Alltgoch means red forest, or forest red, I suppose it should be. And goch is a Welsh word borrowed from the Latin coccum, meaning ‘scarlet’ (the same derivation as ‘coch’ in cochineal). The River Coquet (red river) has the same Welsh root. The Celtic word connects geology and terrain with their effect on the quality of the sheep. Alltgoch and a few surrounding farms in Llanwenog parish overlie limestone, which is markedly different rock from the predominating Silurian mudstone that makes up much of the coastal rocks of West Wales. Limestone has a high natural pH and here contains deep mineral intrusions with ores of lead, zinc, even gold, as well as many other trace elements. Alltgoch produces high-quality livestock (particularly Llanwenogs) for the same reason as the mineral-rich soil around the headwaters of the Coquet produces fine Cheviots. This oasis contrasts strongly with the soils overlying the more acidic and predominant Silurian rocks in this part of West Wales, which need regular liming to raise the pH high enough to unlock their fertility and release their trace minerals.
In the forty years between 1957, when the Society was formed, and 1997, the Evans flock at Alltgoch won the large flock competition twenty-two times. They took the trophy thirteen years in succession between 1985 and 1997 and have never bought a sheep apart from the Llanwenog rams they have used for over 100 years.
Huw Evans is a Welsh bard who has been awarded three bardic chairs – not just of the metaphorical academic variety, but real, light-oak chairs, with arms and beautifully carved high backs. They sit in his parlour, his holy of holies, along with the cups, photographs, flock books and a century of Llanwenog memorabilia. He has written Welsh poetry since his teens and recited it at the National Eisteddfod. For the Royal Welsh Show County Appeal for Ceredigion in 2010, he teamed up with the artist Aneurin (Aneurin Jones) to produce a montage of a painting above a poem in Welsh, in praise of Wales and the ancient roots of its people. It is a real expression of belonging to the land and a paean to the beauty of the soil and its fruits.
Here are preserved the treasures and memorabilia of the things that have nourished the roots of four generations of Huw’s family in West Wales: the land, the Welsh language and its poetry and Llanwenog sheep. He has every flock book, going back to the formation of the Llanwenog Society, in which are recorded the pedigrees of every sheep ever registered with the Society, farm by farm, flock by flock, family by family. These records are like the deeds of a house: they verify an animal’s descent.
Beside the door hangs a tapestry map of Alltgoch made to commemorate Huw’s birth on 22 January 1958. The loving labour that has gone into this – each field is embroidered in a different pattern – and the prophecy in it, or perhaps the pre-destination, set a seal on the course of his life. It is as if he was born for the farm and the farm for him, his destiny recorded by the tapestry, but not determined by it. That was the course set for him before he was born and Huw felt he could no more change that than he could alter the colour of his hair or his ancestry. His freedom and his happiness lay in his accepting this inheritance.
12
THE DOGS
Come my auld towzy trusty friend;
Waur gaurs ye look sae douth and wae?
D’ye think my favour’s at an end,
Because thy head is turning grey?
Although thy feet begin to fail,
Their best were spent in serving me;
An’ can I grudge thy wee bit meal,
Some comfort in thy age to gi’e?
For many a day frae sun to sun,
We’ve toil’d and helpit ane anither;
An’ mony a thousand mile thou’st run,
To keep my thraward flocks thegither.
James Hogg, ‘Address to His Old Dog, Hector’ (1807)
ONE STILL AUTUMN AFTERNOON WHEN THE CLEAR air was blue-sharp and the bracken golden on its way from green to russet, I was gathering up stray sheep a couple of miles away from the farm. I spotted them a long way off, across a stream, grazing in fields on the other side of a small steep valley. They had escaped through a newly appeared gap in the wall. As it was at least three miles round by road and would have taken me half a day to fetch them, I decided to try and get them back the way they had gone across the beck, over the wall and to the top of the steep field where I was standing.
