Counting Sheep

by Philip Walling

  Yet, despite all the evidence that the experiment had failed, it took decades for its most zealous partisans to be disabused of their error. Even when the truth walked before their eyes, and was plainly stated by practical breeders – even the great Coke himself – many still clung to the orthodoxy that four Merino crosses ought to produce an English sheep with Spanish-quality wool. Coke spoke, with untypical understatement, for most practical breeders, when he said at his Shearing in 1811 (the year the Merino Society was founded), ‘I have reason to believe that however one cross may answer, a further progress will not prove advantageous.’

  There is a plausible theory that the Merino could not adapt to its British situation because most of our soils are copper-deficient and their metabolism needed more of that mineral than our home-bred English sheep. As this theory came from a Frenchman, it ought not to be considered entirely free of xenophobia, even Schadenfreude, because the French succeeded not only in improving some of their native breeds with Merino crosses, but in creating an entirely new and valuable breed from Louis XVI’s importation. This came to be called the Rambouillet and had a huge influence on the development of the Merino in Australian sheep farming.

  The failed experiment with the Merino encouraged the leading Dorset breeders to stick to their own breed and improve it from within with selected improving sires; this they saw as a more certain (albeit slower) method of improvement. So apart from an infusion of blood from the larger Somerset variant of the Dorset to increase its size (from which it is supposed to have got its pink nose), all the breeding improvements came from within the breed itself. This tended to strengthen the Dorset’s connection with its surroundings and make it even more a product of the Dorset soil.

  Dorset wool was good, but not the finest, because even in the seventeenth century, when wool was still valuable, high-quality lamb, ‘house-lamb’, at Christmas was a more profitable market to exploit and traditional Dorset breeders had cultivated it to the pitch of perfection. Long before the eighteenth-century breeding revolution from wool to meat, Dorset farmers had developed this system of rearing prime milk-fed lamb for the London market, exploiting the Dorset’s unusual attribute of out-of-season lambing.

  House-lamb derives from ‘housed’ rather than having anything to do with domestic dwellings. Well managed, the ewes would take the ram in early April (when most other breeds are lambing) and would lamb five months later in September and October – and usually have twins. The aim was to give the lambs as much milk as possible for the two to three months leading up to Christmas, so that they would sell as a luxury food, at a high price, as finished suckling lamb, at a time of year when young lamb was otherwise unobtainable. It was a labour-intensive system practised on a large scale, and would nowadays be entitled to an appellation contrôlée like poulet de Bresse, Parma ham or Stilton cheese.

  The ewes gave birth outside and immediately afterwards they and their young lambs were housed in barns that had been scrupulously cleaned during the summer to minimise disease. The lambs stayed inside during the night with their mothers. Then in the morning the ewes were allowed out to graze the best pastures, supplemented with good green hay, swedes, grains, clover – anything of the best that was available. At mid-morning any ewes that had either lost their lambs or whose lambs had already been sold but were still in full-milk were brought in as wet-nurses and the lambs suckled from them until their udders were dry. At midday the natural mothers were brought back in from the fields to suckle for an hour or two. Then at tea-time the wet-nurses were brought in again for an hour or so. Then at eight o’clock their natural mothers came in again for the night shift. Everything possible was done to ensure the ewes were kept in full-milk because once a ewe’s milk began to decline, no amount of feeding would revive her lactation; she would just grow fat. The lambs were pampered, given good wheat straw to nibble (to stimulate their digestion) and pieces of chalk to lick (for minerals), would grow quickly on the surfeit of milk and be ready for market at about eight to ten weeks old.

  Another benefit from Dorset sheep is that their manure maintains the fertility of the light, flinty Dorsetshire soils. They do well on a diet of roots and green crops and, being docile sheep, readily accept close confinement during the winter in folds. Docile as they are, shearing gangs aren’t fond of Dorsets, because they’re ‘so uneasy, and they won’t sit on their arses. Chilver lambs are the worst,’ says Francis Fooks. Chilver is an old English word for a gimmer lamb – i.e. not yet a year old and has not been shorn. The corresponding phrase in the north of England and Scotland is gimmer hogg. Francis Fooks, with his brothers, farms 800 acres at North Poorton, near Bridport. Their great-grandfather established the flock in 1906.

