Lonely Bo Peep and her baa-baa bridesmaids
THE congregation looked a little sheepish... but the bride and groom were beaming.
Emma Gray, who once wrote a book about her life as Britain’s loneliest shepherdess, has tied the knot – with her flock as her guests.
The 32-year-old married fireman Ewan Irvine, 40, last week in a Georgian hotel before holding a reception at her parent’s farm in Hawick in Roxburghshire, Scotland, where they celebrated with friends and family, sheepdogs and sheep.
The new Mrs Irvine hit the headlines aged 23 when a split from her fiance prompted her take sole tenancy of the National Trust’s 150-acre Fallowlees Farm in Northumberland, making her Britain’s youngest solo shepherdess.
She later became the first woman to win the prestigious Northumberland Sheepdog Trials League in the contest’s fourdecade history. But rural life wasn’t easy – she struggled to find a husband and penned a memoir of her lonely life on the farm in 2012, called One Girl and Her Dog.
After the wedding, Mrs Irvine said: ‘I’m very happy. I’d just about settled for being single forever.’ She added that for the honeymoon, naturally, she will be competing in an international sheepdog trial.