From high up on my side of the valley I sent my two dogs very wide, down over the beck in the bottom and up into the fields on the other side. The sheep hadn’t seen the dogs coming, although they had heard me whistling, sensed something was afoot and conveniently flocked together on a hillock in the middle of the field. There were about thirty of them and the dogs got behind them before the sheep knew what was happening. As the dogs were working a long way off and it was too far to shout, I was directing them from my vantage point by whistle. I had never trusted either dog to work so far away from me before. When I lost sight of the sheep and the dogs in the valley bottom I had to trust to the dogs’ good sense and training and hope they would bring the sheep up the steep slope and over the brow.
Nothing happened for a long time. I couldn’t hear anything – no barking or baaing – and in the still air the noise of my heart pumping when I held my breath obscured any sound that I might have picked up from below. As I stood still, allowing the breath to trickle in and out of my open mouth, alert for the slightest noise, I was startled by a shallow cough from somewhere behind me. I spun round to see my neighbour Hilty Hope’s cap peering above the top of the drystone wall, quietly observing proceedings. (Country people, particularly shepherds, do a lot of observing.) Hilty had a reputation for being good with a dog and had enjoyed some success at the sheep dog trials. At this stage we didn’t speak; I lifted my hand but Hilty didn’t acknowledge it.
A few minutes later, although I would not have admitted it, I was more than a little surprised, and quietly delighted, to see a small troop of sheep breasting the bank below, coming straight up towards me, with a dog in control at either corner. As they gently brought the sheep towards the gate, I whistled for the dogs to lie down and hold the steaming sheep in the corner while I went over to have a word with Hilty. Neither of us spoke until I got up close to him and then he volunteered, ‘That’s a couple of useful dogs you’ve got there!’
Coming from a Cumbrian, particularly Hilty, this was high praise. Cumbrians don’t readily dish out compliments. But then he added, ‘Aye! It’s as they always say, it takes a lazy man to have a good dog.’
Not only have British breeds of sheep been exported all over the world, but so have our sheep dogs. The black and white collie dog has spread everywhere across the pastoral world from its beginnings in the Scottish Borders. James Hogg wrote in 1809:
A single shepherd and his dog will accomplish more in gathering a stock of sheep from a Highland farm than twenty shepherds could without dogs, and it is a fact that without this docile animal the pastoral life would be a blank. Without the shepherd’s dog the whole of the open mountainous land in Scotland would not be worth a sixpence. It would require more hands to manage a stock of sheep, gather them from the hills, force them into houses and folds, and drive them to markets, than the profits of the whole stock were capable of maintaining.
In the past, in many parts of Britain, shepherds’ dogs often accompanied their masters to church. An Edinburgh minister was taking the service one Sunday in a remote country kirk where dogs formed a substantial part of the congregation. When the minister rose at the end of the service to pronounce the blessing, to his surprise, the congregation remained seated. He looked around waiting for them to rise, but none moved. At length the clerk looked up from his desk below and shouted out ‘Say awa’, sir, it’s joost to cheat the dawgs!’ Experience had told them that if the congregation stood, the dogs thought the service had concluded and would get up to leave, disturbing the solemnity of the occasion with various noises and stretching.
There was some difference between drovers’ dogs and shepherds’ dogs. Often longer-legged and with naturally short tails (called ‘self
-tailed dogs’), the former had a smoother coat, and if anything were more indefatigable and cleverer than the shepherd’s collie. Forever on the move, they were usually of the barkable kind rather than the quieter collie dog and, crucially, were happier driving away from their master than gathering towards him. The drovers directed their dogs and drove on their sheep and cattle by whistling and their dogs were easily as sensitive to their master’s whistle as the shepherd’s collie.
For upwards of 300 years, until the railway finally finished the droving trade, drovers and their dogs were involved in an astonishing animal migration and feat of endurance, moving huge numbers of livestock from the remotest parts of the British Isles – the north of Scotland, Ireland and the west of Wales – to the fattening pastures of the Midlands and East Anglia or straight to Smithfield market. The drovers regularly carried large sums of money, often as gold coin, and some (particularly the Scottish ones) were armed with pistols or swords to ward off outlaws and armed gangs who would try to steal their cash or their livestock. These men were resilient and resourceful and many were strong characters, with dogs of similarly reliable and robust temperament. Sir Walter Scott’s grandfather was a drover who amassed a considerable fortune from the Scotch cattle trade at the end of the seventeenth century and beginning of the eighteenth.
