Rudding at breeding time may well be an attempt to draw on this ancient magic, to promote fertility, to protect and purify the animal for the breeding season and to encourage good health and good luck. It ‘just looks right’ because it has these purposes, but it undoubtedly adds beauty by contrast to the steel-grey fleece, bringing good luck and gaiety to the autumn breeding season and lifting the spirits as the days shorten and the world slides into winter. Harry would have said I was talking fanciful nonsense, but he had no better explanation for the ancient practice.
I hadn’t so much as touched a Herdwick for over twenty years. So during the slack days that come after New Year I travelled up Borrowdale to see Stanley Jackson, at Nook Farm, Rosthwaite, to find out how the Herdwick was faring in the modern world.
As I crossed the county boundary a rainbow appeared against the looming pewter sky over the Solway, which I took as a favourable omen, and bowled along into the gloom. The North Cumberland Plain stretched out towards the Solway Firth in a fluorescent panorama beneath a flat line of low grey cloud. Then the rain began. By Keswick it was sheeting down and at Rosthwaite the road was awash. Derwentwater had flooded out across the low-lying fields and brown spumy water lapped at the roadside wall. The mist was down to about 500 feet, hanging like smoke in the freezing air, with no wind to disperse it. Icy rain bounced off the tarmac and sluiced down the grey slate roofs, overflowing the down-pipes and cascading across the cobbled yard at Nook Farm. We dodged and splashed through puddles and sprinted for the warmth of the farm kitchen.
Borrowdale was living up to its reputation as the wettest place in the wettest part of England. Stanley Jackson gazed out from the warmth of his kitchen at the relentless rain and flooded fields.
‘Last year was bad up here. A bloody wet summer. We had eighteen months of winter. And now look at this!’ He waved the back of his hand at the curtains of rain moving slowly down the valley.
‘No other breed could stand this wet. They’d die in the winter. Did you know a Herdwick ewe can absorb her foetus to survive a really hard time?’
Most of the ewes had gone back to the high fells after Christmas and the fields were almost empty and bare of grass. A few older ewes stood hog-backed, enduring the metallic rain, their white ears down and rain-washed hooves bunched-up together under them while water dripped off their steel-grey wool. On the way up Borrowdale I had noticed three ewes close to the iron railing fence on the roadside, motionless and chewing dolefully. They stared at me with elliptical almost reptilian pupils in saffron irises, pausing their chewing just long enough to conclude that I wasn’t interesting, before taking up the steady grinding rhythm again, water dribbling off their eyelashes and trickling down their ivory-white faces. My heart went out to these creatures enduring the bitter January rain in that bare field.
Stanley Jackson is a tenant of the National Trust, now the major landowner in the Lake District and the owner of over 25,000 Herdwick sheep heafed to the fells and let to their tenants as ‘landlord’s flocks’ with their farms. Stanley’s farm is one of the ninety-one the Trust owns in Cumbria, greatly expanded from the original fourteen, which Beatrix Potter bequeathed them in her will in 1943, bought largely with the proceeds of her Peter Rabbit books. She wanted to preserve the Herdwick sheep and the unique way of life of the fell farmers who kept them, and stipulated that the farms were to be let at moderate rents to suitable tenants.
But the Trust has a difficult trust to keep – it’s a delicate balance between its largely urban supporters and its farming tenants who keep the Herdwicks and understand their spirit. In a sense, the Trust is the modern secular equivalent of the great mediaeval religious houses whose lands were held in mortmain. They paid no feudal dues because no living hand owned their property and as it never changed hands its ownership was protected from the normal demands the Crown made on all other occupiers of land. In so far as was possible in feudal times, their ownership was absolute. By modern popular consent the National Trust enjoys similar protection from the state’s exactions: its property is held in perpetual trust; it is prevented by statute from selling or mortgaging it; it enjoys all the fiscal benefits of charitable status; and because it cannot die it pays no inheritance tax. There are other landowning charities that enjoy similar immunities – the RSPB, for instance, which owns or controls 128,000 acres in England – but none is as powerful or as well protected as the Trust.
