As successful and well-known as the Border Collie has become over the last century or so, it is by no means the only type of pastoral dog. There are many hill shepherds who do not rate the fancy ‘creeping’ type that is good at sheepdog trials, preferring a more free-ranging dog that can work on its own initiative. In England the hairy Sussex was the dominant breed before it was bred for show and turned into the Old English. It was a bold, resilient dog that could bear the summer heat much better than the Border Collie, which is happier in cooler weather. The Welsh Collie works with its head and tail up and is a more self-reliant type that can move large numbers of sheep across difficult open ground. It will bark and drive, and there is also a strain that will work close to, with a few sheep. Many are ‘blue merle’, with blue eyes, or wall-eyed, with one blue and one brown eye, which makes a very attractive, somewhat enigmatic dog.
There were strong types of dog that were bred not to gather the whole flock, but to catch and hold an individual sheep. The shepherd would point out the sheep to be caught and the dog would chase it and grab it by the neck-wool and hold it by opposing every movement the sheep made to break free. Sometimes the dog was strong enough to turn the sheep over and pin it down with its paws until the shepherd arrived. In the Isle of Man these were called ‘houl’ers’ because they would ‘houl’ on’ to the sheep. The dogs of the crofters on North Ronaldsay do this on the shore to catch and draw out single sheep for slaughter.
In the pastoral countries of Europe and Asia there are many, probably older, types of dog that are used for guarding and herding. The Calabrian or Pyrenean Mountain Dog, or Illyrian, is a big woolly-looking creature that could easily see off wolves. Spanish shepherds, working for the Mesta, had big fierce dogs to herd and protect their huge Merino flocks from wolves during the bi-annual transhumance along the cañadas between Extremadura and Andalusia in the south and Leon and Castile in the north. Similarly protective dogs are found on the Steppes: the Hungarian Komondor (whose white coat of ringlets at a distance resembles a fleece and acts as camouflage when it is amongst the flock); the Puli is a black version of the Komondor.
In New Zealand they have created a version of the drover’s dog called a Huntaway. Huntaways do not gather sheep towards the shepherd as a Border Collie instinctively does by eyeing them, but they drive them by barking and rushing about from side to side. They are powerful, tireless dogs, with short hair coloured rather like a Rottweiler. This type can drive large flocks of sheep across rough country, where an eye-dog like a Border Collie would be useless and are just the kind of dog that mountain shepherds use in difficult terrain.
The Kelpie is its Australian counterpart, bred to deal with large flocks and herds in extreme climates and difficult terrain. It is supposed to have some dingo blood from way back, but nobody would ever admit to crossing their dogs with dingos, not least because it was illegal in Australia even to keep a dingo as a pet because of their untameable instinct for savaging sheep. The Kelpie has tireless energy and complete devotion to its master. Its speciality is running along the backs of sheep to break up a large flock to get it moving. In this it is similar to the old type of Sussex sheepdog that could move a flock of sheep by ‘mounting up’ – running along their backs and snapping at their ears. The Kelpie’s primary instinct is to keep sheep and cattle from moving away from its master, which it can do from a long way off, but it can also drive a large flock tirelessly over a great distance. Without these dogs the pastoral lands of the New World would, as James Hogg said of Scotland, not be worth a sixpence.
Unlike the rest of Europe, there have been no wolves (or other serious predators of sheep) in Britain since the Middle Ages and so shepherding is less a guarding and more a gathering exercise. British flocks on open land are encouraged to range by themselves over their whole grazing area and for this the shepherd needs fast dogs with stamina. There are two main types of sheepdog now found in Britain: the silent creeping close-to-the-ground Border Collie type that ‘shows a lot of eye’ – fixes the flock with a stare and dominates it by force of will; and the more active type of dog with long legs, that will get its tail up, bark when necessary and run about a lot, like the old drovers’ dogs. Although both types can work a long way off, controlled by shout or whistle, the second is more likely to think for itself and act on its own than the Border Collie, which requires almost constant direction, even though it is a more precise instrument of its master’s will than the rough-and-ready type, which wouldn’t be much good at sheepdog trials, but would give short shrift to any insubordinate sheep.