  Dorsets are ‘sheep for the modern world’, says Francis. It is one of the few breeds whose ewes will lamb at nearly any season of the year and the pure-bred closed flock makes fine finished lambs from grass and roots earlier than nearly any other breed, without invoking the hybrid vigour that many other pure breeds seem to need to fulfil their potential. The great value of keeping a ‘closed’ flock and only importing rams is that the ewes become accustomed to their terrain, develop immunity to certain parasites and diseases and are a known quantity, having been selected over generations by their breeder. So long as they are as good as Dorsets, there is no need to consider breeding hybrids.

  In 1937 an ‘accidental’ mating between a Dorset Horn ewe and a Corriedale ram (half Merino, half Lincoln Long-wool bred in New Zealand) produced a ewe lamb without horns. When this lamb was mated back with a Dorset Horn ram the resulting ram lamb was polled. This started a twenty-year breeding experiment aimed at breeding a Dorset with all the Dorset Horn qualities but without the horns. The Polled Dorset is now a separate breed which has become more popular than the horned variety. It does not catch its horns in netting, can be packed tighter in the sheep pens, takes up less space at feeding troughs and is popular with the abattoirs that do not like horns. It is questionable whether these benefits are worth the loss of handles. But there is something else. I asked Francis why he still keeps the horned variety if polled ones are so much easier to manage and he replied, ‘Horned sheep remind me of what the polled sheep ought to look like.’

  By this he means that the Polled Dorset is not quite a Dorset Horn without horns. If it’s bred pure for long enough it either reverts to being like one of the other breeds that make up its ancestry or it begins to grow horns. As with the Suffolk, many supposedly polled Dorsets grow scurs and, it seems, sheep with a better carcase tend towards being horned. Horns in the Dorset are another of those secondary breeding characteristics it appears cannot be bred out without losing some of the essence of the breed.

  Until artificial fertilisers became cheaper in the middle of the last century, it was common for arable farmers to allow sheep farmers to grow root crops on their land to feed their sheep during the winter, simply in return for the manure. But modern grass varieties that stay green and keep growing throughout the winter have tended to replace roots. They do not give as much goodness to the soil, but they are much less work and consequently cheaper than a crop of the swedes and kale which the Fooks’ sheep feed on through the winter. Crops from the Brassica family are a wonderful store of energy and fresh food during the winter, and greatly increase the productivity of livestock farms. They can be grown either for their starchy roots and leafy tops (swedes and turnips) or just for their green leaves (kale, rape or cabbage). Although swedes are over 90 per cent water, it is, as the saying goes, ‘bloody good water’ and sheep folded on roots generally do not need extra drinking water, making folding so much easier, because there is no need to carry water to them, or let them out daily to drink. Francis has found that if you give sheep water when they’re first folded they drink deeply from it once and then never go near it again for weeks on end. Drinking too much also makes their dung loose and in a wet season soils their fleeces.

  On the high land in this part of Dorset, the sandy topsoil is only four to si
x inches deep and careful shallow ploughing is necessary to avoid turning up the less fertile and intractable yellow and grey clay subsoil. In some places the limestone bedrock pokes through the surface. The soil has a warm orange ochre tone and imparts a tint to the fleeces of the sheep folded on it. It is what Francis describes as ‘hungry gutless sand’. When the sun comes out after rain, the wet flints on the bare earth shine like a pavement and without the dung of livestock it would be very unproductive. In winter it is sticky and muddy and then it dries out quickly in spring. Ideally, to be farmable, it needs ‘a storm of rain every day and a storm of shit on Sundays’, says Francis.

