Counting Sheep

  COUNTING SHEEP

  PHILIP WALLING started life as a sheep farmer, then became a barrister for the next twenty-five years, and has now decided to pay homage to his farming roots. He lives in Northumberland.

  COUNTING SHEEP

  A Celebration of the Pastoral Heritage of Britain

  PHILIP WALLING

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

  PROFILE BOOKS LTD

  3A Exmouth House

  Pine Street

  London ECIR OJH

  www.profilebooks.com

  Copyright © Philip Walling, 2014

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  eISBN 978 1 84765 803 6

  For Stephanie, who believed in me because I didn’t believe in myself.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1 The sheep our ancient ancestors kept

  2 The Romans and the wool breeds

  3 The New Leicester

  4 The Swaledale

  5 The Cheviot

  6 The Scotch Blackface

  7 The Leicesters

  8 The Welsh Half bred

  9 The Suffolk

  10 The Herdwick

  11 The Dorset Horn and the Llanwenog

  12 The Dogs

  13 The Sacrificial Lamb

  14 The Modern and the Future

  Glossary

  List of illustrations

  Select bibliography

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  IN A HOWLING BLIZZARD DURING THE WINTER OF 1940–41 my grandfather received a phone call from Cockermouth asking him to form a search party to look for a young soldier called Sale, who had left the farm where he had been on leave with his aunt and her family to walk the six miles to Cockermouth railway station to rejoin his regiment, but had not arrived. His family had evacuated themselves for the duration of the war from Aylesbury to Picket How, their farm between Lorton and Loweswater. The searchers luckily found the soldier in a snow drift, exhausted and insensible and huddled in his greatcoat. They took him to the district nurse’s house, where he was revived. Ever afterwards, the Sale family maintained that my grandfather’s search party had saved their nephew’s life.

  Thirty-five years later, when I was looking for a farm to rent, the Sales had not forgotten the events of that terrible winter. Their tenants at Picket How, the Mackereth brothers, were retiring after a hundred years on the farm and the Sales offered me the tenancy at a very low rent. I did not enquire why the rent was little more than nominal, nor did I know at that time about my grandfather’s search party. I just accepted the generosity that gave me such a flying start in farming. Later, when they decided to sell the farm, I was able to buy it at a substantial discount as sitting tenant. When I left farming to go into the law, and subsequently sold the farm, I felt a terrible sense of guilt that I appeared to have thrown their kindness back in their faces, especially because I was sure they believed I would live there for the rest of my life.

  I owe a deep debt of gratitude to the Sales for their almost transcendent generosity to a young man, at the beginning of his life, when he needed it most and I hope this book will be accepted as slight recompense, inadequate as it is.

  It is hard to know exactly which influences and people contribute to the writing of a book, but I know I have incurred many unrepayable debts to many people. For without their willingness to indulge me, often for hours on end, I would never have been able to start let alone finish it. Most of the farmers and breeders I simply telephoned out of the blue and, not knowing me from Adam, they invited me to their farms, showed me round, patiently answered my questions and told me more about themselves, their sheep and their farming lives than I was entitled to know. Everywhere I went I was received with considerable courtesy and hospitality, not to say kindness, and it is a pleasant duty to record this. If I have inadvertently omitted anyone to whom I owe thanks, I can only apologise and ask for their forgiveness.

  My first point of contact was usually with the secretary of each breed society and I wish to thank them all for their helpfulness in usually directing me to a breeder with the patience to deal with me. I thank them all for their courtesy and patience.

  For half a day I shamelessly picked the brains of John Thorley MBE, for many years the Chief Executive of the National Sheep Association, now the power behind the Pastoral Alliance and an indefatigable pillar of the Campaign for Wool. I am immensely grateful to him for sharing with me his fathomless knowledge of sheep and their breeders, and opening his address book to me. His help has been invaluable. I am also grateful to Phil Hadley, Senior Regional Manager of the Southern Region of Eblex, for his help with information on halal slaughter.

