The Shepherd's Life (26 page)

The next two-year cycle in the life of the farm plays out in our heads. I catch my father's eye, and his look tells me he loves these things but that he knows he might never see them happen. It also says he knows this will all go on. I turn away to cry so he can't see.

 

30

It is January, and I am wading through a grey swell of sheep. They are in their midwinter coats and the wind buffets their backs so the wool ripples in little waves. The oldest ones thrust their heads amidst my legs, or towards the hessian feedbag, eager to get at the sheep cake. I stumble on through them, looking for a clean bit of field to feed them on.

We scan them in January so we know which ewes have single lambs in them (these ewes can, by and large, look after themselves with some hay), and which have twins or triplets in them (these need more help and are at risk of twin lamb disease or just getting worn down, so need feed and hay). The scanning is a blur of activity as our friend who does it gets paid by the sheep, so understandably wants the process to be efficient. We have to be organized. He glares at the fuzzy grey screen, with one hand under the ewe's belly, shouts out “single,” “twin,” “triplet,” or “geld” (barren) and a mark is quickly sprayed on the sheep's back. She is then released back to the flock standing in the yard. Our mountain ewes average about a lamb and a quarter, to a lamb and a half each. Any more and we get too many problems, as a young hill ewe can manage one lamb, but two can be too much on marginal land. We don't want triplets born, as it inevitably means little lambs that are at high risk in bad weather or needing to be taken off the mother at birth so she has enough milk to rear the remaining ones. Our farming system is not about maximizing productivity, but producing what we can, sustainably, from the landscape.

It took traditional communities often thousands of years to learn by trial and error how to live and farm within the constraints of tough environments like ours. It would be foolish to forget these lessons or allow the knowledge to fall out of use. In a future without fossil fuels and with a changing climate we may need these things again.

For a few short weeks until lambing in April, those ewes scanned with more than one lamb in them will be fed some sheep cake. I carry this out in sacks, as cobs, little cylindrical nuggets, and pour in a line on the ground. Momentum is everything, or I will find myself wrestled to the ground, the feed spilled, and unceremoniously mobbed. As their pregnancies progress we have to be vigilant for any issues.

*   *   *

The weeks from Christmas until March are the longest and most testing of the year. I finish work each day in the gloom, orange specks of light across the valley telling me my neighbours are still working as well; although on bad days you can't see the other side of the valley and I'm greeted by waves of rain or snow that pass by as if in slow motion. These hard, cold, wet, weeks are when Herdwicks come into their own. Few other breeds would survive the winter here carrying lambs in their bellies. The ewes are becoming heavier in lamb with each passing week. They need our help. The bond between shepherd and flock is formed in these cruel months.

 

31

I missed large chunks of a couple of winters while I was at university. I missed the feeling that would come in the spring—that spring-elated feeling—because I hadn't earned it through the hard months of winter, the sun didn't shine quite as bright or the grass look so green.

I understand why people once worshipped the sun and had countless festivals to celebrate spring and the end of winter. It is this endurance in a place throughout everything that nature throws at it, year in, year out, that shapes our relationship with this place. We are weathered like the mountain ash trees that grow here. They bend away from the wind and are battered, torn, and twisted. But they survive here, through it all, and they belong here because of it. That weathering makes us what we are.

So you live for those little signs that you've outlasted it, the point when the days lengthen in March or April and the days eventually warm up, the fields turn marginally greener, and the sheep suddenly lose interest in hay as the grass begins to grow. Grass is everything. We see a thousand shades of green, like the Inuit see different kinds of snow.

These are the ways that winter is passing: the creeping out of the daylight each day, the warmth of the sun increasing, the bite of the wind easing, the grass greening. But the ravens honking above the fells speak of carrion from worn-out ewes, and the fieldfares flashing out of the hedges are reminders that winter still holds the far north. Foxes steal withered-up moles from the barbed wire, where the mole catcher has left them, telling of the hunger that once would have tested men here as well as animals. The carrion crows still lord it over the valley, cawing from the tops of thornbushes or trees. We know that without warning winter can grab hold of the land again.

 

32

My father says you cannot rely on winter being finished here until May. Sometimes I think he is too pessimistic; sometimes it is done halfway through April. Late in the winter things start slowly to change. Skeins of geese pass over, sometimes low and loud, other times high up near the clouds, heard as a quiet childlike chatter. We clear sheep from some fields in the first weeks of the New Year, so they can freshen up with spring grass for the ewes and lambs coming back to them in early April, and we look nervously at the pile of big bales of hay, because the heap shrinks every day through the cold weeks and starts to look like it will run out. My grandfather used to pick up little wisps of hay in the summer like they were worth a fortune. “That'll fill an old ewe in the depth of winter,” he'd say. Most years it lasts into April with a little bit left, then the grass grows and you curse having any left at all.