  Compared with the Dorset’s ancient lineage, the Llanwenog would seem to be a parvenu. With its spindly legs, no horns and a woolly topknot, it resembles nothing so much as a badly bred Suffolk in a barrister’s wig.

  The heartland of the breed is in the Teifi valley around Lampeter in Ceredigion in West Wales, amongst small farms in soft green dairying country with a mild Atlantic climate, where the grass comes early and grows lushly late into the year. In most winters there is no snow and little frost, although fierce winter storms race in from the North Atlantic between Cape Clear and Land’s End.

  Already by the middle of the eighteenth century the farmers here had established a lucrative trade in butter with the London market, which they transported by sea from ports in West Wales. This connection with the capital drew people from the Teifi Valley to seek their fortune in the ‘milk business’ in London, particularly in Bethnal Green, where they kept milch cows to provide fresh milk for the metropolis. Welsh emigrants could make enough money from the London milk trade to set themselves up on a small farm when they retired back to West Wales.

  The area between Lampeter and Llandysul was nicknamed the ‘Black Spot’ (Y Smotyn Du) by the dominant Welsh Calvinist Methodists because its inhabitants espoused Unitarianism in defiance of the almost complete Methodist hegemony in Wales. When this group of dissentient parishes in mid-Ceredigion was dotted on the map of Wales, to the fury of the Methodists, it appeared as a black cluster of intransigence. Unitarians were considered dangerous radicals and free-thinkers, especially as they were early and vocal supporters of the French Revolution and active in the Rebecca riots in the late 1830s. Almost all the original Llanwenog breeders were Unitarians (many still are), who stuck together in their dissentient group, intermarried, lent each other money and supported one another; and out of this emerged their breed, the Llanwenog.

  On its mother’s side it is most likely descended from the unrecorded and forgotten primitive Cardy, an ill-shaped little animal that was once native to the hills of Cardiganshire, Carmarthenshire and Brecknockshire. It seems to have been a member of the great tribe of ancient English Heath sheep and, as Robert Trow-Smith remarks, an exhibit in ‘the ovine open-air museum of the Welsh hills’ with a lineage on its native soil stretching back into prehistory.

  These sheep were kept like crofters’ sheep, for their wool and manure. They were not as important to the farmers of West Wales as their principal export, the little hardy black cattle, which for centuries they had consigned in droves to the fattening pastures and markets of England. But, in the late eighteenth century, the cattle yielded primacy to sheep because of the increasing urban demand for mutton and tallow for candles and a home-grown demand for wool to supply the Welsh weaving industry. Huge flocks were entrusted to drovers who walked them into the Midlands and on to London along the ancient drove roads through South Wales into Gloucester-shire, Herefordshire and beyond.

  In 1867 the first railway to penetrate West Wales opened from Shrewsbury to Carmarthen (via Aberystwyth and Lampeter) and the old practice changed almost overnight. For the first time in history, farmers could carry their sheep to the English market in less than a day; they could buy sheep in the morning and almost have them back home on their farms that evening. By one of those happy coincidences, about the same time as the railway opened, the Shropshire Down was enjoying its heyday as the most popular Down breed. If the railway had followed a southern route from England the story would almost certainly have been different. But as the line went to Shropshire, the breeders in West Wales found it easy to take home the Shropshire to improve their native flocks.

  The Shropshire Down had been created by crossing the New Leicester with one of the ancient West Midland or Welsh border types and then by a second cross with the Southdown. The new breed first appeared in the area around Bridgnorth, where the now extinct ancient Morfe was indigenous, so it might be that on its maternal side it is descended from the Morfe, but as no trace of that breed has survived, it is impossible to know. The Shropshire was widely admired and became very fashionable. It was prolific, with a very good fleece, and thrifty, gaining most of its sustenance from grass; its only arguable defect was that it tended to sire small lambs when crossed with small hill ewes. But breeders were compensated for the smallness of their lambs by the fact that they were regularly rearing between one and three-quarters and two lambs from every Shropshire ewe.

