A Year in the Life of the Yorkshire Shepherdess Read online

  January is, on paper, a quiet month. If the weather is settled, the cold is not an issue for the flock. There may be little grass for them to eat, but the hay we made in the summer feeds them. We make small hay bales that split easily so that we can spread it out, so that even the shyest of the sheep gets a chance to eat. Also, it’s a good way to distribute seeds for next year’s crop, reseeding the pastures by entirely natural means, though it doesn’t work when the wind picks up and our prized hay can be seen blowing across the moor, balling up and rolling like tumbleweed in a Western, until it eventually disappears from sight. This is wasteful, so then we use round hay feeders. We’ve got a couple, but we don’t like them. The ground around them becomes paddled with mud as the hooves churn it up, and Swaledale sheep have horns which can get stuck when they put their heads through the metal bars into the feeder. Some stand quietly, accepting that they are going nowhere and either eventually extricate themselves or wait for us to come to the rescue; others panic and writhe about, and have been known to contort themselves in such a way that they can suffocate. Trying to free a tight-horned yow stuck in a feeder can be a real battle of wills, the yow pulling backwards with all her might while we try to push her head forwards and down, resulting in nipped fingers. Sometimes the only way to rescue her is to saw her horn off.

  We’ve also got a couple of hay racks on wheels, with mesh grids down the side. The problem with these is that the sheep push their noses through the square gaps in the grid to get the hay, and it ruins the look of their noses. The white marking round the nose becomes more angular and square. The damage cannot be remedied, and the sheep will not sell so well at the breeding sale where looks are paramount.

  We start feeding the flock twice a day as soon as the weather gets really rough, though we try to delay this as long as possible, to keep our hay supplies going. But if they can’t graze because of the deep snow, they need extra rations.

  After all the work we put into our hay crop (you’ll read about it in August), I get a bit obsessive about it. I dislike waste at the dinner table, and I dislike waste when feeding the stock. I chase wisps of hay that are blowing down the yard and I once got really annoyed with some resident tups who were overwintering in one of the loose boxes in the yard. Twice a day I took them fresh water, a handful of cake and a few canches of hay which I put in their trough for them to nibble at throughout the day. Every time I looked over the stable door they would be pawing at the hay, just picking at it, and by teatime they would be looking at me with hungry expressions as if to say: ‘I’m really ravenous but I’ve got a lovely comfy bed . . .’

  It’s not just the fact that it’s a waste of good food. Hay is terribly heavy to lift when you have a barn to muck out by hand with a fork. We use straw for bedding, which we buy in, and in the big building we bed the cows on seaves (rushes), which grow in the wetter areas of our hayfields. After our main hay harvest is over, we cut them, dry them and bale them.

  When we hear that heavy snow is coming, we keep the children home from school, especially the older ones who have furthest to travel. Lying in bed with the curtains open, we can tell when there’s been a significant snowfall. A harder, more unforgiving light is cast, and there’s a muffled silence that still perplexes me; why is it so instantly recognizable when Ravenseat is as quiet as can be at the best of times? The peace is soon shattered, as the children rush out there sledging, building igloos, throwing snowballs, and skiing. Before they leave the farmhouse there is a frantic scrabbling in the hat basket for balaclavas, gloves, mittens. They are dressed in layer upon layer of tights, socks, body warmers, overalls, coats, and waterproof mittens on top of gloves.

  I bought some second-hand skis on eBay that keep them amused for hours going up and down the slopes. From Violet upwards they are very proficient at downhill racing, but none of them knows how to turn, and the end of each run is the point where they stop or fall over. Muck-spreading can play havoc with the slopes, and hitting a frozen lump of dung at speed results in a few impressive aerial moves. Trudging back up the hill is a chore, so Little Joe the pony or an obliging sheepdog are persuaded to act as ski lifts, with mixed results: the animals don’t quite get the hang of where they are supposed to go, and tend to tow the children off in the direction of the stables rather than back up the hill. Sometimes I take pity on the kids, and pull them to the top with the quad bike.

  Empty feed bags stuffed with straw make comfortable sledges for the smaller children, though there are inevitably complaints when they hit frozen molehills and are catapulted into the air. The downside of their many layers of clothing usually comes about five minutes after they go outside:

  ‘I wanna wee,’ says Sidney, jumping up and down.

  ‘I think tha’ Annas ’as pooped,’ says Reuben, nodding towards a small figure standing in the farmyard with a look of deep concentration on her cherubic face.

  ‘Great,’ I mutter, taking off my gloves.