In my experience – I’ve had both types – the second type tends towards extremism and wants to gather the whole flock, or none of it. Both types are fundamentally different from the guarding type of dog, which does little gathering because the flock tends to follow the shepherd with the dog making up the rear. These guard-dogs are more of a friend to the sheep, whereas the Border Collie is like a policeman, bred to master the wilder kinds of sheep found on the hills and mountains of Britain.
While I was working for Harry I paid £100 for my own pedigree collie pup from a renowned breeder in Westmorland – I named her ‘Tess’ – and trained her myself, or rather she taught me to how to train her. She was a natural. She had a half black and half white face and was wall-eyed, with one blue eye and one brown eye. This is an inherited trait in certain collies and considered by some to be an indication of superior ancestry. Wall-eye is from the Old Norse vagleygr meaning a film over the eye, like a cataract.
She was very fast and quiet over the ground and completely reliable at holding sheep in a corner, she ran instinctively wide round the flock, in whichever direction she was sent, and infallibly rounded them up and brought them to me. I quickly discovered that once I had trained her to stop when I told her to, I was three-quarters there. If I gave the signal of one long whistle, she would immediately clap to the ground. The next whistle was a short sharp note that got her to move on again. The knack to training her was to use the appropriate whistle when she was already doing, or about to do, what I wanted. She was quick on the uptake and soon began to associate that whistle with being told to do a particular action. Consistency and calmness were the watchwords. If she did something wrong I would whistle her back to me, and then get her to do it again. I avoided raising my voice unless it was to make her hear me a long way off.
Harry let me try her out on some of his geld (barren) sheep in the in-bye fields and occasionally sent me off with her to gather up a few stragglers. But because she wouldn’t bark – and was ‘a creeping wall-eyed bitch’, as Harry affectionately referred to her – she was of limited use on the open fell, where she proved feeble at moving large numbers of sheep over hard country, particularly through waist-high bracken. They simply weren’t frightened enough of her to move when she crept towards them, or they couldn’t see her and because she wouldn’t bark they didn’t know she was there. The best she could do with Herdwicks on the fell was annoy them. Sometimes a ewe with lambs would call her bluff and run at her. She then resorted to biting, which Harry frowned on, because it showed she had lost her authority.
None of her keen pedigree impressed Harry because she wouldn’t bark and wouldn’t ‘get up’ – that is, she worked close to the ground with her tail down with the tip slightly curled up, not gaily on long legs with her tail waving like a flag. He said she was no more than a ‘trial dog’, a prima donna that would let you down on the open fell just when you needed her the most. He was right about the trial bit, and that she was not much good at moving large numbers of sheep, but he was wrong about her letting you down. She was the only dog I ever owned that never gave in. You hear about dogs watching over their dead master’s body for impossible lengths of time – well, I’m certain Tess would have been one of those, loyal to the end.
Harry’s judgement was partially vindicated one hot June morning. At that time of year when the ewes are in full fleece with active lambs at foot and the days long and warm, we had to set off ver
y early to gather before the heat of the day. The commoners on our part of the fell had established a practice of leaving at four in the morning, just as it was getting light. We were each supposed to gather an area of the common and take the sheep to the communal sheepfolds below Force Crag, at the foot of Coledale Hause, at the head of the valley, where they would be sorted into their separate owners’ flocks. Once they were sorted, their owners would leave at intervals with their sheep to avoid them getting mixed up with their neighbours’.
Harry and I were to gather The Side, on the north side of Coledale, which is a long, sweeping shoulder of land about 1,000 feet from top to bottom and two and a half miles long. In summer the steep slope is covered in chest-high bracken and the dogs find it very hard to ‘lift’ sheep out of the deep vegetation. Harry’s friend Jack was with us, a lean, tireless, wily, cantankerous old Lakeland shepherd, who was well over seventy, with equally tireless, long-legged, barking dogs – black, white and tan versions of the Huntaway – which were doing a wonderful job (as he kept telling us) of ferreting out the sheep from the thickest bracken.
