The Shepherd's Life (3 page)

 

3

My grandfather was born in 1918 into a fairly anonymous and unexceptional farming family. A lot of that time they lived and farmed down in the heart of the Eden Valley. The written records, for what they are worth, show that my grandfather belonged to an agricultural family struggling by from generation to generation, occasionally making it into the ranks of relatively established farmers, before sinking back into being tenants or farmworkers or in the workhouse or worse. The written story peters out into ineligible sixteenth-century script of births, deaths, and marriages, church records belonging to little villages close to where their descendants still live and work. My grandfather was, quite simply, one of the great forgotten silent majority of people who live, work, love, and die without leaving much written trace that they were ever here. He was, and we his descendants remain, essentially nobodies as far as anyone else is concerned. But that's the point. Landscapes like ours were created by and survive through the efforts of nobodies. That's why I was so shocked to be given such a dead, rich, white man's version of its history at school. This is a landscape of modest hardworking people. The real history of our landscape should be the history of the nobodies.

 

4

The alarm clock vibrates on the bedside table. My hand swipes across and kills it. 4:30 a.m. I was only half-asleep anyway. The room is already dimly lit with the coming dawn. I see my wife's shoulder and her leg curled over the sheet, and my two-year-old son lying between us, where he came in during the night. I move quietly out of the room with a fistful of clothes. The sun will rise soon over the edge of the fell.

In the kitchen I swig from a carton of milk. I throw on my clothes robotically, half-awake. I have half an hour before we are meeting at the fell gate. We are going to gather the fell (mountain) flock in for clipping (shearing). My mind is on a kind of checklist autopilot.

Right clothes. Check.

Breakfast. Check.

Sandwiches. Check.

Boots. Check.

As I get to the barn, my sheepdogs, Floss and Tan, jump, wriggle, and make whining noises until I get them unchained. They know we are going to the fell. I feed them so they have energy later when they'll need it. A shepherd on a fell without a sheepdog, or dogs, is useless. The fell sheep are half-wild, smell weakness in dogs, and would escape and create chaos without good dogs. Men can't go lots of places the dogs need to, the crags and rocky screes, to chase ewes down. When I head out, Tan bolts for the barn door and jumps on the ATV. Floss follows.

Sheepdogs fed and loaded. Check.

Quad bike. Check.

Fuel. Check.

The swallows explode outwards from the barn door. They fledged a couple of days ago, and whole families head out to the fields, where they hawk all day over the grass and thistles.

Fingers of pink and orange light are now creeping over the fell sides.

Sunrise.

These are the hottest days of summer. As I go along the road, I feel the heat rising from the tarmac. Sun. Dust. Flies. Blue skies. It is too hot in the heat of the day for moving sheep, something we would scarcely have believed possible for the past eight or nine months of cold wet weather. By midday the sheep will be panting, or hiding in the nooks and crannies for shade, and we will miss lots of them. It is too hot for sheepdogs as well. You can kill dogs working them too hard in the heat and humidity. So we intend to start early and do the work before the sun burns high in the sky.

I didn't know anything about gathering today until last night. I had been in the bath. The phone rang. My wife brought it in, and I pretended like I wasn't naked and covered in soap. It was my neighbour Alan, an older respected farmer who has a lot of sheep on the fell and has done it a lot longer than me. He's the boss—the elder statesman if you like—and has to organize the commoners to work together. Organizing fell farmers to do anything collectively is not easy, so I don't envy his job one bit. He doesn't waste words unnecessarily.

“We are gathering the fell tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

“Meet at the fell gate at five a.m.”

“Right.”

Then he hangs up to call someone else.

I knew it was impending because of the date, and because it is time to clip the ewes, but it is a communal job that needs the right weather and men to be free of other work to do it. So it's a bit like waiting for D-day—you never know until the phone call, or shout from the road as he passes, to say, “It's on tomorrow.”