There are many stories of their dogs’ intelligence and courage. Progress with a large flock of sheep or a herd of cattle was often painfully slow, for they would graze the roadsides or open commons as they passed along. And once their initial burst of speed had been exhausted, the animals had to be encouraged to keep moving and that is where the dogs came into their own, tirelessly pushing the animals along and keeping them together and out of side-roads. Another of the dogs’ duties was to make a way through the slow-moving animals to allow vehicles to pass. The dogs were so accustomed to doing this that on many occasions they would do it automatically and not have to be told.
It was not unusual for drovers to return home by carriage and send their dogs off to find their own way back. There are numerous reports from travellers of drovers’ dogs making their way back north along the route they had travelled south. They would call to be fed at the inns and farms where the drove had rested on the way down and the drover would pay for their food next time he was going south again. Most dogs, to a greater or lesser extent, have an instinctive understanding of landscape and memory for places, but drovers’ dogs had this capacity to a remarkable degree, it having been bred into them over many centuries. Sheep were regularly walked from the Scottish Borders south for fattening and once a dog had made the trip, rather like a London cabby doing the Knowledge, it would remember where the lanes and cul-de-sacs were and all the places the flock ought to be kept out of, and hold them to the straight road all the way.
A Welsh drover’s dog, named Carlo, travelled back from Kent to West Wales on his own after his master had sold the pony he had ridden on the outward journey and arranged to return by coach; he fastened the pony’s harness to Carlo’s back with a note requesting the innkeepers along the route home to feed and shelter his dog. Carlo was well looked after and completed the journey within a week. His refreshment would probably have consisted of the traditional sustenance for drovers’ dogs, bread and beer.
It is hard to explain to anyone who has never worked a sheep dog how clever these pastoral dogs are and how completely the livestock farmer relies on them. Before there were so many motor vehicles travelling at high speed on rural roads, it was common to find farmers walking their flocks and herds from field to field, and even to market. I remember my neighbour walking his draft Swaledale ewes from their fell heaf to Cockermouth auction for the annual sale in October. The journey was about eight miles, and he did it in two stages, stopping off overnight about three-quarters of the way there, where the sheep could graze and rest.
I could move a flock of sheep on my own anywhere with just two dogs. One would stay behind with me, chivvying the sheep on, and the other would, when given the signal, push through the hedge or over the wall and go round the flock to head them off and hold them up if necessary. I had one dog, Ben, who was particularly good at this; the only thing he couldn’t do was open a gate, but he would hold up the flock beside a gate until I could get there to open it. He wasn’t infallible, but he was as reliable as many humans would have been.
Sometimes he got it spectacularly wrong. One day I was moving about 300 sheep through the village and had sent Ben on ahead to cover the gateways and junctions and to keep the flock on the road home. As we passed each side-turning he would be standing or lying in the way, blocking the sheep’s entry. Occasionally he would bark as they passed just to hurry them along and remind them who was boss. At the end of the village, just before the gate of the field I intended to turn the sheep into, the owner had left her drive gate open. Ben went ahead and lay down in the road ahead of the flock to hold them up until I got there to open the gate. But this caused the whole flock to escape into her large garden, where they milled and wheeled about trampling everything in their path. By the time I had got them out the devastation was dreadful. I knew the woman who owned the house and she was very decent about it, generously admitting that she had been wanting an excuse to remodel her garden and had never got round to it.
Collie dogs are astonishingly astute to pick up a word or a whistle and act on it. I had a bitch called Tess who could not hear the word ‘smoky’ without immediately leaping to her feet, rushing outside and barking to chase the cat we kept with that name. Even if ‘smoky’ was hidden in the middle of a sentence such as ‘it’s very smoky in here’, or ‘smoky bacon crisps’, she would never fail to pick it up, even if she seemed to be asleep at the time.
