Counting Sheep Page 2
Also, we tend to underestimate the effect of modern photography in reproducing a breed exactly as it looks. It was only fairly recently that livestock painters began to strive for realism: the sheep in William Taylor Longmire’s 1870 painting of Herdwick Sheep at Windermere, Seen from Low Wood (kept at Townend in the Browne Collection by The National Trust) actually look like sheep, although not much like modern Herdwicks. And the pictures of the celebrated livestock painter Thomas Sidney Cooper, who knew livestock from a countryman’s perspective, are accurate representations of animals as they were. But going further back in time, from the eighteenth century to the Middle Ages and beyond, when it would have been fascinating to see what domestic sheep actually looked like, such images as we have are far from realistic. Many of them were propaganda, done as caricatures to exaggerate desirable attributes, such as the 1842 picture of Jonas Webb’s improved Southdowns, and an 1863 painting of Shropshire Downs, both of which depict sheep as preposterous blocks of meat standing on impossibly thin legs. There are some apparently accurate images from the second half of the eighteenth century, but they are remarkable for their realism.
We have also tended to take our sheep so much for granted that we forget that mankind has depended on them for much of our history. They are the essential domestic animal, more so than the cow, the goat or even the pig. They are also our oldest domestic animal and for centuries have satisfied many of our needs. Their tenfold purpose – meat, fat, blood, wool, milk, skin, gut, horn, bone and manure – provided us with food, clothing, housing, heating and light, all manner of domestic implements, soil fertility and parchment – which for centuries was the only material upon which a permanent written record could be preserved. Over the millennia each of these products has assumed a greater or lesser value as our needs have changed. We no longer use much tallow for candles, as we did during the eighteenth century, when the demand across Europe was such that the fat from a sheep’s carcase was worth twice as much as the meat. Similarly during the wool boom of the Middle Ages the fleece was worth much more than the carcase. Now the carcase is worth between ten and twenty times the value of the fleece and the tallow is of negligible value. But throughout our association with them there has never been a time when we have not depended on sheep for one or other of their products. Our sheep represent a store of seasonal plant production that we can call upon when nothing else is available.
For centuries, when wool was our greatest cash crop, flockmasters kept sheep for the weight and quality of their wool. And the woolliest sheep were often the most ill-shaped, ungainly animals, slow to mature and living to great ages. Their breeding properties, carcase shape and fecundity were not all that important because only a few lambs were needed every year to maintain the flock size. Few animals were killed for meat and those that were tended to be older ones that had matured into the kind of mutton which would now be unattractive to modern palates. Many of these wool-bearing types were of venerable lineage, descended from sheep introduced into lowland Britain by the Romans to supply wool for their cloth manufactories. As the towns and cities grew, the demand for meat (and candle tallow) increased – although wool was still a worthwhile crop. Even into the 1980s the annual wool clip was reckoned to pay the farm rent. But as the urban population burgeoned in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for the first time in our long relationship with sheep we began to keep them almost exclusively to satisfy the demand for their meat. In the last decade or so, a fashionable niche market in sheep’s milk products has opened up again in Britain for the first time in nearly a century. We abandoned sheep milking – mostly for cheese making – when liquid cows’ milk became commonplace, unlike in Continental countries, where sheep’s cheese continued to be made and sold in large quantities and cows’ milk in bottles never caught on as it did in Britain.
This urban demand for meat caused a sea change in the British pastoral world over less than fifty years in the middle of the eighteenth century when a few farsighted farmers and graziers anticipated this revolution. The change in emphasis to meat marked the beginning of a long decline in the quality of fine English wool, and our renowned Longwools, such as the Lincoln and the Cotswold, and the incomparable Shortwools – notably the Ryeland – that had produced the wool-wealth of England in the Middle Ages were reduced to shadows of their medieval glory.
Then gradually, throughout the nineteenth century, the different regional types of sheep were developed into the kinds of distinct breeds we know today. Most of these were associated with a particular locality, but they were much more homogenously bred to conform to standards of breed uniformity than they had been when the emphasis was only on wool. By the second half of the nineteenth century the enhancing effect on their offspring of crossing together certain pure breeds became more widely recognised (particularly after the work of the monk Gregor Mendel in cross-breeding peas). Then when the railways made it easy to move livestock over long distances at a fraction of the cost of droving, the way was open to British sheep farmers to develop the sheep pyramid, the sophisticated national meat-producing system that we have today.
This book is an attempt to give a flavour of the wonderful story of how we and our versatile, compliant companions made our landscape in the great endeavour of taming the wilderness. For man and his sheep stand in partnership outside wild nature, on the side of the civilised world, transforming its vegetation for human benefit. Perhaps the most exciting thing is that the whole pastoral history of our Islands can be traced through breeds that still graze our pastures. They are all still here. So let’s start at the beginning.
