Counting Sheep

by Philip Walling

  In hard times, when grass is really scarce, Herdwicks will find a way to survive. The more enterprising will find their way onto roadside verges, jumping stone walls or getting over cattle grids by squeezing themselves close to the side-walls and tiptoeing along the edge like a ballerina; I heard of one ewe that had mastered a trick of doing a side-roll over the bars. Resourcefulness has long been a feature of the breed. Lydekker, in his 1912 account, The Sheep and Its Cousins, wrote that Herdwicks’ ‘activity is unsurpassed, as they leap like bucks and ascend stone walls in almost cat-like fashion’.

  The origins of the breed are obscure. There is the usual legend that they are descended from sheep which swam ashore from a wrecked Spanish galleon that ran aground off Raven-glass in the aftermath of the Armada. The story is almost certainly a fable, particularly since there has never been anything remotely resembling a Herdwick in Spain, and the same exotic origin is attributed to other British breeds whose provenance has been forgotten. A Spanish vessel in the Armada was a man-of-war, not Noah’s Ark.

  William Youatt, in his classic work, Sheep (1840), gives a slightly different slant on their supposed maritime origin:

  In the beginning of the last century a ship was stranded on the coast of Cumberland that had on board some Scotch sheep which seem to be now unknown in that country. They were got on shore and being driven up the country were purchased by some farmers who lived at Wasdale-head, in the neighbourhood of Keswick.

  Apart from Wasdale Head not being that close to Keswick, the two stories add an exotic, almost cargo-cultish aura to the Herdwick’s mystique. A remnant has been cast up by the sea, as if Providence had provided them for the benefit of the flock-masters of the Cumbrian and Westmorland mountains, who must be supposed not to have kept sheep before.

  The Shorter Oxford Dictionary says that the Herdwick ‘originated on the herdwicks of the Abbey of Furness’ and herdwick is a ‘tract of land under the charge of a “herd” employed by the owner’. This comes from wick, which is from the Latin vicus, meaning village, town or farm, as in Keswick, Berwick or Greenwic(k)h. But then wick has another meaning from the Old English wice, an office or function of an official. So wick is the herd’s jurisdiction over the flock in his care and the land over which his flocks graze, just as bailiwick is both the bailiff’s office and the area over which his jurisdiction extends. Herdwyke is also Old Norse for a sheep farm.

  So, it would appear that any breed of sheep kept on the mountain sheep farms of the Lake District would be called a Herdwick. This might explain why the sheep in William Taylor Longmire’s painting from the 1860s are described as Herdwicks even though they look nothing like today’s Herdwicks.

  Genetically the Herdwick is said to belong to the group of Northern European short-tailed sheep and is closely related to Norse breeds such as the Ronaldsay and the Spaelsau from the island of Froya off the west coast of Norway. But they are not short-tailed sheep and seem to have many similarities with the Hardy Welsh Mountain and other types of the great tribe of white-faced breeds related to the Cheviot. They may well be a cross between the sheep the Vikings brought over in the ninth and tenth centuries and the indigenous Celtic sheep they found in Cumbria.

  Herdwicks can survive long periods of hard weather, not only without supplementary feed of any kind, but without the roughage that sustains other hill breeds, because unlike the Scottish hills or the Pennines, the thin soils of the Lake District fells are largely bare of accumulated herbage. There are accounts of Herdwicks surviving for weeks under snow, and despite being blind when they emerged, and having eaten their own wool, recovering to full health afterwards.

  My affair with the Herdwick began in the 1970s, when for a few months I had nothing much to do and Harry Hardisty asked me to give him a hand as a general dogsbody on his farm called Darling How, at Lorton in Cumbria. Harry was a Herdwick man, and a dog-and-stick man – or more accurately, a dog, stick and boots man. It was a shame he died before the invention of the quad bike because it would have been perfect for him, had he been able to work one and stay on it. He didn’t use a tractor because he said he didn’t need one, but actually he could barely drive one. He had a car he ‘kept for best’, but his wife usually drove that.