Some of the ewes were crafty enough to lie with their lamb in a bracken bed, flat to the ground, staying still until we had passed. Then, when they judged it safe, they would scurry away downhill, behind us, hidden in the bracken, until they were out of range of the dogs, and then emerge onto open ground half a mile away, running like crazy with the lamb sticking to them like glue. If they lay still they were very hard to find in the bracken, and an eye-dog like Tess could make little of them. I was soon reduced to shouting, whistling, clapping my hands, beating the bracken with my stick, and even barking myself, as Tess wouldn’t, to get the sheep moving.
It was after seven by the time we met up with the others at the sheepfolds at Force Crag. Early shafts of sunlight penetrated the purple shadow under the crags and pierced the steam rising from the woolly cacophony. We had gathered up a huge flock of six or seven hundred ewes and lambs. They were hot and tired, and most of the ewes had become separated from their lambs and they were all making a tremendous noise, ewes baaing for bewildered lambs and lambs crying an octave higher for their mothers. We had them in a huge pen, roughly fenced with posts and wire netting and none too secure. It was the joint property of all the commoners and therefore nobody took responsibility for repairing it, everybody blamed somebody else for its decrepit state.
We let them calm down a bit and had a smoke before we began to put them through the shedder. A shedder is a marvellously simple and effective device for sorting sheep. It exploits two of the sheep’s instincts: to follow the one immediately in front, and to move uphill if possible. The shedder is combined with a race, which is an alleyway with blind sides (ours were made of second-hand corrugated zinc roofing sheets), just wide enough for one sheep to pass along it at a time and sloping uphill if the ground will allow. So long as the sheep have a clear view up it to the other end they will think they can escape by moving along it towards the exit.
At intervals, set in the sides of the race and attached to posts, are little solid wicket sorting gates which can be swung from side to side to direct the sheep into separate pens. Our race had three such gates we could operate to divide the flock into four with only one passage along it. Some have two sorting gates hung opposite to one another in such a way that one man can work them both at the same time. This is pretty advanced sorting and hard to do without practice, because once the sheep gain momentum they just keep running and have to be directed somewhere. If the sorter loses concentration, rather like juggling, everything is lost and the operation has to start all over again.
Much of the language relating to sheep is either Celtic or, in certain places, Norse and has been little affected over the centuries by Latin or Norman French. Gimmer is a Norse word, as is rake. And one thing that leads directly back to the Celts is the method of counting sheep, supposed to have been used in Cumberland and Westmorland. I have never met any Lake District (or other) shepherd who counted like this. Even 100 years ago, when Canon H. D. Rawnsley wrote By Fell and Dale (1911), the best he could do was find old men who could say that their fathers told them that their grandfathers always counted that way. The system is vigesimal (based on twenties) and remarkably similar to counting in traditional Welsh (and Breton) and apparently certain North American Indian tribes. The following is the Cumbrian version:
1 Yan
2 Tyan
3 Tethera
4 Methera
5 Pimp
6 Sethera
7 Lethera
8 Hovera
9 Dovera
10 Dick
11 Yan-a-dick
12 Tyan-a-dick
13 Tethera-dick
14 Methera-dick
15 Bumfit
16 Yan-a-bumfit
17 Tyan-a-bumfit
18 Tethera-bumfit
19 Methera-bumfit
20 Jigget
I think I learned from my mother that this was how the old shepherds used to count and every time he reached jigget the shepherd would transfer a pebble from one pocket to another. Some carried a tally-stick which they notched with their knife. In traditional Welsh twenty-one is ‘one-on-twenty’ and thirty is ‘ten-on-twenty’, forty is ‘two-twenty’, and so on up to half-a-hundred, and then in twenties up to a hundred. Up to twenty it is so similar to Cumbrian counting that it seems likely to have stemmed from the same root, but the bigger numbers were forgotten as such counting fell out of use. I once asked Harry whether he had ever counted like that and he replied dismissively, ‘Never! It’s the kind of thing “townies” come out with.’