Stanley has an eccentric way of judging the profitability of his sheep flock by comparing what he gets for a draft ewe with the number of fence posts that sum would buy. In 1980 it was sixty posts. In 2006 it was reduced to fifteen posts. Now that sheep prices have improved a little in the last few years, it’s about twenty posts. Although he’s hardly making a fortune, Stanley takes a long view and will carry on keeping his Herdwicks, for despite all the difficulties he loves this vocation that gives meaning to his life.
Despite valiant efforts by various groups to promote it for its hardwearing properties, the market for Herdwick wool almost disappeared in the last decade, even though it has recovered recently in line with the general increase in wool prices world-wide. There are two grades: Light Herdwick makes a penny or two more a kilo than Dark Herdwick, but both are in the lowest grade of the Wool Marketing Board’s price schedule. Some niche manufacturers are making imaginative things like durable luggage from it, but the appeal is limited. At one time it was used to make Hodden Grey cloth, an almost everlasting, waterproof rough tweed, woven in Caldbeck, later Cockermouth by John Woodcock Graves, the man who wrote ‘D’ye ken John Peel’. Peel’s ‘coat so grey’ was made from it. But it’s too coarse for most modern sensibilities.
Herdwick lamb, by contrast, is one of the less well-known gastronomic delights of England. The Queen has served it at official banquets. But until mutton fell out of favour and wool became virtually worthless, the best Herdwick meat came from wether sheep. Traditionally managed Herdwick flocks had always contained a large proportion of wethers, castrated males of varying ages, which only came down from the high fells once a year to be clipped and dipped. They cost virtually nothing to keep and would often be aged three or four or more years when they were sold. Unlike the ewes, they were unencumbered by lambs, and not compromised by motherhood and became strongly heafed to their mountain grazings, where they formed a united group that would ‘hold the fell’ against all-comers that might try to muscle in on their heaf. They were almost wild animals and their slow-growing carcase improved with age, especially after the wild flora of the high fells had imbued its dark meat with a distinctive gamey flavour, similar to but less heavy than venison.
The Prince of Wales has been a great promoter of Herdwick mutton. He founded the Mutton Renaissance Campaign in 2004 to bring mutton back into our diet and try to improve the income of Herdwick sheep farmers. Some of the more enterprising now sell their Herdwick meat direct to the consumer, helped by the internet, and some have developed sales at Borough Market in London, and Westmorland Services on the M6. But, as ever, producers are up against the buying power of the supermarkets, who will not stock mutton because there is a limited demand for it, which remains limited because they will not stock it.
In mid-afternoon, on my way down Borrowdale, the cloud cleared and it grew cold. A weak mid-winter sun appeared briefly before slipping down behind the high fells. It was shaping up to be a frosty night. Any creature needs special qualities of endurance to survive a day-long drenching followed by a freezing night. But when that creature’s only sustenance comes from poor vegetation scavenged from thin acid soils, its resilience has to be very special indeed and proves the Herdwick breeder’s boast that his sheep ‘live on fresh air, clean water and good views’. They bear privation with such dignity that their cleaving to this austere landscape has almost become a virtue.
11
THE DORSET HORN AND THE LLANWENOG
It has been said with truth that each locality tends to develop the livestock most suitable to it, and the chalk hills of D
orsetshire are probably responsible for its evolution. … It is true that enthusiasts, from time to time, are able to take a breed out of its native surroundings and do well with it, but they are no more that the exceptions which prove the rule.
From an article in Country Life, 7 December 1907
THE BREEDERS WHO BROUGHT THE ANCIENT TAN-faced sheep of south-west England from the medieval world into the modern age of Bakewell were not impeded by sentimental attachment to the old breeds that had outlived their usefulness. Their gaze was fi xed on the future and the huge changes they wrought over the ensuing 200 years so altered the native Dorsetshire sheep that it is hard to see – and they do not care to be reminded – that the Dorset Horn they created is descended (on its mother’s side) from a type that would have been ubiquitous across south-west England since the Iron Age, and almost indistinguishable from the primitive Portland. The Dorset is a breed that has grown so perfectly to fit its terrain and fulfil its purpose that it has no need of a crossing sire because no out-cross could possibly improve it.