 

33

My other work has taken me to historic landscapes around the world, including others that face similar challenges to ours. I have met and talked with hundreds of farmers, stood in their fields and their homes, talked to them about how they see the world and why they do what they do. I have seen the tourism market shift over the last ten years with greater value attached to the culture of places. I see people growing sick of plastic phoniness and wanting to experience places and people that do different things, believe different things, and eat different things. I see how bored we have grown of ourselves in the modern western world and how people can fight back and shape their futures using their history as an advantage, not an obligation. All of this has made me believe more strongly, not less, in our farming way of life and why it matters in the Lake District.

Now, when I look at the world, and wonder if we will survive in it, I am full of hope for the future. There are young people coming into the farming way of life here. I see the pride in their eyes, and their tough, northern love of this place and our culture. This way of life lives because people want it to. If they didn't, it would already have died. It will change and adapt, as I and others have, juggling it with more modern lives, but the heart of it will remain. I now believe we will survive doing what we do. And, like Wordsworth, I believe our way of life represents something of wider benefit that others can enjoy, experience, and learn about.

The choice for our wider society is not whether we farm, but how we farm. Do we want a countryside that is entirely shaped by industrial-scale cheap food production with some little islands of wilderness dotted in amongst it, or do we, in at least some places, also value the traditional landscape as shaped by traditional family farms?

Recently I was in the south of China, following a winding path down the steep sides of a valley. As we got halfway down the hillside we came across a lady under a tarpaulin tent selling souvenirs. The things for sale were nice (though not made locally). Little ornaments showing the villages I have come to visit. She flashed me a smile, but there was something in that smile I didn't quite trust. It was a plastic have-a-nice-day kind of smile. I asked my interpreter to ask the lady if she likes selling these things, and she said she did, that she is doing very well financially. Then I asked what her family did here before tourists, and she said they were duck and pig people. They have farmed ducks and sold meat and eggs, and fattened pigs for centuries.

I told her that when I am home I am a farmer, and she smiled, but this time a real smile, open and friendly. It vanished when I asked if they still farm ducks and pigs. No. Those days were past. Someone had decided that ducks and pigs are too messy, they make too much shit, and tourists don't want shit on their shoes.

Like many of the loved places in the world this one is struggling to cope with the tension between wanting to earn money from tourism, and its potential to sweep away that which is special in the first place. Walk enough people over a stone step and you will eventually wear it away to nothing. So someone has decided that keeping ducks and pigs is yesterday's work and selling souvenirs is today's. When I asked her which was better, farming or selling souvenirs, she told me there was more money in souvenirs, but she'd rather keep ducks and pigs, because that is what makes her family and these villages what they are. Later, as I walked through those villages, I had to admire how clean and well preserved they are. But I looked at my clean shoes and I felt like this was a bit of a sham.

My shoes should be mucky.

 

 

 

SPRING

Let no one say the past is dead.

The past is all about us and within.

Haunted by tribal memories, I know

This little now, this accidental present

Is not the all of me, whose long making

Is so much of the past.…

Let none tell me the past is wholly gone.

Now is so small a part of time, so small a part

Of all the race years that have moulded me.

OODGEROO NOONUCCAL, “THE PAST”

And yet all these impressions, and a thousand more, add up only to a one-sided, personal and entirely superficial memory, which ignores what the mountain may mean to those who have lived for years beside it.

NORMAN NICHOLSON,
THE LAKERS: THE ADVENTURES OF THE FIRST TOURISTS

I respectfully maintain that work, business, and the undisturbed customary use of centuries should be set before idle amusement.

MRS. HEELIS (BEATRIX POTTER) IN A LETTER TO
THE TIMES,
OBJECTING TO AN AEROPLANE FACTORY ON THE SHORES OF WINDERMERE, JANUARY 1912

 

1

I am on edge. I can't settle. It is a week before the lambs are due to arrive but I am ready. Fretting. I go round the ewes more often than necessary because I'm nervous. Helen tells me I am a fool, that in a month's time I will be worn-out and the work will start soon enough, that I should save my energy for when the lambs actually arrive. I know she is right, but I still go anyway. So much can go wrong in the week or two before lambing. Ewes can suffer from conditions brought on by the stress of carrying lambs, like twin lamb disease. They have come through winter and now are tired but heavily pregnant. There are countless things to worry about, and I worry about all of them.