  Within ten years of the railway arriving in this remote, almost entirely Welsh-speaking part of Wales, the Shrop-shire Down became established in the mid-Teifi valley, largely through rams imported by three improving farmers whose land lay alongside the new line between Lampeter, Llanbydder and Llanwenog. But it took longer to create the Llanwenog. The intention was to breed a sheep that would complement the dairy herds which provided the main income for most of these Cardiganshire farms. Mixed grazing is good for the pastures because sheep’s closer grazing makes the grass tiller out and the sward thicken; sheep’s hooves level the surface after cattle have plunged it with their much bigger hooves; and a sheep flock tidies up the grazing after the cattle. Also it reduces the burden of worms that each species carries because they can ingest one another’s worm larvae without being infected as they are destroyed in their digestive systems.

  They sought a moderate-sized, placid, prolific ewe with good wool that was disinclined to stray and would produce prime butchers’ lambs, entirely from grass. It was crucial that it lambed early, before the dairy herd was turned out in spring so as not compete with the cows for spring grazing. They also sought a ewe that would breed its own replacements, so the flock would become acclimatised to the terrain, and reduce the risk of importing disease.

  It was a tall order to try to reproduce all these attributes in one breed. But in their own unobtrusive way the breeders achieved their objectives. The Llanwenog remained largely confined to the Teifi Valley until 1963, when the breed took four out of the six prizes in the class for small pure-bred lowland flocks in the national lambing competition organised by The British Farmer and Stockbreeder. The winning flock averaged 213 per cent lambing, a thing almost unheard of. Then the breed won again in the next two years with another flock achieving 230 per cent lambing; and for four consecutive seasons, between 1966 and 1970, John Hughes’s flock at Cwmere, shepherded by his daughter Christina, averaged 217 per cent lambing. No other breed or hybrid could average more than 200 per cent.

  This astonishing fecundity is an unforeseen consequence of the way the flocks have been managed. To reduce competition with the dairy herd for grass during the summer, lambs that were ready for market were sold fat straight off their mothers. Inevitably singles and twins would be ready earlier and be the first to go. The triplets and quads would be smaller at birth, would grow more slowly and tend to be the animals left at the end of the season. It was from these that the flock replacements would be chosen. As the tendency for multiple births is inherited, the flock would come to comprise ewes with that propensity. Ewes with these qualities admirably suited the dairying regime of West Wales: multiple births from mediumsized ewes meant that they needed to keep fewer ewes over the winter which did not graze the fields bare. And by lambing early in the year their need for grazing coincided with the flush of spring grass when there was plenty for both the lambing flock and the dairy herd.

  Another benefit is the Llanwenog’s
longevity, due to the ewes’ excellent teeth. The ewes regularly have six or seven crops of lambs and so breeders can be choosier about their replacements and can pick a few of the best from each year’s crop of lambs. When each ewe has twins, only about twenty ewe lambs are needed each year (10 per cent of all lambs) to maintain a flock of 100 ewes. The remaining 180 or so are available for sale, either for meat, or, if they are good enough, to other farmers for breeding. Also, having a closed flock, the ewes are acclimatised to their farm and fewer die from disease. The only thing the breeder needs to buy is a couple of fresh rams each year to keep up the flock’s vigour. This is how to make lowland sheep farming pay.

  Flock No. 1 in the Llanwenog Flock Book (the first flock registered out of the eighty-eight original flocks that formed the Breed Society in 1957) belongs to Huw Evans from Alltgoch in Llanwenog parish. Huw’s great-grandfather and his two sons (Huw’s grandfather and great uncle) came to Alltgoch in 1905 and the Unitarian minister at the time lent them the money to buy their first sheep.

  The place exudes old-world, unostentatious order, hallowed by long and loving use. A spring flows peacefully from a pipe beside the house into a drinking trough, which feeds a large duck pond at the bottom of the yard.