  His mainstay was an old Bedford van with sliding front doors, into which he could, at a pinch, squeeze about twenty sheep, held in with a ‘heck’ – a wooden hurdle – wedged just inside the back-doors and secured with baler twine. At every opportunity Harry got me to drive the van. We went about in all weathers with the sliding doors held open by a canvas strap which slipped over the door catch, so the dogs (and I) could jump in and out quickly. Harry sat up in front with his nailed fell boots with their turned-up toes, scraping and scratching the metal floor, one hand stained red with sheep smit, grasping his horn-handled stick, and an Embassy Regal between the fingers of the other.

  Smit is a Cumbrian dialect word for the fluid used to mark the sheep’s fleece to indicate ownership. Red was made from haematite ore (iron oxide), which was mined in West Cumberland. Black came from graphite (plumbago), which was mined in Borrowdale from earliest times and provided the raw material for the manufacture at Keswick of Cumberland pencils. Traditional shepherd’s boots, like Roman marching sandals, and infantry boots, have sprung soles, so that with the heel flat on the ground the toe is about two and a half inches off it. You walk with a rocking motion using your ankles and calves, and are propelled forward, without bending your toes; it is much less tiring than walking in flexible-soled boots. They used to be made by bootmakers in market towns up and down the land, but as rubber soles have superseded them, and country people hardly walk anywhere any more, the trade has shrunk to the last traditional shepherd’s boot maker in Britain, Lennon’s of Stony Middleton, in Derbyshire.

  Harry and I spent much of our time touring round in the van, ‘looking’ the sheep, gathering up strays and generally ‘keeping an eye on things’. Most of Darling How was steep fields or even steeper fellsides, and much of our looking was done through a pair of binoculars from the front seat of the van. If there were sheep to gather from land which involved any strenuous climbing, Harry would usually send a dog, or me, directing the dog with a whistle and, in my case, shouting and swearing at the top of his voice, from his vantage point on the passenger seat. Now and again the dog would do something wrong enough to cause Harry to explode in fury, leap from his seat wave his arms about and yell oaths at the top of his voice. Noise carries a long way in steep valleys, especially on still days, and at most times of the year you could be sure that there would be a few unseen walkers silently trudging up or down the fells, or through the woods. Heaven knows what they made of his outbursts of dreadful language. I often felt embarrassed about his loss of self-control, but it never seemed to bother him when I pointed out that he might have shocked some gentle walker with his profanities. To him they were ‘nothing but a bloody nuisance’ and probably trespassing anyway.

  He had a particular phobia about ‘ramblers’ dogs’ chasing his sheep. Whenever he came across a dog off the lead, even when it was under control and no danger to his sheep, he never failed to shout at its owner, often at the top of his voice, ‘Get that bugger on a lead!’ There seemed to be something about gathering hill sheep that drove hill farmers to gibbering fury, either at their dogs, anyone who happened to be in the way, or nobody in particular. One neighbour, who died young, had such a notoriously bad temper, particularly when he was gathering, and used such dreadful language, that an offended walker once complained to the village policeman, who issued him with a caution. It was not clear what offence he was supposed to have committed.

  Before he turned to farming, Harry had, for twenty-five years, been the huntsman of the Melbreak Foxhounds, hunting on foot, in winter, over a sector of majestic country running west from the top of Great Gable, along the watershed between the Ennerdale and Buttermere valleys, and north along the River Derwent through Borrowdale to Keswick and Cockermouth. He knew every square yard of t
his country, like a fox, in his bones and in his soul.

  When he took it, Darling How was a run-down fell farm with a damp, single-storey house, and dilapidated farm buildings surrounding a cobbled yard with an open midden in the middle. The few flat fields were infested with rushes because the drains and ditches had been neglected during the depression, before and after the First World War. Then the Forestry Commission acquired the farm as part of a great post-war tree-planting scheme intended to replace the timber felled during centuries of industrialisation, war and coal mining.