  They may be getting time out of school but they don’t get away without doing their homework. We have the internet, and schoolwork is emailed to us. So when the impromptu Winter Olympics is over, and the soggy gloves and hats are steaming on the back of the range, it’s down to work. There’s no mobile signal at Ravenseat, and we can’t have broadband because we are too far from a telephone exchange. The only way we were able to get online was to install a satellite dish. Running a business without the internet is near on impossible, but it wasn’t long after the dish was installed that I discovered the social buzz of Twitter, which is infinitely more fun than VAT returns and electronic cattle movements. We were initially dubious as to whether a satellite would survive the rigours of our weather, but it has endured everything, including gale-force winds. Only a direct lightning strike put it out of commission: it was frazzled and needed to be replaced.

  At some point, the electricity will go off. It happens every year, usually in winter, when storms bring the lines down. Electricity finally came to the top of Swaledale in the 1960s. It was a very big event and the National Parks authority was opposed to it, because they saw the electricity pylons as a blot on the landscape.

  At the time, not all farmers were convinced of the merits of an electricity supply – especially as they had to fork out nearly £300 each to be connected, and that was a lot of money back then.

  In the relatively short time I have lived here, electricity has become more and more important in our lives, not always to good purpose. It’s ironic that while energy efficiency is such a hot topic, things that once upon a time worked well without electricity now need it. Water used to come out of the taps without it, but now an expensive and complex water purification plant is needed to have a public water tap. Even our septic tank now has an electricity supply which is supposedly so efficient that it is possible to drink the water that drains out of it, but I have no intention of trying. When everything works, it is fine, but when the electricity is off, we’re in trouble: you can’t even flush the toilet.

  High winds are the usual cause of power failure, and it usually happens in the worst of the winter weather, when the children can’t get to school. At first it is a novelty, going back to the old ways, and whatever happens we always have a snug farmhouse to retreat to. We will never replace the open fire with anything that relies on electricity.

  Outside in the bitter cold, merely touching the gates without gloves is painful, your deadened hands seem to stick to the metal. The water troughs freeze over and we have to break the ice to refill them, carrying buckets of water and bales of hay on our backs. I suffer badly from kins, my finger ends repeatedly splitting and bleeding during these harsh days.

  I walk with my head down, to avoid being lashed by the wind that scours down from the hills and whorls around the yard. My thoughts often turn to our forebears, the men and women who farmed this land for centuries past, enduring the same conditions as us but without wellies, waterproofs, and hot showers to revive them, and only smouldering peat fires to warm the draughty farmhouse
. People may think we are tough and hard but our life is one of luxury compared to theirs. There were no quad bikes to take them up to the sheep on the moors, they walked miles to market with eggs and cheese to sell. From reading local history books and examining census records, I know that nobody stayed too long at Ravenseat farm in those days: it appears to have been a transitional place, with several smaller farms where we now have one. The families never ventured far, many remained in Swaledale for years, but they generally farmed here as young folk, leaving Ravenseat’s exposed and unforgiving land when they could find somewhere just a little bit better.

  Much of our energy in winter is spent keeping the animals well fed, but there’s a family to sustain as well.

  ‘It’s yer belly that keeps yer back up,’ they say round here. With no afternoon teas to do, or breakfasts for guests who stay in our traditional shepherd’s hut, I have a little more time to spend in the kitchen, cooking. I fill our big black pot with meat and vegetables and leave it simmering on the traditional black range. Sometimes I bake bread, oatcakes, buns, cakes. I get plenty of practice, because nothing lasts long around here. I make double or triple quantities, reckoning it will last a couple of days, but next time I look in the tins there are just a few remaining crumbs, or perhaps one token lonely bun, as if to say: ‘Well, we didn’t eat it all.’

  Our freezers and our pantry are filled before the winter: we expect to be snowbound at some point, and we need to be self-sufficient. The children love it when I cook on the black range: the smell permeates the whole house. The downside is that in the cold weather they are all ravenously hungry, and they are tortured by the aroma:

  ‘Is dinner ready, Mam?’ is a constant refrain.

  I prove bread in the ovens of the range, or on the hearth if the ovens are too hot. The little ones watch me testing whether it has risen enough by pushing my finger in and watching the dough bounce back, and when I am not looking they like to have a go. I have found many a loaf with the dents of several little fingers in it.

  ‘Who’s been pokin’ t’bread?’ I ask.

  ‘Weren’t me,’ is the general chorus.

  ‘Must’ve been Chalky,’ one of them pipes up. A dozing Chalky’s ears will flicker in recognition of her name but she’ll never move from her comfortable nest under the settle.

  The worst time is if the water is off. You go to the bathroom when you wake up, turn the tap and . . . nothing, sometimes just hissing, the sound of air escaping. That is really bad, much worse than the electricity being off. You don’t know how much water you use until you have to carry it from the river. Once the water supply to the house is frozen it’s impossible to get it back on, as the pipes run under the concrete in the farmyard. We have in the past tried and failed to get it running again, but now we resign ourselves to waiting until the temperature rises. There is a great deal of water-carrying into the house by the bucketload, heating it in kettles to wash the children as well as we can. Washing long hair is never easy. The water is either too hot or too cold; then you need to heat more water up to rinse the shampoo off.

