A SHEPHERD’S LIFE
James Rebanks’s Cumbrian column takes us through the sheepfarming year. This month: spring lambing
This month: SPRING LAMBING
Like his family before him, James farms hefted sheep – animals so bonded with a particular area of the land that they will return to the same spot without guidance, generation after generation. Having achieved a double first at Oxford University, James went back to the farm and wrote two bestselling novels about the life he leads there, steeped in tradition and the lore of the land. Here, he describes the most important season of the shepherding year, welcoming the latest members of his flock. The sun rises slowly over the fells and down onto a valley silvered with hoar frost. Shards of light race across the grass, chasing the darkness back until it only remains in the shadows. It is time for winter to accept its defeat and for the next season to take its turn in these hills – but spring must be shy, because it’s taking its time to put in an appearance.
I have been working in the lambing fields for two hours already and am keen to feel the sun’s warmth. Coldness at this time of year makes things harder because it shortens the survival time for the newborn lambs. In weather like this I have to be focused, otherwise a single crisis among the 500 expectant ewes can have a domino effect, stopping me from getting to the next sheep quickly enough and resulting in more fatalities.
Our flock lambs in April because history has taught us that any sooner than this and we might get caught in terrible winter weather. Any later and our lambs will not be ready to return to the fells with their mothers to graze the new-season grass in May and June. It’s healthier for mountain sheep to lamb outside, so that’s where I keep my flock. Many of my ewes, maybe 70 per cent, will lamb in the first three or four hours of the day, so I head out a couple of hours before sunrise. Only those that need intensive help are brought into the barn, to small pens where I can feed them and keep them sheltered. But most of my work is outdoors, so a cold snap, storm or prolonged period of lashing rain can wreak havoc.
The watery sunlight has shown me a struggling ewe in one of the lower fields and in no time I am on my knees next to her. I can feel the problem; she is delivering twins but, instead of one of the lambs coming first, its legs pointed together like a diver, there are three tangled front limbs appearing at once. So
I feel my way, working out whose are whose. I close my eyes and let my fingers do the work, until I am sure which of the legs belongs to the second lamb, and push them backwards out of the way. Then I pull my arm back, and take hold of the two correct legs and gently pull them. After a few tense minutes the lamb is born in a whoosh. It comes out shaking its head and spluttering for breath. I clear its nose and tickle a piece of stiff grass up its nostrils until it is breathing clearly, then I pull it forwards in front of the ewe. She has an instinct deep inside her that tells her she must get this lamb dry, on its feet, suckling successfully and moved to somewhere safe before nightfall, or foxes and badgers will surely come looking for it.
She fusses, licks and nibbles at the afterbirth, peeling it from the lamb’s coat, leaving behind an almost perfectly dry carpet of thick black wire wool. These fell lambs are born with their jackets on, ready for snow and rain and howling wind at an hour old. She is a good mother, and I merely watch to see that this lamb and its sister, who arrives without intervention shortly afterwards, are getting to their feet, and are heading towards her teats on their wobbly legs. The older I get, the more observing I do, and the more I leave things to their natural processes. A lifetime’s experience tells me this ewe will be OK now. She is one of my best, a fine-breeding old lady that has reared strong sons and daughters for me in previous years, so I look carefully at her lambs, assessing them. They are jet-black everywhere – except their ears, which are snow white – ‘true-coated’, with no other white streaks or dapples anywhere.
The lamb first to its feet is the male, and I can already see that he has a fine Roman nose, like her previous sons, and thick chunky legs – ‘heavy-boned’ in our words. I realise I am already making a judgment about whether he will someday be a highly valuable sheep for breeding. Each family of ewes in my flock is a long, ongoing story. Their stories wind around mine, intertwining with it, and each lamb is like a new chapter
“The older I get, the more observing I do, and the more I leave things to their natural processes”, James says in an old book. I can tell you where most of my sheep were born from memory alone.
When I get home from the fell, I have two ‘helpers’. My daughters, Molly and Bea, arrive at the lambing barn after school. They feed the orphan – ‘pet’ – lambs with bottles and I hear them laughing at their greediness. Ours is an old-fashioned family farm; I can’t do everything without them, so everyone is expected to pitch in and help out with a few jobs, just as I was as a child. This is how we learn to be farmers. The girls are particularly good at feeding and watering the ewes and lambs in the maternity pens. And sometimes I have to go and get them to help me run after a lamb, which has, at a few days old, escaped from its mother, and is racing around the wrong field or chasing the wrong ewe.
My daughters are also old hands at lambing now. I remember their delight the first time they did it. Molly, my eldest, was first, but it wasn’t long before Bea wanted to have a go, determined to keep up with her sister. I recall her appearing in her work clothes at first light, and getting on the quad bike with me. I told her it was cold and that she might not get a chance, but she seemed to know that she would – and she was right. She was small at the time, just six years old, and the lamb she ended up helping was on the large side – its front legs and nose protruding from its struggling mother. At first, Bea looked worried but there was grit behind her nervous smile and, after listening to my instructions, she gripped the lamb’s hooves and pulled. It was hard work and by the time the animal’s hips started resisting, she was tired and ready to let me take over. However, I reassured her and before long the lamb was on the grass being licked by its mother – Bea laughing because the ewe’s tongue was rasping at her hands, too.
I don’t know whether my children will always want to help their grumpy dad on the farm – time will tell – but, judging by their smiles when they hug the newborn lambs, I think they just might…
The Shepherd’s Life: A Tale of the Lake District by James Rebanks is published by Penguin at £8.99.