The Shepherd's Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

money we make is from these two kinds of production.
    Winter is about looking after the core breeding flock through the worst weather of the year, feeding them when needed (our sheep eat grass for much of the year until it disappears in the winter months, when we need to feed them the hay).
    Late winter/early spring we tend the pregnant ewes and prepare for lambing time.
    Spring revolves around lambing the ewes on the best land we have (the inbye) and looking after hundreds of young lambs.
    Late spring/early summer we are marking, vaccinating, and worming the ewes and lambs and pushing them to the fells and intakes to take advantage of the summer growth of grass, freeing the valley bottoms to grow the hay for winter.
    And then we do it all again, just as our forefathers did before us. It is a farming pattern, fundamentally unchanged from many centuries ago. It has changed in scale (as farms have amalgamated to survive, so there are fewer of us) but not in its basic content. You could bring a Viking man to stand on our fell with me and he would understand what we were doing and the basic pattern of our farming year. The timing of each task varies depending on the different valleys and farms. Things are driven by the seasons and necessity, not by our will.
    Sometimes I am left alone somewhere on the mountain, waiting for the others, alone in the silence. Skylarks rise, ascending in song. Sometimes there are moments when not a sheep or a man can be seen. Away in the distance I can see the main roads and the villages. No one really knows how long this fell gathering has happened, but it is quite possibly as much as five thousand years.

 
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    Beneath my feet and all around me is the rough mountainous grazing land. Traditionally, Lake District farms like ours had common grazing rights for a set number of sheep on the common belonging to their manor. The numbers were established by custom and communal management to reflect the grazing capacity of the fell and the winter grazing capacity of the farms down below. This was, and is, a system that requires rules and customs to prevent abuse, cheating, or mismanagement. Before mobile phones or e-mail, the only way that people could work collectively to manage this land was to have agreed traditions and practices—making clear what everyone was supposed to do, when, and how. There were even manorial courts to punish wrongdoing with fines, a practice that still exists through the commoner’s associations. We collect stray sheep from one another at our shepherd’s meet in November or are fined by the other commoners. Travelling by road from one side of a common to the other to collect a stray can be a ninety-mile or more round trip. Some farms still have stocks on different commons, so some fell shepherds spend a lot of their lives gathering different fells. Some farm lads specialize in this kind of gathering as an extra way to earn their living, and have packs of sheepdogs for the work.
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    There is a poetic fantasy that shepherds and farmers live a kind of isolated existence alone with nature. Wordsworth encouraged that idea, offering the world an image from his childhood of the shepherd alone in the fells with his dogs, at one with nature. At times this is physically true: men like my grandfather were sometimes alone with our sheep and the natural world. But shepherds don’t exist alone. My grandfather had a field called the football (soccer) pitch. There were enough young men working on the neighbouring farms that they could muster two teams of eleven for a match. And his work was about dealing with and ultimately impressing and earning the respect of other people.
    Apparently the Bedouin can navigate the Sahara because they have an extensive knowledge of the dunes and sandy ridges; and even though these move slowly over time, the Bedouin can count the ridges and know with a degree of accuracy where they are and how to get to where they are