he breeds provide ‘manufacturers mutton … fat with oil’, firmly to be distinguished from the lean flesh of ‘gentlemens’ sheep that gives ‘gravy of the claret kind’.
To be fair to the traditionalists, who formed the majority of their neighbours and who took a principled dislike to the Culleys’ fat ‘manufacturers’ sheep, with some reason they feared the soft Leicester would adulterate the hardiness of their native breeds. One neighbouring landowner, William Mure, hired a ram from the Culleys, only to find that his neighbours, who were at that time inveterate enemies to the Culley sheep, had sabotaged his effort, by introducing ‘a black-guard Galloway ram’ amongst his ewes and out of the whole flock there were only five ewes that ‘had not got the ram …’
This resistance to the Culley Sheep was not, as it might have appeared, just local prejudice against in-comers. The detractors had a good point that they were nothing much as a breed in their own right: they ran too early to fat, their flesh was tasteless compared with the old breeds, they struggled to average more than a lamb and a third from each ewe, and they were too soft to subsist on ordinary grazing, needing to be fed throughout the winter (on the relatively new crops of turnips or cabbage, or on hay and corn).
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