  Of the farmers, shepherds and breeders, I thank: Alan Alderson, Nick Archdale, the late Robert Armstrong, Norman Bayley, Alec Bissett, Irving Blamire, Jim Brown, Susannah Coke, Michael and Julie Coney, Simon Dawson, Trevor Dodson, Jeff and Helen Dowey, Andrew Elliot, Mark Elliot, Tim Elliot, Huw Evans, Louise Fairburn, Francis Fooks, Rachel Godschalk, Stanley Jackson, Andrew Jones, Norman and Michelle Jones, Frank Langrish, Cyril Lewis, Brian Marrs, Frank Martin, Matt Mason, Angus Morris, June Morris, Philip Onions, Tom Patterson, John Ryrie, Bertie and Alice Thomson, Tim White, Lyn and Carol Williams and Lucinda Woodcock (who gave me the run of her extensive library).

  I regret that I have been unable to include all the breeds and breeders I visited, but I hope they will be assured that nothing has been wasted, and everything I learned from the scores of people who helped me has contributed in one way or another to the making of this book.

  Many friends encouraged me, some knowingly, others unwittingly simply by listening to me, particularly Rosemary Howell who has had to listen to me for more than thirty years. At one low point, Rose Peel cheered me up when she brightly said at least I wasn’t in as bad a state as a friend of hers who had been ‘broken’ by writing a book. Emma Maxwell Macdonald regularly lifted my spirits with her enthusiasm whenever I fell into a slough of despond. Andrew and Carolyn Lewis encouraged and accommodated me in some style on my trips south. Miles and Glenis Postlethwaite freely donated their humour and trenchant advice, as did Peter and Laura de Wesselow. Pauline Dixon helped me to organise my disorganised thoughts. John Sadler advised me to ‘just get the bugger written’, and read parts of the manuscript even though he could hardly be less interested in sheep. Margaret Vane injected more enthusiasm into the project than sometimes even I could rouse, and Christopher Vane has, on many occasions, stiffened my resolve with words of quiet support. Alison Pilling administered doses of her life-enhancing zest and Sarah Edmondson her sobering realism. Nigel and Nina Lightfoot even tried to buy the book before it was written.

  My children contributed in different ways: the idea first came to me while I was walking along the Northumbrian coast with Emily and my son-in-law Max; Libby helped me greatly, particularly with computer problems; Thomas read chunks of the manuscript and offered usefully honest criticism; and, as a result of his immersion in the ovine world, Edward now recognises, on sight, more breeds of sheep than most children his age.

  It may be trite, but I mean it, that without my agent, Ed Wilson, and my editors at Profile Books, Rebecca Gray and Penny Daniel, and Mark Handsley, my copy-editor, this book would most likely
never have seen the light of day.

  There will doubtless be mistakes and infelicities; for all of these I take full responsibility.

  Philip Walling

  Belsay

  January 2014

  INTRODUCTION

  … For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.

  G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Rolling English Road’

  THERE IS A PARALLEL WORLD AT WORK IN BRITAIN which most people, even those who live close to it, hardly ever notice and, even when they do, know little or nothing about. It’s a world that has existed time out of mind and was once the foundation of all the wealth of England. And despite its decline from high importance in the Middle Ages and the ravages caused by the opening up of the New World, it continues, keeping faith with the passing seasons, obeying its own imperatives and adapting to survive.

  This is the world of sheep husbandry.

