All in the April evening
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All in the April evening
April airs were abroad
The sheep with their little lambs Passed me by on the road.
SHEEP calling to their lambs—the throaty, tremulous ‘where have you gone now?’ answered by the higherpitched, childish baa—is the evocative noise of spring. An ovine kindergarten performing comical corkscrewing star jumps or having running races is synonymous with lighter evenings and primrose banks. ‘No miser with his hoarded gold can feel the pleasure which comes to Esme and me as we stroll now through our doubled flock,’ wrote sheep farmer Thomas Firbank in I bought a mountain (page 168). ‘There is no greed in our eyes as we survey the teeming land; rather are we humbled before the courage, persistence and simplicity of Nature.’
John Lewis-stempel writes that sheep have given him some of life’s best moments: ‘Few experiences match lambing under spring moonlight, or breaking open a bale of hay in a January snowstorm on the top of a faraway hill, the sheep gathered gratefully around.’
Britain boasts a dazzling smorgasbord of sheep breeds—and, therefore, meat flavours —more than any other nation, and it is still possible, in some places, to tell where you are by the shape of the animals grazing. There are Wiltshire Horns that speak of ancient landscapes and Tess of the d’urbervilles, black and badger- or speckle-faced Welsh Mountain sheep roaming wild Wales, tough grey Herdwicks on the fells, honey-coloured Portlands, cuddly-faced Exmoor Horns, primitive Hebrideans and Shetlands and majestically horned Blackfaces in the Scottish borders.
Others, such as the Cotswold, whose rippling, golden fleeces once made the area prosperous, have become all too rare.
There is a lazy tendency to disregard sheep as brainless, easily led, deploying soppy facial expressions, having a death wish and being unapologetic burpers. In fact, they can be resilient and useful and, if their uneven distribution contributes to environmental degradation, this is partly the result of consumer pressure for everything to happen faster.
Britain is more or less self-sufficient in sheep meat; the industry is worth about £1.3 billion and, says the National Sheep Association, has half the carbon footprint of the global average. Wool is a natural, sustainable fibre, a good insulator and a short-term storer of carbon. Our country is predominantly grassland—someone’s got to eat it; sheep will graze where other animals can’t, prevent a brambly monoculture and, in rotational farming, will naturally restore soil fertility. The British landscape would be a poor and desolate place indeed without our woolly furniture.