The original old Dorsets were small thrifty sheep, with longer legs than the Portland, and characteristically black lips and nostrils. The ewes seldom needed help at lambing time because the lambs had small heads at birth, and also because they were such resilient self-sufficient sheep. These qualities were carried through into the improved Dorset Horn and were a large part of the attraction of Dorsets to the owners of sheep stations in Australia and New Zealand, where they are expected to get on with lambing on their own, without cosseting and constant supervision. They are naturally early-maturing sheep with a noble temperament.
One clue to the Dorset Horn’s ancestry is that it has the unusual capacity to breed all year round – an attribute that early commentators believed to come from a late-eighteenth-century cross with the Merino. But this is not true. There are numerous accounts of Dorsets lambing out of season long before their fleeting flirtation with Merinos. Edward Lisle wrote in 1756 about one of his tenants, ‘Farmer Stephens’, who at Lady Day (25 March) in 1707 sold the lambs fat off some Dorset Horn ewes and thinking ‘his ewes to be mutton, for they looked big’, at the beginning of June sent them to the butcher, who found they were about to lamb. They must have taken the ram nearly three months before their lambs were weaned. It is almost unbelievable that both Farmer Stephens and his landlord were surprised at one of the defining characteristics of the Dorset breed. And even harder to believe that Farmer Stephens could not distinguish, at a glance, a pregnant ewe from a fat one or that he did not know his ewes would take the ram and lamb at almost any season of the year.
25 March is the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Spring Equinox, and until the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in England in 1752 this was the first day of the year. There is a vestige of this in the tax year starting on 6 April, which is Lady Day adjusted for the days lost by the calendar change. This is a significant day in the farming year, when many tenancies began and ended. The years AD are counted from 25 March in the year preceding the birth of Christ because that is reckoned to be the date of his conception.
You can see what a Dorset Horn looks like whenever you pass a Young’s pub because the brewery adopted the breed as their mascot and have had it on their pub signs since they built their brewery on the Ram Field at Wandsworth, where it is said the villagers formerly kept a communal ram.
Dorset has been a sheep county for many centuries. Daniel Defoe in 1747, in his Tour thro’ the whole Island of Great Britain, describes how the downs come up to Dorchester on every side:
even to the very streets’ end; and here it was that they told me, that there were 600 thousand sheep fed on the downs, within six miles of the town … the grass or herbage of these downs is full of the sweetest, and the most aromatic plants, such as nourish the sheep to a strange degree, and the sheep’s dung again nourishes that herbage to a strange degree; so that the valleys are rendered extremely fruitful, by the washing of the water in hasty showers from off these hills.
There cannot have been half a million sheep within a six-mile radius of Dorchester in the middle of the eighteenth century. This is an area of 113 square miles, or 72,500 acres, which means there would have been more than eight sheep to the acre, which even today, with modern fertilisers and imported feedingstuffs, would be hard to maintain. In 1840 Youatt gave an estimate of the number of sheep in the whole county to be rather more than 632,000, which seems more likely, even though it works out at two sheep to every acre. Whatever the true number, it is clear that Dorsetshire has always sustained a lot of Dorset sheep, a breed ‘peculiar to itself’ being ‘chiefly collected within a circle extending ten or twelve miles from Dorchester’.
The Dorset has largely been created by selection from within the breed, not out-crossing. There have been experiments with crossing with various breeds but all gave indifferent results. For example, at the height of the Dishley Leicester fascination, a cross was tried to improve the Dorset’s carcase, but the results were disappointing. Then, at the end of the eighteenth century when the Merino craze was at its height, it too was tried, to improve the wool. Merinos bore (and still do) fleeces of the finest wool in the world. It was worth ten times as much as coarser English wool. And unlike most other fine-woolled sheep, for example the Southdown, it was of the same excellence all over the body, so close and fine on the back that it resisted the pressure of a flat hand. Merinos are unique sheep with a very long ancestry. They could originally have come into Spain with the Phoenicians when they arrived from the Levant, and having been improved by the Romans, they were brought to the pitch of woolly perfection under the medieval Spanish Mesta, where they were called Transhumante because they spent their winters in the Spanish lowlands and summers in the cooler hills of Castile. They were distinguished from the other principal breed in Spain, the Estante, so called because they stayed put and were not moved with the seasons, like their peripatetic cousins.
