Exciting days. In the mornings, while walking the dogs, I’m now allowed to play shepherdess for a while, and take Nell the sheepdog to bring our sheep out of the field on the neighbouring croft that we sublet and onto the common grazing. (It might sound like an odd thing to do every day, but it’s temporary and there’s a logic …) Quite an adventure; David is the one who’s always worked with the sheep and moved them around, and Nell was trained by him and is used only to working with him. Happy willing little dog that she is, she tolerates my bumbling attempts to figure out how it works (though not without an occasional stop in mid-flow to turn around and look at me as if to say – you want me to do what? For heaven’s sake, get me someone who knows what they’re doing …) and now I’m beginning to understand that the way I see the sheep isn’t the way she sees the sheep, and that somehow I need to adapt to her view of the world if it’s going to work. And to my delight it does work, helped of course by the fact that the sheep know where they’re going. There’s a great pleasure in making that happen, and increasingly I’m find myself more attached to our sheep than I ever thought I could be.
To be honest, I never much used to like sheep. Not even when my mother married a Welsh sheep farmer while I was in the throes of my PhD at the University of London, and I’d regularly find myself in the hills outside of Machynlleth playing honorary second sheepdog at lambing and other critical times. Oh, I liked the lambs well enough, and the age-old ritual of putting the dodgy ones in a wee cardboard box in the bottom oven of the Rayburn to warm up, but if I had a choice on those odd weekends off and holidays I’d always much rather feed silage to the cattle than run around after sheep.
When I had my first croft, in Lochbroom just outside Ullapool, I never much wanted sheep either. My thoughts about properly using the croft included pigs, polytunnels, geese , even alpacas – anything but sheep. Until I met David, and (being a true Welshman too, I suppose, albeit of the more southerly kind than my stepfather) he inevitably started hankering after a few sheep. Most of the sheep around that area were Cheviots, which are very fine meat producers and hardy enough, but I really don’t find them beautiful. In fact (sorry, all Cheviot sheep farmers) I have been known to call them Cream Blobs. So as far as I was concerned, if we were going to keep sheep they had to be beautiful and preferably rare-breed sheep. I thought about Shetland sheep for a while – but eventually David talked me into buying five beautiful little black Hebridean ewe lambs from a neighbour, and a few weeks afterwards on a fishing trip we added to them with five more from the prizewinning flock of the late Donald Ferguson on North Uist.
Because we had such a small flock, we began to know them very well. We didn’t have common grazings rights on that croft, and so they were on the inbye land year-round for the eighteen months or so that we had them there before we moved to Lewis (and, with a sigh of relief, to common grazings rights - ten ewes and associated hangers-on are far too many for the average sized croft year-round, without the ability to give the land a decent break). They began to acquire names so that we could identify them to each other – mostly derived from the colour and location of the sticky tape that we put around their horns to help that identification: Blue Left, Blue Both etc etc – but a couple of particular characters acquired names based on other aspects of their appearance: Wonky, who managed to break her leg in a galvanised feed trough within a mere few days of being brought home from Uist, and Little Horn – for obvious reasons.
By the time we moved to Lewis I found rather to my surprise that I’d grown incredibly fond of the sheep (which, although I’d happily inject them and help out at lambing, had always been firmly in the category of David’s animals, while I’d managed the growing geese/duck/hen collection, vegetable garden, and hankered after pigs and a cow). So much so that, when we were thinking of expanding the flock by a handful more, I argued for us to have a few Jacob sheep rather than more Hebrideans. So, we now have half a dozen breeding Jacob ewes, and a very fine tup lamb (Jake) who we hope will do the right thing by them in a couple of weeks time. The Jacobs have different sorts of names from the Hebrideans: Pirate, who has a black smear over one side of her mouth; Norma, short for Enormous; Big Sister and Little Sister, a pair of twins; Dulse, for no good reason other than because I always wanted to name a sheep after seaweed, and Just Jacob, because she has no particular distinguishing characteristics at all.
One of the most interesting things, now that I find myself occasionally, like David, staring at them in some sort of odd trance from time to time, is the difference in the two flocks – the different places on the common grazing that they seem to prefer, the different types of grass, the different behaviours (the Hebrideans are very active playful sheep, the Jacobs a little more tame and stately. And stubborn with the dog …). By the time lambing comes along and we hopefully have a few Jacob lambs to add to the annual collection of Hebridean lambs, I rather suspect that, even though I now finally have pigs and will very soon have the milk cow that I’ve always wanted, I’ll be totally smitten.
Sharon
Sheep are far more intelligent than most people realise. I have seen them tease many a sheep dog – and even more humans! A really smart sheep dog will ignore a human who gives them what they consider to be a really foolish order too. Understand both those things and you are a long way towards being able to work with both. (Says me from years of Australian country living. :-) )
Sheep certainly have character, and a very strong sense of how things should be done :-) And very individual characters, too. Wonky, for example, reminds me of the bustly old ladies I grew up with, and an old character from a soap opera when I was a child: the inimitable Ena Sharples from Coronation Street. I suppose some degree of anthropomorphism is inevitable :-)