 

5

Gathering is ancient communal work that consists of everyone with rights to graze sheep on the unfenced common land working together with their sheepdogs to bring in the flocks from the fells. There are about ten different flocks of sheep on our fell, a vast unenclosed piece of moorland and mountain. Because there are no large predators, the sheep are left to graze alone but are brought down several times a year for lambing, clipping, and other key activities in the life of the flock. Beyond our common lies other unfenced areas of mountain land, other fells, farmed by other commoners, so in theory our sheep could wander right across the Lake District. But they don't because they know their place on the mountains. They are “hefted,” taught their sense of belonging by their mothers as lambs—an unbroken chain of learning that goes back thousands of years. So the sheep can never be sold from the fell without breaking that ancient link. This is, they say, the greatest concentration of common land in Western Europe; and on it survives an older kind of farming than that which exists across much of the world now.

The fell land we are gathering today doesn't belong to us; it belongs to the National Trust. Other fells belong to other landowners, but regardless of the owner we have an ancient legal right to graze a set number of sheep on them. Many of these mountainous areas of land were bought and given to the National Trust by wealthy benefactors like Beatrix Potter. This land was given in trust to them to protect the landscape and its unique way of life because it was deemed to be in the public interest. The legacies from the benefactors often stressed that the fell flocks had to remain Herdwick sheep.

There are different kinds of ownership on one piece of land. The grazing rights on our fell are divided into something called stints (a share of the common rights); and each stint you own, or rent, entitles you to graze a certain number of sheep (six per stint on our fell). We buy and sell and rent stints so that older farmers can retire and their grazing rights and flocks can be taken forward by the next generation. The owner of the fell sometimes owns no stints and cannot therefore graze his own land unless there are surplus grazing rights. The rights to graze are held in common with our fellow commoners. “Commoner” isn't a dirty word here; it is a thing to be proud of. It means you have rights to something of value, that you contribute to the management of the fells, and that you take part in our way of life as an equal with the other farmers. If you farm Herdwick or Swaledale sheep and they are hefted to the common grazing land on the fells, then you, by definition, often belong to an association of commoners. This is all a strange hangover from a feudal past when we paid dues (including bearing arms) to the lord of the manor in return for the right to graze the poor mountain land. But no dues have been paid for a long time now. The aristocrats either disappeared or couldn't be bothered to contest our rights, because we are troublesome and stubborn when crossed. It was more effort than it was worth, so we, the peasants, won. We are a tiny part of an ancient farming system and way of life that has somehow survived in these mountains because of their historic poverty, relative isolation, and because it was protected from change by the early conservation movement.

 

6

My ewes and lambs have been up in the mountains for nearly eight weeks. They are Herdwick sheep, native to the Lake District fells. Bred for centuries to suit this landscape, this climate, and this way of farming. They have two functions. Survive the winters and the tough times, and in the spring and summer months have a good lamb and rear it in the mountains so the flock is sustained with ewe lambs and the farms have a surplus of lambs to sell.

In the eight weeks since I brought them here I have not seen many of them. They have looked after themselves on the abundant summer grass. Our shepherding culture includes periods when the sheep graze the fells away from our supervision. Because they need better nutrition to rear twins than the mountains offer, the ewes with twins stay down on the lower slopes on our own fenced land, called intakes or allotments. So I am anxious to see them again, keen to see that they are alive and well. Above all I am interested to see how much my lambs have grown since I brought them up when they were just a month old in May. It is now the second week in July. The rising sun is already starting to burn the mist that hangs in the hollows as I head across the high ground to the fell gate.

I reach the fell gate second.

One shepherd always gets there first. I suspect he is an insomniac.

Fell gate on time. Check.