  On first sight, the farm was not an attractive prospect. But Harry knew its potential. Apart from the cheap rent, until the Commission (as he called it) got its hands on it, Darling How had been one of the best Herdwick sheep farms in the northern Lake District. And even though the Commission had planted up most of the best parts, leaving Harry ‘the bits that wouldn’t even grow trees’, there was still something about the terrain that made good Herdwick sheep.

  From these unpromising beginnings, Harry had created a prizewinning flock of Herdwicks from the scraggy collection he had been required to take over from the previous tenant. According to the usual practice on Lakeland sheep farms, Harry bought the flock at a valuation and was expected to hand on the same number and quality of sheep to the next tenant when he left.

  But there was something else that attracted Harry to Darling How. The farm had only been created when the previously unfenced Lorton common was enclosed by a private Act of Parliament in 1840. The newly enclosed land had been parcelled out amongst the erstwhile commoners in proportion to their previous rights on the common and divided up by new drystone walls. The walls were built, often on impossibly steep land, with stone quarried as close as possible above the site, and then sledged down. They never carried stone uphill. Most of these walls are still running clear across the fells, proclaiming our Victorian ancestors’ faith in progress. They were functional, not intended to be beautiful and built quickly to a price, but skilled hands have produced a beautiful marriage of form and function.

  As all the land at Darling How lay within the newly enclosed Lorton commons, Harry had no grazing rights on any of the surrounding huge unenclosed commons on the high fells in the adjoining parishes of Buttermere, Brackenthwaite and Braithwaite, where the ancient system of common grazing that long pre-dates the Conquest still obtained. Traditionally the heafed flocks held their ground on the huge areas of land by force of numbers but, by the late 1960s, the system had become so degraded, due to amalgamation of farms and shortage of labour, that Harry was able to exploit the resulting vacuum with impunity. Even though he had absolutely no right to be there, the under-grazed land was too tempting an opportunity for him to pass up.

  Those commoners who still kept flocks on the common were not amused by Harry’s antics, but there was little they could do about it because it was not a criminal offence; their only remedy would have been to sue him for trespass. But that would have required all those with common rights to agree to do it and many were not interested, because they did not exercise them. Besides which, they were all a little bit frightened of him, because he was as tough a character as his Herdwicks.

  But he had another advantage. He knew that the fencing around the woods was worn out, with large sections missing, so he only had to let his sheep get into the woods and they would eventually find their way out onto the common. For long stretches the forest fence ran along a ridge or saddle of land 1,800 feet high. On one side were the extensive woods and the other ran down about 1,000 feet into the valley below. So when Harry’s Herdwicks emerged onto the common they had the advantage of being way above the commoners’ flocks that had had to work their way up from the lower slopes in the valley on the other side. They could dominate the grazing and during the short summer season, by sheer press of numbers, could force the commoners’ flocks to stay on the lower slopes. Then in the autumn, having eaten out the high-lying grazings where the commoners’ flocks ought to have been during the summer, Harry’s sheep simply retreated for the winter to the shelter of the thousands of acres of ungrazed woods. And being forced to graze out the lower slopes meant the commoner’s flocks were eating the store of preserved roughage that would have seen them through the winter.

  Just because Herdwicks lack a compatible Longwool to make breeding hybrids, we should not be blinded to their remarkable breeding potential. Every year I used to buy forty draft Herdwick ewes from a breeder whose sheep grazed the high fells between Ennerdale and Wastwater. They never saw a pickle of feed from one year end to the next and gained their whole sustenance from the alpine sedges and herbage that clung to the thin acid soils of their rain-swept terrain. When they came into the auction mart, at the beginning of October, straight off their bleak common grazings as four-year-old ewes, they were thin, grey, half-starved things, ‘clapped like kippers’. But their appearance belied their tremendous promise.