  Just as robins and blackbirds occupy the same territory and yet completely ignore one another, so most modern Britons occupy the same land as millions of sheep and, for all the notice we take of them, they might as well exist in another dimension. Everybody recognises sheep when they see them – they have woolly coats, live in fields, eat grass and have lambs in the spring – and there are few country places in Britain where you won’t encounter sheep. But those things apart, to most people sheep are only sheep. They would not be able to name the breed, or the part of Britain it belonged to, or know what it was doing or why it was there. One of the purposes of this book is to try to remedy that. Another is to show you a little about something that we do really well here in Britain, something of which we ought justifiably to be proud. Because producing food and wool from our own soil is a real activity, not a metaphor, and unlike much that happens in modern Britain, it does not evaporate when you try to grasp it

  How many of the millions of people who scurry past Shepherd’s Bush every day give a thought to where the name came from? It was once an open heath, where sheep grazed under the eye of their shepherd, and there would have been a hawthorn bush trained into a shape that was once ubiquitous all across the downs and heaths of England. The thorn was pruned to grow into the shape of an oval cup, rather like an armchair; all the inner wood was removed and the outer branches were allowed to grow densely and knit together to a thickness of about eighteen inches. The trunk was shaped to make a kind of a platform upon which the shepherd could lay a bed of straw for comfort, and then he could step up onto it, throw a sack over the bushy sides to protect his arms from the thorns, and stand like a sea captain on his bridge, scanning the flock on the heath from his vantage point. Some shepherds’ bushes were shaped to form a roof, as well as sides, and with a sack thrown over the top, would have made a fine shelter from the sun and rain.

  Right in the middle of one of the most cosmopolitan cities on earth we have this permanent reminder of the enduring place that sheep have had in our lives. There are hundreds of sheep streets, sheep washes, sheep towns, associations with wool and weaving and spinning in every part of the kingdom. But these historical references and allusions should not lead us to believe that sheep belong to the past and have lost their importance. Far from it. We still have about 23 million of them in the United Kingdom, even though the national flock is reduced from 1992, when we had the ninth largest in the world, with 44.5 million head of sheep, half of them breeding ewes. It has never fallen below 20 million, apart from during and just after the two world wars when crop production took precedence. The sharpest reduction came in the year to June 2001, when the foot-and-mouth slaughter reduced the flock by 5.5 per cent. It has never recovered from this.

  Britain and its people have been formed by waves of migrants flowing in over thousands of years. Historians can tell us something about their origins and the effect they had when they got here. But little is known about the domestic animals they brought with them. Perhaps they weren’t considered worthy of recording, only being livestock, but the immigrants’ animals, particularly their sheep, established themselves just as surely as did their human keepers. Some were crossed with the breeds they found here, others retained their purity for centuries, while a few have remained almost as they were when they arrived. By adapting to the landscape and climate, they found a place and established their character.

  More than any other piece of land in the world, Britain is quintessential sheep country. Its climate and terrain are ideal for rearing sheep and sheep have been kept in large numbers throughout the British Isles for thousands of years. Our temperate climate, with little or no snow cover in most winters, and nearly always some vegetation available at any altitude, allows sheep to be kept outside in most places, throughout the year. From the thin soils and semi-tundra of the mountains of Scotland, Wales and the Lake District, to the Pennine fells, the rich lowlands of the Midlands, the marshes of Kent and the moors of the West Country, over many centuries, breeds of sheep have been developed which have become marvellously adapted to the land they live on. We have more than sixty different native breeds – a breed for every type of land and climate – and much of our landscape is the result of centuries of sheep grazing.

  The French, who have remained closer to their soil than we have, talk much about terroir – the semi-mystical belief that the soil imparts a unique quality to everything that grows on it. Mention le terroir to a Frenchman and he will nod knowingly; no further explanation is required to explain, for example, the difference between wines made from the same variety of grape grown on adjoining plots of ground – sometimes only separated by a track or a stone wall – mais c’est le terroir, c’est évident! And our native sheep are just as much a product of their soil as are the Frenchman’s grapes, or his cheeses or anything else that he gets from it. The soil imbues its products with certain characteristics. Sheep bred and reared for long enough on soils overlying limestone appear to take on a black or blueish bloom to their skin; whereas acidic soils, especially those containing iron, seem to impart a reddish hue. The best sheep-breeders are instinctively aware of these effects and strive, whether consciously or not, to enhance them. Breeders of the Swaledale aim for highly defined black and white skin and hair colouring; any shade of brown is not tolerated and they aim for a blueish cream fleece, like skimmed milk. By contrast, everything about the Herdwick, bred on the thin soils of the Lake District, tends towards steel-grey with reddish contrasting tones. And the Wiltshire Horn, on the calcareous soils of its native downs, is the quintessence of chalky whiteness.