The Mesta (Honrado Concejo de la Mesta) was a powerful association of sheep ranchers in the medieval Kingdom of Castile. Until the expulsion of the Moors from the south of Spain resulted in the Reconquista at the end of the fifteenth century, there was a buffer zone about sixty miles wide between the Christian north and the Moorish-controlled south. Too insecure for settled farming, it could only be exploited by transhumant sheep grazing, where vast flocks grazed, regulated by the Mesta, which was the first agricultural union in medieval Europe. Its members grew rich from breeding Merinos and exporting their wool, at the time the finest in the world and, as in England, Spain’s greatest single resource. The Mesta enjoyed many privileges under the protection of the Castilian crown. For example, the network of 78,000 miles of cañadas (ancient drove roads believed to date from prehistoric times) was (and still is) protected for all time from obstruction. These had to be maintained at 100 yards wide and the most important were designated cañadas reales (‘royal cañadas’), specifically created and protected by the crown. Even some streets in Madrid are still part of the cañada system, and those with the right still assert it by driving sheep through the modern city. Every autumn since 1994 the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture has encouraged the fiesta of transhumance when 2,000 sheep are driven through the centre of Madrid. Upon payment of 25 maravedis (an eleventh-century coin) to the city council, shepherds and drovers have the right to stop the traffic and take their flocks through the streets following the routes of the cañadas.
So highly prized and valuable to the Spanish crown was Merino wool that for centuries the export of live sheep was prohibited on pain of death. Gradually, over time it became practically impossible to enforce the ban and in any case the king himself undermined it by giving his cousin, the Elector of Saxony, 300 Merinos in 1765 (from which the Saxon strain is founded); then he allowed another cousin, Louis XVI, to buy 350 sheep to start a flock on his model farm at Rambouillet (which founded the French strain). And in 1789 the Spanish Crown allowed further stock to be exported to South Africa, from wh
ere they were taken to Australia as the basis of the vast wool flocks of the New World. But as good as the Merino undoubtedly was, it could still be bettered by a drop of English blood, because in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it is recorded that Spanish breeders imported English sheep to improve the local woolly breed that became the modern Merino.
‘Farmer’ George III and certain of his enthusiastic landed supporters came to believe that our English wool-producing flocks could be improved in their fleece by a cross with the Merino. Apart from his patriotic wish to give English sheep better wool, the king’s intention was to try to keep British weavers employed by seeing off foreign threats to our textile manufacture. Sir Joseph Banks managed to procure a couple of Merinos via France in 1785, and then the king himself got hold of some indifferent specimens in 1789 by having them smuggled via Portugal to England, where he installed them on his model farms at Kew and Richmond. Five years later he approached the king of Spain directly and persuaded him to allow the export of a legitimate consignment of his prized Negretti type to add to the royal flocks. This English importation began a fifty-year experiment in crossing the Merino with many of our native breeds which, in theory, ought to have improved their wool, but in practice was an almost complete failure. Its enduring legacy, for better or worse – and largely for worse – is that traces of Merino blood flow through the veins of most of our native breeds.
The effect on the Dorset (and almost every other breed it was crossed with, except probably the North Country Cheviot) was to improve the wool in the first cross at the cost of an almost immediate deterioration in the carcase. This did not endear the Merino to commercial English breeders who were turning away from pure wool production and striving to breed meat-sheep. The breed was also disliked on aesthetic grounds because its extravagant dewlap and folds of woolly skin were offensive to the English taste for understatement and simplicity. To add insult to injury, after the first cross, the wool deteriorated unless the ewes were back-crossed with a Merino, in which case the carcase deteriorated even further. The long Spanish concentration on excellence in the wool had created an animal that was more like a late-maturing woolly goat than a sheep and perhaps more importantly, apart from the bad carcase, the breed simply failed to adapt to English conditions.
Counting Sheep Page 19