There is a story from 1846 told by a traveller to Scotland about a crofter’s dog employed to keep animals off his small patch of oats and potatoes. The dog was lying by the fire in the house, where his master and the visitor were talking, and in the middle of a sentence concerning something else, without altering his tone of voice or stressing the words, his master interposed, ‘… the cow is in the potatoes …’ and carried on with the rest of the sentence. The dog, which appeared to be asleep, leapt through the open window, scrambled onto the low turf roof of the house and finding that the cow was not in the potato field, went to look in the byre, where she found the cow safely tied and came back into the house. After a while the crofter spoke the same words again and the dog repeated his action. But when the words were uttered a third time, the dog got to his feet and, wagging his tail, looked searchingly into his master’s face, as if to ask, ‘Why are you trying to fool me?’ and went back to his bed by the fire.
The meaning of collie is obscure. In Waverley, referring to events in 1745, Sir Walter Scott describes packs of ‘collies’ maintained by each village whose duty was to harry the often exhausted post-horses to keep them moving on from one parish to the next. The prosaic and often-cited derivation of collie is that it comes from ‘coaly’ meaning black; but that ignores the obvious fact that very few collies are black. Most have white, or tan, in their colouring. There is even a ginger, or ‘red’, strain favoured by certain shepherds, but shunned by others because at a distance it looks like a fox. Certain writers have suggested that as the sheep the dog herded were black-faced, i.e. ‘coalies’, the dog took its name from its charges. But nowhere are Blackface sheep referred to as ‘coalies’ and collie dogs shepherded other types of sheep, particularly white-faced Cheviots, long before Blackface sheep came to Scotland.
The more compelling explanation is that like many words to do with the pastoral life that have come down to us in modern English, it is derived from the language of the Celts and not from a later Latin or Germanic root. Collie seems to be one of those words preserved from an orally transmitted culture that has always existed apart from the dominant written culture of the educated ruling class. Coelio in Brythonic (the language spoken by Celtic people who occupied the south of Scotland, north of England and Wales) means to tru
st or be faithful to, and seems apt to describe this most trustworthy and trusting of dogs. In the Isle of Man, into the nineteenth century, the word for a sheepdog (not a Border Collie type) was coly, which seems to come from the same root.
The modern type of Border Collie largely descends from Old Hemp, a dog bred in 1893, by Adam Telfer, in the Northumbrian Borders hills. His father was Roy, a flamboyant dog with a ‘free eye and frank expression’, and his mother was a more sensitive, shy bitch, called Meg. By the time he died in 1901 Hemp had fathered over 200 puppies with Telfer’s own bitches and those brought to him by other breeders. These were then inter-bred so that the modern type of Border Collie became fixed, and within forty years there was hardly a collie that did not have some of Old Hemp’s blood in its veins.
There is a long tradition (probably as old as pastoralism itself) of naming sheepdogs with short names of no more than two syllables in order to give a note of authority to the voice and ensure a quick response when the dog is called. The Roman writer Columella (from Cadiz), who wrote De re rustica, suggested two-syllable names such as Lacon, Ferox, Celer, Lupa, Cerva and Tigris. But British shepherds prefer one-syllable names, such as Bess, Tess, Roy, Nan, Bob, Jim, Ben and so on. To compare the effectiveness of this, the next time you are out in a howling gale with a companion, try calling ‘Nan’ and then ‘Ferox’ and see which gets lost on the wind.
Queen Victoria was fond of collies. She had been given one by Tim Elliot’s grandfather, and when it died in the 1850s she journeyed from Floors Castle, where she was staying with the Duke of Roxburghe, to Hindhope, where Elliot presented her with a replacement The route of her pilgrimage was marked by the planting at intervals along the way of seedlings of the newly discovered Wellingtonia. A fine specimen still stands in the garden at Hindhope.
Counting Sheep Page 21