  But there is another thing about our national flock that is unique to Britain. We are the only sheep-keeping country in the world to have developed, over the last century and a half, a remarkably sophisticated stratified national meat-producing system, based on double cross-breeding, which has come to be called the sheep pyramid. The sheep at the top are pure-bred mountain and hill ewes, of which there are many millions, which form a genetic reservoir upon which the modern British sheep industry depends. These are moved downhill to better land and crossed with Longwool rams to produce breeding females which, in their turn, are crossed with Down breeds (referred to as terminal sires) to produce what are called butchers’ lambs. The effect of this system is that most of the lamb we produce for the table in Britain is descended from one of our pure breeds of mountain or hill sheep.

  However, we have not always had this pure-breed crossing system. Until about the beginning of the eighteenth century there were many different regional types of sheep, few of which were breeds that we would recognise today. All of the types were descended from four main wild prototype ancestors, and over long centuries they developed distinctly local characteristics. The Urial (or Turbary) ranges from the near east and eastwards into Tibet; its main distinguishing characteristics are a fawn coat, curved single horns in the rams and light erect horns in the ewes. They are prolific, twins being usual and triplets fairly common. Then there is the Mouflon, which was once widely distributed across Europe; the rams hav
e massive horns that grow at right angles to the head, backwards (and sometimes outwards) and end in a tip just below the eyes after completing two thirds of a circle. The ewes are nearly always polled, i.e. hornless. The third is the Argali from central and northern Asia. Both sexes are horned but the rams’ horns are larger than the ewes’ and curl outwards with up to three spirals; they also have a distinctive white or grey muzzle (like the Swaledale). The fourth is the Bighorn, originating in north-east Asia and Siberia and later extending throughout North America, where, like their bovine counterpart the bison (and many other native species), they were hunted almost to extinction during the nineteenth century. Both sexes have horns, massive and curled on the rams. They have a hairy-woolly coat, like a Wiltshire Horn, a white rump like a roe deer and a white or grey muzzle like the Argali.

  Their development into local types was partly through their adaptation to the soil and climate, emphasised by geographical isolation, and partly because breeders in a particular locality tended to favour a particular kind of sheep for sound practical reasons, such as there being a local market for its wool, or for its meat, or for its docility or fecundity, or whatever. Often a number of influences coincided and breeders enhanced certain characteristics because their experience told them that animals with those traits tended to thrive better than those lacking them and thus were more profitable.

  But it is hard to trace the origins of our modern breeds because the evidence is lacking, incomplete or confusing or they have been difficult to classify. Some breeds manifest what could be described as primitive features – for example, six horns, or a carcase like a goat, or they automatically shed their fleece in spring – whilst others have been selectively bred for certain characteristics such as high milk yields or a particularly meaty carcase. There is also much scholarly disagreement over the routes by which different types of sheep came into Northern Europe. Advances in DNA analysis and carbon dating of bones have thrown some light into certain dark corners and added to the evidence, but there are still large gaps in our knowledge about the origins of particular breeds that will probably never be filled. There are many reasons for this: the literate ruling class (with notable monastic exceptions) tended not to concern itself with matters deemed proper for peasants. The origins and management of domestic livestock were not considered worthy of aristocratic concern. And the peasant flockmasters and breeders, assuming they were literate, tended to get on with their work rather than record what they were doing. Some of the later pioneers responsible for the breeding revolution in the eighteenth century were secretive about their methods and sometimes deliberately confused their rivals by misrepresentation. Breed names have been used imprecisely and interchangeably over the centuries and breed characteristics have changed radically according to demand, fashion and sometimes individual whim. And, rather like an elephant being hard to describe, even though we all know one when we see it, it is difficult to describe in words the differences between one breed of sheep and another.