Soon the fell gate is a meeting place for eight or ten men and women. An assorted pack of sheepdogs, and other willing mongrels, circle excitedly. Occasionally, there is a snarl up. Everyone is in short sleeves, booted, and wearing an array of sun hats that won't win any fashion prizes. Over shoulders are slung tatty old bait bags, packed with sandwiches, pop, and cake. On bad days we stare nervously at the skyline and the clouds hugging the fells. Sometimes we have to turn back if the clouds are too low, and return later. It is dangerous up there in bad weather. On the winter gathers snow can make it potentially lethal. But today in the height of summer there is only one worry, the heat. One of the shepherds is late, so everyone is impatient and frustrated. We stand and curse him.

“He is always late.”

“Can't get up, that bugger.”

“Let's go without him. He will catch up.”

“No, we better wait.”

“Oh, here he is.”

A quad bike races up the fell-side road. A slightly flustered shepherd mumbles his apologies. He has been gathering up some lambs down below that have escaped onto the road.

It doesn't matter.

We need to get going. Move fast. The ewes and lambs are high up on the fells where the land meets the sky.

The oldest shepherd performs the function of a general on a battlefield. There is a bit in the movie
Zulu
when the native's battle plan is described like the “horns of a buffalo … that come around like pincers and encircle you.” That's a bit like how we gather our fell. It takes six or eight people and a dozen or more dogs. Involves hours of walking (though is made a little quicker by a quad bike on the drivable bits) and requires everyone to work more or less like a team. As you pass over the fell you try to use your judgement to carve through between the flocks of our common and the sheep of the next, by judging their smit marks—the coloured paint marks that identify the sheep to specific farms. Anyone ignorant of the flocks and the marks and the lie of land can make a terrible mess and push sheep on to a neighbouring common and thus make unnecessary work for everyone. We stand and chat, but it's a serious business. We must do what we're told. No fucking around.

One of the most experienced shepherds, called Shoddy, is sent over the fell tops to clear out some distant crags high up where the green meets the blue. The best men and dogs are sent to the hardest places. He will define the far end of the gather. Act like a blocker when the sheep try to flee from us, tucking them back down at the far end.

Joe, a younger fell shepherd with good dogs, is sent to clear out a long deep ravine—we call them “ghylls”—carved out by the beck over many centuries, on the left-hand arm of the gather where our common meets the next one. A great dog can bring sheep carefully out of the crags, moving left or right or stopping on a sixpence at a whistled command. A young or poorly trained dog would just fail to get them down, or worse, scare them into danger on the scree or rock faces.

These are good fell shepherds with a pack of good dogs apiece. They disappear off, one on a quad bike, the other loping off across the heather.

Two or three of us are sent up the left-hand side of the fell, after Joe, to sweep out the sheep across the fell to the right, with one of us peeling off to hold them that way every half mile or so. Each of us has a landmark we are to hold at.

Each of us is responsible for not letting any sheep break back past us, easy with a good dog, impossible without one. Farming the fells is only possible because of the bond between men and sheepdogs.

I'm the last one on this arm of the gather. I am to meet Shoddy at the far end. Wait at the Stones for the others, I'm told.

Right.

The eldest shepherd takes a couple of men with him along a dusty old track to the right. He will form a break before the next common. Pushing their sheep away and fetching ours back, he will form the right arm of the gather.

Men bawl to their dogs, who are excited and heading off after the wrong shepherds.

We will meet them in a few hours at the far end, past the peat hags—raised peat bogs that rise up out of the sward, like green, or brown, islands slowly emerging out of the earth. They form a sea of raised mounds, some twenty or thirty feet across, others acres in size; they are carved apart by little gulleys and valleys worn by the water, forming dangerous cliffs of black peat the height of a man, or deeper, that you can tumble into. The sheep rub their backs on these peaty cliff faces, giving their fleeces a coal-black hue that tells us this is where they live. In the sheltered low ground between the peat hags sheep can be lost from sight, and the ATV can be easily turned over, so you have to pay attention to navigate through them, and ensure the flock is cleaned out of them and pushed by the dogs away homewards. Beyond them we meet at Wolf Crags and form a kind of noose, with all of the fell encircled and the sheep heading in the right direction for home.