A shepherd’s life
James Rebanks’s family have been working the land in and around the Lake District for 600 years. In a series of exclusive columns, he takes us through the seasons of the sheep-farming year
In the middle of summer, our sheep are grazing on the distant fells. I can see them from my kitchen table even though they’re three or four miles away, high up on Great Dodd, just along the skyline from Helvellyn. When we go up there to bring them in for shearing, the fell is alive with skylarks rising and falling in the blue summer sky. You can see as far as Scotland across the shimmering silver of the Solway Firth, and away to the Pennines in the east. The whole Eden Valley stretches out beneath you like a vast ocean of green fields.
We are only one of the ten flocks on our common land, so we have to work with the other shepherds to ‘gather’ the fell. We clip our sheep on around 10 July each year, so in the preceding days we go with our dogs and bring them into the sheepfolds
to sort – if you’ve ever gathered a flock of sheep and lambs, you will know that they make an unholy racket as they seek to find each other in the chaos. To get to the folds we bring them along the shady lanes past dry-stone walls and foxgloves that swallow bees as they search for nectar. The sheepdogs are tired, and hot, by the time we get close to home. Tongues lolling, they wallow in the becks.
I love clipping time. It is one of the traditional tasks that anchor our working lives into an ancient cycle. Many of my childhood memories are of treading the fleeces into the wool bags, helping my father and grandfather, later struggling to learn to clip myself, and having a kind of macho rivalry with my father. He worked for a decade or more in his fifties and sixties as a contract shearer with a gang of local farming lads. It was a way to earn some extra money in the quieter months when the farm was less hectic, and was the kind of slightly insane workload that he thought nothing of. My father just got on with it and ignored the fact that it should really be a younger man’s job. He was quietly proud that, when he was 61, he sheared more than 6,000 sheep in a season, and was lean, fit, wiry and suntanned at the end of that summer – he wasn’t as fast as the younger men he sheared with, but he had amazing stamina. More than one yoth experienced the embarrassment of being beaten by the ‘old man’ late in the day, when they ‘blew up’ and slowed down, and he passed their daily total.
My father loved clipping, as I do, because of the social side of the work. You toil away with your friends, teasing or encouraging each other, or racing to see who can shear the most. But you
also get to visit countless farms across the landscape, seeing their flocks and getting to know the farming families. It is hard work, but it feels like you have done something useful and real. Often you are obliged to sit down to a clipping-time tea, laid out by the farmer’s proud wife. Eating mountains of cake is not really what you need when you will be bent double shearing all afternoon, but these are not ladies to say no to.
Our wool is almost worthless. I find that heartbreaking. Some of my friends don’t even send it to the British Wool Marketing Board for processing, but simply burn it, because the cost of collection, and the time required to pack it up, often exceeds the market value. One of my friends in Patterdale tells me they found a record showing that in the mid-18th century they would be paid £250 for their wool, a fortune then. But it is still the same amount today, a pittance for all the work involved. Our slate-grey fleeces are worth about 40p – if I paid someone to clip them, it would cost me more than £1 per sheep.
The sad truth is that most people wear synthetic clothes now. I’m told these kinds of material are made more quickly and cheaply than natural wool can be washed, combed and processed. But nothing beats woollen fabric, and there is a growing bunch of talented craftspeople using ours to make great products including beautiful hardwearing tweeds for clothes, purses and bags. We have a Herdwick carpet on our stairs and in the bedrooms. Someday I’m going to have a stylish grey overcoat made of tweed from our Herdwick wool, so I can look like a Cumbrian version of José Mourinho.
I clip my own 500 or so sheep myself. We do it mainly to keep them healthy and comfortable rather than to make a profit from the wool. Once I’ve finished each ewe, I mark it with our ‘smit mark’, a dab of paint that identifies the sheep as belonging to our flock. Ours is a blue dot in front of a red dot on the sheep’s shoulder. As the ewes go back to unfenced common land, these identification marks are vital to stop them being wrongly claimed by someone else.
Clipping is brutal work for your back, until you learn to hold the sheep well, and move with it to expose its fleece to the blade
to best effect. It’s a choreographed, sweeping, twisting dance between man and beast. A great clipper in full swing is a thing of beauty – arms, feet and legs all moving the sheep and the clipping handpiece simultaneously so the fleece falls away like peeling a banana skin. We like it to be sheared off without any kind of tramlines and certainly without any nicks or cuts, so I take my time and make sure the ewes are cleanly clipped. After I’m finished, they are slender-looking, skinny things, suddenly all legs and head. They are also spotlessly white once the dirtier fleece has gone. Often they seem to find their new nakedness ticklish, flicking a foot against their side as if unsure what just happened. You can see their skin shuddering when a fly lands on their flanks.
The lambs seem confused by their mothers when we let the flock out of the pens. They run to the sound of their calls, but recoil a little when they see a strange-looking shorn creature where they had expected to see their familiar woolly mother. But an hour later they have ‘mothered up’, suckled and the change is long forgotten.
The clipping shed is half-full with the large hessian wool bags that the Wool Board sends us to put the fleeces in. They are like a sleeping herd of fat grey hippos. My son Isaac trudges from side to side in the bag near to where I am clipping. He is five years old, but an old hand at this work. He treads down the wool into the bags, packing it in tightly. It is the same work I did for my father at that age. I have no idea if he will become a farmer someday, or whether the world will still have a place for people like us, but I am glad he has had this kind of childhood. There is nothing better than summer when you grow up on a farm. It leaves you with memories in which the sun seems to shine every day and life is always good.