1
THE SHEEP OUR ANCIENT ANCESTORS KEPT
… Theirs is no earthly breed
Who only haunt the verges of the earth
And only on the sea’s salt herbage feed – Surely the great white breakers gave them birth …
Roy Campbell, ‘Horses on the Camargue’, from Adamastor, Faber & Faber, 1930, p. 80
ABOUT THIRTY YEARS AGO MY NEIGHBOUR ACQUIRED a dozen piebald Jacobs (gentlemen’s parkland sheep, as I thought) with two, four and sometimes six horns, to graze the fields around his house. He was a lecturer in engineering and had designed his own elaborate sheep pens to hold his little flock for handling. He had also acquired a collie dog. But this dog flatly refused to have anything to do with sheep. If she even got wind that she was expected to go anywhere near them she would run into her bed and refuse to come out. No amount of cajoling, or even dragging, made the slightest difference to the recalcitrant animal.
From time to time his wife and daughter and anyone else who happened to be at the house were enlisted to try to pen up his Jacobs, but for eighteen months he failed to get them to go into his pens. They simply refused to be driven anywhere near them and whenever he tried to corner them they scattered. It was like a circus. They all gave birth during their first lambing time without needing any help, so he left them to fend for themselves. They were not shorn that year and by the next spring they were a sorry sight, carrying two fleeces, one on top of the other.
However, there were compulsory dipping regulations in force. And after their second lambing, when the flock had grown to over thirty mixed females and uncastrated males (which formed a separate little pack away from the ewes), he had to find a way to get them into his pens to comply with the law. So he asked me if I would go round with my dogs and help him.
Now these sheep were wild. I only had to rattle the chain on the gate and their heads went up. As the dogs circled round them they split up into two groups: one flocked on a little hillock at the top of the field and the other made for a gap in the hedge into the next field. I put one of my dogs round the escapees and with some difficulty she brought them back through the hedge into the field, but as soon as they realised they were being manoeuvred towards the sheep pens, they divided themselves into another two troupes, one which allowed itself to be eased into the pens, but the other legged it for the opposite corner of the field from the little group on the hilloc
k. The more we tried the more agitated they got.
This charade went on for ages, with me getting more and more irritated and the dogs more and more desperate. These sheep had never been bossed or dogged and with each failed attempt to get them into the pen they grew bolder, leaping over the dogs and running away like deer with their leggy little lambs keeping close to their mothers. My neighbour’s daughter and wife emerged from the house roused by our shouting. The four of us, with my two dogs, eventually got the flock penned, but one ewe and her lamb leapt the wooden railings and took off down the road towards the village. We later cornered them both in a garden a mile and a half away. They were completely exhausted or we wouldn’t have been able to catch them, but even so, the ewe still had enough fight left in her to jump about as I dragged her by a horn towards the van, with her frightened lamb tagging on behind. But as soon as I got her into the van the lamb turned tail and took off down the road as fast as it could run. I sent the dogs, but they couldn’t turn the terrified lamb, and after a hell of a chase, it finally gave up and flopped down on the verge, panting and lay there. I picked it up and threw it in the van with its mother, who by this time had set up a tremendous bleating and was running at the back windows butting them, trying to break out. This was my first encounter with primitive sheep and it rather prejudiced me against them.
Apart from oddities like Jacobs, there are two main primitive types of sheep, which came into Britain by two different routes. One is the northern short-tailed group (which for shorthand I call ‘Viking’ sheep). These came into northern Britain via Scandinavia and Russia from central Asia. By a genetic quirk, they only have thirteen vertebrae in their tails, compared with twenty in other sheep. The second type is a long-tailed Celtic sheep believed to have come from the Near East through the Mediterranean into southern Britain and then spread north. An example of this Celtic type is the Soay that roams semi-wild on Hirta, the largest of the abandoned St Kilda islands. But its near neighbour, the Hebridean, is a short-tailed Viking sheep. It seems that the two early migrations reached the furthest extent of their ranges in the Western Isles, where they met but never mingled. Rather as the Isle of Barra is Catholic and next door the Isle of Lewis is fiercely Protestant.
One of the most unusual of the Viking sheep is found on North Ronaldsay, or Rinansey (Ringan’s Isle) in Old Norse, the most northerly of the Orkney Islands, their last redoubt in Britain. They have endured here, on the very edge of the British Isles, because their island is so isolated and for the last two centuries have been confined to the foreshore for a large part of the year. Here they fend for themselves, and have adapted themselves to living on a diet of seaweed.
