The Shepherd's Life Read Online Free PDF

going. Our cultural navigation, our placing of ourselves and other people, works on a similar structural basis—if you understand the bones of it, you can navigate the detail.
    My grandfather and father could go just about anywhere in northern England and they’d usually know who farmed the land they had passed by and often who was there previously or who farmed next door. The whole landscape here is a complex web of relationships between farms, flocks, and families. My father can hardly spell common words but has an encyclopaedic knowledge of landscape. I think it makes a mockery of the conventional idea of who is and isn’t intelligent. Some of the smartest people I have ever known are semi-illiterate.
    My grandfather could quickly find common ground with any farmer, discussing what breeds of livestock he kept, and which auction mart he frequented. He knew what everyone was likely to be doing at any given time of year. “Don’t bother going to see the Wilsons.… They’ll be too busy dressing mule hoggs [the beautiful ewe lambs they sold each autumn for breeding on lowland farms] today,” he’d say. And if I went to the farm over the hill that he was talking about, I’d see that he was right.
    Long before anyone could have a credit ratings check, people here could quickly find out if someone new in the community was trustworthy or not; a few questions in an auction mart or at a show with someone from the person’s previous community and their whole pedigree and track record would be passed on.
    So someone being accused of sheep stealing is a matter of scandal, a dirty rumour that flows through the valleys. Recently a well-respected Pennine farming family was accused of stealing sheep from many of their neighbours. The case has not been to court yet, and I have no way of judging whether it will end in a conviction or an acquittal—but the shock waves it sent through the hill farming community were profound. An old man we know, who farms the same common, had tears in his eyes when he told us about it—like he couldn’t believe someone he trusted might be guilty of cutting out ear tags, sawing off horns with the burnt-on flock marks, and stealing sheep.
    There is an unwritten code of honour between shepherds here. I remember my grandfather telling me about his friend buying some sheep privately from another farmer for what he thought was a fair price. Weeks later he attended some sheep sales and realized that he had got the sheep very cheap indeed, too cheap, about £5 less each than their market value. He felt that this was unfair to the seller because he’d trusted him. He didn’t want to be greedy, or perhaps as important, to be seen to be greedy. So he sent the farmer a cheque for the difference and apologized. But the farmer who’d sold them then politely refused to cash it, on the grounds that the original deal was an honourable one. They’d shaken hands on it. Stalemate.
    The only way out was to go back the next year and buy his sheep and pay over the odds to make up for it, so he did. Neither of these men cared remotely about “maximizing profit” in the short-term in the way a modern business person in a city would; they both valued their good names and their reputations for integrity far more highly than making a quick buck. If you said you would do a thing, you’d better do it. My grandfather and father would go out of their way to do good deeds for their neighbours because goodwill counted for a lot. If anyone bought a sheep from us and had the slightest complaint about it, we took it back and repaid them or replaced it with another. And most people did the same.
    Fathers’ names are interchangeable with those of the sons, and surnames with the names of the farms. The name of your farm tells other farmers here as much about you as your surname. There might be twenty farmers with the same surname, so it is immediately followed by