Country Mouse Giles Wood
William Holman Hunt’s great painting Our English Coasts, 1852 ( Strayed Sheep) always sends shivers down my spine. Especially today – because, in the absence of anyone with professional skills to take charge, I have just been doing a bit of shepherding myself on our south Welsh coast.
What surprised me, given my indifference to sheep – deeming them, with their reptilian eyes, to be no more sentient than fish – was how naturally it came to me to assist a fellow creature in distress. A dormant impulse towards public spiritedness, last manifest in the bob-a-job years, was suddenly reactivated when duty called.
‘Sheep are such unfortunate animals!’ lamented Bathsheba Everdene in Far From the Madding Crowd. ‘There’s always something happening to them! I never knew a flock pass a year without getting into some scrape or other.’
How right she was. I have now spent three mornings as a citizen shepherd and am building a case file against the absent incumbent.
Day One: I was searching the headlands near a precipitous limestone quarry for choughs. Good news – the choughs are back. But I found a breach in the field fence where sheep had erupted on to rocky, self-willed, badlands of briar and thorn. I released two from bramble thickets; another three seemed too weak to get up on their legs after I freed them.
Day Two: house-to-house enquiries identified the shepherd responsible, a man with a dismal local reputation for poor shepherding and animal welfare skills. I obtained the shepherd’s mobile number and alerted him. He said he would ‘get up there and have a look’. Returning to the headlands, I found a pop-up army of volunteers – more citizen shepherds cutting bramble twines to free more trapped sheep.
Sheep don’t help themselves when trapped. They turn around in circles, causing bramble cables to corkscrew into their fleeces with all the tensile strength of steel, trapping them until starvation, drought or pneumonia does its business.
Sometimes, you can just go up to a sheep and say ‘Boo’, and that’s enough to give them a burst of adrenalin sufficient to free themselves; but often they have become so meek and accustomed to being passive and bossed around by dogs that they seem to have lost their Bear Grylls-type survival skills.
I might make the fanciful suggestion that brambles be reclassified as Britain’s largest carnivorous plant. There’s nutrients in dead sheep.
Day Three: no evidence of shepherd’s visit can be seen. Breach in fence unmended and further skeletons provide evidence of historic neglect. Magpies and buzzards were hovering.
One sheep had fallen into a chasm caused by a faultline. I see now why shepherds need crooks. Without one, I had to free it from its prison by removing rocks and debris with my bare hands. Later, I read in a shepherd’s manual that it is not acceptable to pick a sheep up by its fleece. You must pick it up by the scruff of the neck and support the rear end. Mary is frustrated that I have returned without photographic evidence from the killing fields but then, as she often complains, I’m the only man in Britain never to carry a mobile phone.
Day Four: the morale of the publicspirited locals must have been crushed by the realisation that no one responded to their reports of fallen stock; the locals have ceased to attend the scene of the crime. Will I join these ‘Sheeple’, and give up, or do my Man Scout duty to God and Queen in this corner of Wild Wales?
Having complained to both tenant farmer and land owner about these animal welfare concerns, I can only conclude that both may be inured to livestock loss. There are simply too many sheep and maybe breaches in the fence go unmended deliberately as they take a Darwinian stance re letting the sheep stray into the badlands.
In Feral (2013), George Monbiot advanced the original view that sheep are far from harmless, picturesque enhancements of our uplands. Forget Agnus Dei. Monbiot claims that the UK has been ‘shagged by the white plague’. Monbiot does what he does best – in the spirit of William Cobbett, he stirs it up.
‘We pay billions to service a national obsession with sheep… which have reduced most of our uplands to bowling greens with contours... Spend two hours sitting in a busy suburban garden and you are likely to see more birds and a greater range of species than in walking five miles across any part of the British uplands. The land has been sheepwrecked.’
Mary is not the only Briton to make a sentimental connection between sheep and wild places. But Monbiot’s thesis is gaining ground and letters are beginning to appear in, for example, the Daily Telegraph, urging that ‘Michael Gove rule that landowners will receive subsidies for hill land after Brexit only if they agree to plant trees, instead of rewarding them for open grassland and sheep farming’. (Professor Arthur Morris).
Cleansing us of our cultural, religious and literary associations with the woolly-headed ruminant from Mesopotamia will be a generational struggle. Shepherding – and the pastoral tradition embraced by Virgil and revived by the Elizabethans – will not disappear overnight, like the night-soil cart. And with regard to Agnus Dei, the way things are going, it’s probably only a matter of time before Christianity is filed under a box named spiritual abuse.
But I doubt if even Monbiot would want to see sheep disappear altogether from our shores.