Ewe and me

This is not just any sheep, it's a Herdwick sheep. I was surprised to see a flock of them in the hillside pastures where usually our Welsh Mountain variety crop the turf.

Herdwick sheep are native to the Lake District and with their distinctive blue-grey fleeces of weather-repellent coarse-haired wool they survive all year round foraging the open moorland without additional feeding. Centuries of their grazing has created the distinctive landscape of the Cumbrian fells: grassy, treeless uplands criss-crossed by stone walls built to contain the sheep generation after generation. As a result these animals are 'hefted' to their native turf: the lambs learn the topography of the landscape from their mothers and they never stray from their ancestral pastures. It means that flocks cannot be easily broken up or replaced because, like novice London taxi drivers, they lack 'the knowledge' in unfamiliar surroundings.

Beatrix Potter, creator of Tom Kitten and Peter Rabbit, had another career as a Lakeland sheep farmer and it was she who championed the Herdwick in the 1930s and 40s when it was in decline. She left 15 farms and their flocks to the National Trust and those acres are still grazed by descendants of her sheep. It seems as worthy a legacy as her immortal nursery tales.

In her novel The Fairy Caravan Potter's woolly heroine Belle Lingcropper bleats:

Cool is the air above the craggy summit. Clear is the water of the mountain keld. Green grows the grass in droughty days beneath the brackens! What though the hailstorms sweep the fell in winter--through tempest, frost, or heat--we live our patient day's allotted span.
Wild and free as when the stone-men told our puzzled early numbers; untamed as when the Norsemen named our grassings in their stride. Our little feet had ridged the slopes before the passing Romans. On through the fleeting centuries, when fresh blood came from Iceland, Spain, or Scotland--stubborn, unchanged, UNBEATEN--we have held the stony waste.

That's the ewe. For me it's been a busy day's catering: a loaf of bread, a cassoulet and a mincemeat and pear jalousie tart have rolled in and out of the oven for the unexpected guests who strayed into our pastures. It's left little time for comments and now, please forgive me, I'm very tired.