  Compared to their mountain heaf, the grazing I offered them must have seemed like the Fields of Elysium. No matter how bad the winter, their pride and ingrained frugality prevented them from taking any hand-feed. Then, the following spring, most would quietly, almost discreetly, give birth to twins, which by August would be as big as their mothers. The astonishing thing was that these ewes would produce twins for three or four seasons, grow half as big again as they had been when I bought them and at the end of their lives achieve a better price than I’d paid for them. Such results were exceptional because the breeder was a traditionalist who passed on the full value of his sheep to his buyer. They were what the auctioneer described as ‘honest sheep.’ In other words, the seller had not, before he sold his sheep, tried to get for himself some of the profit he was purporting to pass on to the buyer. He could have housed them or fed them during the winter and he would have made more for himself, but he would have deprived his buyer of some of their potential and that would have been unthinkable to him. It wasn’t so much the sheep that were honest as the man who was selling them.

  One of these ewes proved to me the almost unbelievable hardiness of Herdwicks. One January I found her hanging by her back legs from two strands of wire running along the top of a wall where she had got tangled up trying to jump over. When I extricated her and set her on the ground her rear end collapsed, apparently paralysed. That didn’t stop her trying to drag herself along by her front legs, with her hind quarters trailing behind. I thought she might have damaged the motor nerves in her pelvis, but as she didn’t appear to be in pain I kept her to see if she would improve. I tried hand-feeding her with tempting little things that sheep like, such as locust beans, dried peas and crushed oats, but she was too proud to accept charity.

  During the rest of what turned out to be a cold, wet winter and spring she dragged her hind legs around her small field, fending for herself. Even when the grass was frozen, she refused to touch the fragrant meadow hay I put out for her. Then in late April she gave birth to Suffolk cross triplets. They were small but healthy so I let her keep two and fostered the third onto a ewe that had lost her lamb.

  After her lambs were weaned in July I moved her into another field, intending to send her to the knackerman when she had fattened up a bit. But she seemed to do so well and had such spirit that I didn’t have the heart to get rid of her. She survived another winter, again stubbornly refusing all handouts, living on what she could forage (including the bark of ash branches that had been blown off in storms), but she never moved beyond the couple of acres in the field she had chosen as her heaf.

  Then one morning in late May, after most of the other ewes had lambed, I happened to glance over the wall and there she had two small, healthy lambs. I had no idea how she had contrived to be in lamb. She reared both lambs herself because I didn’t have a foster mother that late in the season. This would have been her sixth crop of lambs. The following spring she gave birth to two more lambs – this time Cheviot crosses – and reared them herself. Again I had no idea how she had managed to get in lamb. I never saw an
y ram with her and she certainly could not have got out of the field. The ram must have found her. She reared those lambs as well, but during that autumn she started to show signs of failing, so, with a heavy heart, I shot her. I felt it was better than allowing her to suffer, or submitting her to the trauma of being taken away in the back of the knackerman’s charnel-wagon. I buried her in the corner of the field she had chosen as her last home.

  There is a unique tradition amongst Herdwick breeders to rudd both the tups and the ewes at breeding time and for autumn show and sale. Rudding is applying a deep redochre paste made from iron oxide powder mixed with oil and rubbed into the sheep’s back and nape. This is an ancient practice without any apparent practical utility, and seems to be a relic of almost mystical significance from an older world. It is usually only done at breeding time and, as far as I know, at no other time of year, except perhaps if a special sheep was to be sold or shown in some kind of competition.

  The practice looks very like a kind of sympathetic magic. Sir James Frazer mentions in The Golden Bough the primitive belief in the magical healing power of the colour red; that among primitive peoples red is an elemental colour associated with many forms of protective magic related to energy, fertility and medicine. It is not only symbolic because in traditional medicine red is believed to have its own energising power. For example, to this day in certain Eastern countries red clothes are worn during an illness because it is believed that red drives away depression and promotes healing. Military hospitals made up the beds of wounded soldiers with red blankets. In the Balkans it is still common to see red tassels hanging from horses’ head-harnesses. I remember an old aunt wearing red flannel next to her skin to relieve aches and pains. I don’t know whether people still use it, but it was certainly believed to be efficacious well into the last century.