They do most things the opposite way round to other sheep. At their best during winter, when the red seaweed they prefer, Palmaria palmata, or ‘dulse’, is most abundant; they can’t eat grass for too long, or they are poisoned by the copper in it, yet they cannot get all the annual sustenance they need from seaweed alone; and unlike other sheep, which eat by day and chew their cud at night, they feed according to the tides, lying up on the foreshore at high water and then following the ebbing tide onto the rocks to graze the exposed seaweed. They can even swim. Some of the most intrepid will plunge into the ebbing seawater and head for an outcrop to be the first to reach the tastiest fronds. They are as agile as goats, negotiating the slippery rocks, unafraid of the surging tide. And they are not entirely vegetarian. They have developed an odd partiality to the feet and legs of dead seabirds. When the new automatic revolving lighthouse at Dennis Ness was installed, it attracted flocks of birds, which flew into it and were killed. Their car-cases proved irresistible to the sheep, which came from all around the shore to eat their legs.
Although the sea sustains them, it is an exacting benefactor. For in winter, powerful Atlantic tides surge around the island, in contention with the calmer waters of the North Sea. And when a westerly gale blows against a running tide over the shallow uneven seabed, many of the smaller low-lying islands, such as North Ronaldsay, are often ringed by broken water and overblown by spindrift for days on end, confusing land and sea. During particularly violent storms, the little sheep have hardly any protection from the crashing waves that douse them with salt-water and spray, and even on calm days the land is seldom free of a ruffling breeze.
The island’s flock was banished to the foreshore in the 1830s because the islanders were in desperate circumstances. Seaweed grows in vast quantities in the cool coastal waters around North Ronaldsay, nourished by the Gulf Stream. The crofters had used its almost unlimited growth as fertiliser for their sandy soil, dried it for fuel (there is no peat or wood on the island) and in winter, when other fodder was scarce, supplemented their animals’ diet with it. But there was still a vast annual crop that went unused.
So when James Traill, an Edinburgh lawyer, bought the island in 1727 for 2,000 guineas (£1 an acre) he probably had more than half an eye on the huge potential for kelp making. His purchase included the foreshore, which gave him the right to gather the ‘tangles’, as the seaweed Laminaria digitata is called locally, to make the kelp. Traill made it a condition of the crofters’ tenancies that they collectively produce a certain tonnage of kelp each year. It was an arduous business. Between forty and fifty cartloads of wet tangles made a ton of kelp after being dried and burnt, in controlled fires, like charcoal-burning, in shallow pits on the shore. A ton of kelp would make about 8 lb of iodine.
During the fifty years between 1740 and 1790, kelp brought in about £37,000 to North Ronaldsay. The crofters produced about 150 tons a year, at an average price of £5 a ton, which rose to £20 during the Napoleonic wars. Half the income went to the crofters, the laird received a third and the balance went on shipping and expenses. But this large cash income had a corrosive effect on the crofters’ moral economy, inducing them to neglect their crofts and fishing and live entirely on the profit from the kelp trade. The prosperity which it brought to the island caused its population to grow in fifty years by 40 per cent from 384 to 522.
In 1793 Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster in Caithness (first President of the Board of Agriculture and the man responsible for bringing Cheviot sheep to the north of Scotland) warned of the foolishness of relying on the kelp trade, ‘agriculture, which in every county is the first and foremost of the arts, is greatly neglected; and a style of living has been introduced among the proprietors, which their lands can by no means support, and which, if ever this manufacture should fail, must bring certain ruin upon them, their tenants, and their families’.
Sinclair was proved right: by 1832 the price of kelp had collapsed, and, with the islanders facing destitution, even famine, something drastic had to be done. Traill’s grandson, the then laird, drawing on his experience of colonial administration in India, together with his land-grieve (agent), Robert Scarth of Sanday, known as ‘a mesterfu’ man’, came up with a radical plan to save the island’s people from extinction.
Apart from encouraging emigration to larger, less populous islands, the plan involved ‘land-squaring’ and building a dyke round the island to keep the sheep off the cultivable land across which they had hitherto roamed unchecked. Up to then the whole island was cultivated in a Scottish version of the communal open-field system (the ‘run-rig’) that had been abolished in much of the rest of Britain by this time. The crofters were allotted strips of the island’s arable land each year so that everybody got a share of the best and the worst. Land-squaring abolished the run-rig and divided the land between the crofters to make it more productive and banishing the sheep prevented them from roaming over the crops and damaging them. The island’s flock was still kept mainly for its wool (and a little tallow for lights) and only occasionally killed for meat, because as is usual in pastoral societies they seldom ate their sheep (and when they did it was only the older ones).
The drystone sheep dyke was twelve miles long, built round the island above high water, to ‘louping height’ – about six feet – a little higher than the sheep could
jump. It separated the 270 acres of foreshore from the rest of the island. The crofters were then allotted the right to keep a certain number of sheep in the communal flock, according to the size of their squared-up holdings. The flock has been confined to the beachhead and foreshore ever since, although the ewes are allowed into the fields for about four months between lambing in mid-April and weaning in late July or early August. The nutritive value of seaweed varies with the seasons, but its great benefit is that it is at its best in mid-winter, when it is most plentiful and there is little else to eat. In spring, at lambing time, it also has milk-stimulating qualities.