As Harry and I were going the same way, after we had sorted them we amalgamated our flocks and set off home together. The track from the sheepfold to the top of Coledale Hause was wide, very steep and rocky, and the sun was well up by the time we left. The stronger sheep quickly paired up with their lambs and set off at some pace up the hill. Harry put his dogs round them regularly to check their progress and keep the flock together, but they still got well ahead of the rest of the flock. The slowest were the smaller lambs, which were not only distressed because they had lost their mothers, but exhausted by the melee, the heat and the climb.
One after the other they would flop down onto their flanks, panting and refuse to move on. We started to collect up as many as we could carry at a time and took them in relays a hundred yards or so, to the top of the steepest part of the path, and laid them on the turf, then went back for more. Ewes kept doubling back, running from lamb to lamb trying to sniff out their own. Lambs were screaming for their mothers, dogs were barking and we were shouting, whistling and waving our sticks. And thus the little caravan moved slowly up the steep bare fellside towards the saddle of Coledale Hause. The younger, stronger sheep and those without family obligations had steadily drawn away from the main flock, which stretched out in a straggled line.
As the ground levelled out onto the hause I caught sight of the leaders making strongly across the flat land towards the top of Grasmoor a mile or more away and those ewes that had found their lambs were scurrying along behind them.
‘We’ll lose them if you don’t get past them. Let that young bitch away!’ yelled Harry.
I’d never seen him so discomposed. The sweat ran freely down his face and behind his ears and from time to time he took off his cap and swabbed his face and matted hair with it. Down the back of his light blue kytle (rustic cotton jacket) a broad slick of sweat had darkened the material to indigo.
Tess had been keeping close to me for the last half hour or so. She had given up trotting and the best she could manage was a doleful plod. She had worn herself out with her earlier efforts and her long, narrow, pink tongue lolled extravagantly from one side of her mouth, dripping moisture. She was also a little awed by the indefatigable long-legged fell dogs which barked regularly, rushing here and there, waving their tails like demented tour guides. Poor Tess was bred for elegance, and she seemed affronted by their coarse manners.
I shouted, ‘Get away!’ and waved my arm in the direction I wanted her to go round the flock. She set off well, but after about a hundred yards she slowed down and I whistled my ‘Get-a-bloody-move-on!’ whistle, which usually got her going, like flooring the accelerator in an automatic car. She disappeared into some ‘slack ground’ and I waited for her to come back into view on the other side of the hollow, but she didn’t reappear. I whistled a few more times, but there was no sign of her. I was no more willing than she had been to run in the increasing heat, but when Harry shouted, ‘Go and see what’s up with that daft bitch!’ I stumbled to the place where she’d disappeared from view and 300 yards away I spotted two ears pricked up above a grassy mound, and facing away from me. She had not heard me because I was running into the wind, so I managed to get very close before gasping for breath and screaming, ‘Tess, you lazy bitch, you’ve let those sheep go!’
She flattened herself like a kipper, low to the ground, and as I neared she rolled onto her back with her legs bent, tail between her legs and started to whimper. I would like to say that I took pity on her because she must have been really exhausted, but to my shame I whacked her twice on her ribs with my stick. She yelped to her feet after the second blow and ran a short distance away with her back arched and tail now so far between her legs that she could have held its tip between her teeth. By this time the vanguard of the flock had reached the last climb before the summit of Grasmoor at least a mile away.
It would have been foolish for Harry to send a dog past them and risk chasing them over the top, even if his dogs still had the energy to do it. The crags on the west side of Grasmoor are treacherous and dogs and sheep could have fallen 1,000 feet and been dashed to pieces. Harry decided to send his dogs round part of the flock and leave the others gradually to graze their way back onto the heafs we had gathered them off earlier that day. We had no option but to come back and try to gather them another day, piecemeal, and on our own, because the next communal gather was not until the autumn. Not even if he enlisted my help, and Jack’s, would we be capable of gathering the whole of these fells on our own.
Counting Sheep Page 22