  The pipes to the outdoor water troughs go underground, then up and through the nearest drystone wall, and it is usually just the last bits in the wall that are frozen. There’s no electricity supply nearby, so you can’t use something sensible like a hairdryer to gently thaw them. Inevitably, after days of frustration, we resort to the trusty blowtorch, but if you are not very careful you can end up with a burst pipe, so it’s better to be patient and stick with the buckets. There is no shortage of water, as Ravenseat has a river close by in every direction. When the troughs are frozen solid we can provide the horses with water by taking them down to the ford; but the old adage about leading horses to water but not being able to make them drink is very true.

  Cows drink an enormous amount of water, and it seems like a good idea to take them to the river rather than ferry endless buckets to the troughs. But as soon as they get out of the buildings they like to stampede up the snowy fields, making them even thirstier. One wintry day, after chasing the galloping, sweating cattle back into the barn, I decided that I’d had enough, and the water troughs were going to be defrosted by fair means or foul. I’d seen a TV programme about Siberia where a fire was lit under a car to get the engine going. It sounded dangerous: fire near to petrol. But I figured fire near to water wasn’t such a worrying combination. So I sneaked into the tool shed without Clive noticing: I knew he wouldn’t approve of my plan. Matches, some loose straw, and a small bottle into which I’d decanted a little bit of red diesel were all assembled at the other side of the barn wall from the water troughs. I reckoned that I’d soon get a bit of heat into the ground, and the cows would have their drinking water back in no time. I laid my fire carefully, scraping away the snow and the topsoil and getting as near as I dared to the wall. The fire burned hot to start with, fed by wood shavings and anything else I could lay my hands on, like the string and bits of crumpled paper that lurked at the bottom of my pockets. As soon as it had burned for a few minutes, I departed, pleased with myself and sure that Clive would be none the wiser.

  A couple of hours later he stormed into the house with a face like thunder.

  ‘Yer know t’water into t’coos?’ he said.

  ‘Mmmmm.’ I could tell from the look on his face that this was not the moment to boast about my clever scheme.

  ‘I’ve got serious trouble wi’ mi waterworks,’ he said.

  I resisted the temptation to reply with a smart quip: it was clear from his mood that this was no laughing matter. When I went outside with him I saw a geyser of water spraying high into the air from behind the barn. The whole water supply had to be shut off to investigate and, hopefully, remedy the problem. The frost on the ground was nothing to the frosty reception I got when Clive found the blackened, half-melted alkathene pipe. The weather was too bad to head off to the hardware shop for replacement pipe fittings, so I served my penance carrying far more buckets of water than I’d ever have needed to, if I’d only been patient.

  But when it comes to impatience, I’m not alone. I’ve heard of farmers in the old days, when the pipes were made of copper, putting an electric current through them. It had one of two instant outcomes: thawed pipes, or death . . .

  Wood is an essential fuel: we use it to supplement the more expensive coal, which we have delivered. The job of stacking the wood usually falls to Reuben and Miles, with Edith and Violet taking charge of bringing enough into the house to last the day. We are not log snobs: it doesn’t matter whether it spits or gives off a good aroma. Forget seasoned hardwood – at Ravenseat we burn anything, including old pallets.

  Poor Raven once stood on a piece of pallet with a nail sticking out, which went right through the sole of her welly and into her foot. She hopped around squealing until Clive removed the nail.

  ‘’Ow bad was it, Dad?’ she shrieked, still hopping.

  ‘It were so far in I didn’t knaw whether to use mi fencing pliers to pull it out, or use mi hammer an’ just bend it over on’t other side. . .’ he said jokingly.

  Luckily, it hadn’t gone deep into her foot; it was a superficial cut and there was no harm done, apart from a spoilt welly.

  Every winter we send sheep away from Ravenseat to spare them the worst of the weather. Most of them go at the back end of the year, in November, but we have one small flock that sometimes goes later. We rent a field near Teesside Airport, which has enough grass to sustain about forty-five sheep. We take our thinnest in-lamb shearlings, the ones expecting their first lambs. That’s a nice number: just one trailer load, so we don’t have to arrange transport on a lorry for them.

  It was New Year’s Day 2014 when Clive asked me to take them on their winter holiday, and to collect a bull from a neighbouring farmer on the way home. The land at Teesside suits the sheep, with the fields overlooked by a nursing and residential home for elderly people and not used by other livestock. Not only is it good pasture, but the residents take great delight in watchin
g the sheep, counting them, keeping a check on them. There was huge excitement a couple of years ago when one of the yearlings lambed early, while they were still there. The owner of the field, a nearby farmer, casts his eye over them for us now and again, but on the whole they thrive left to their own devices. I take them some mineral lick buckets every few weeks while they are there, but that’s all they need.

  So on New Year’s Day I dropped them off, then decided that, as I was close to a supermarket, I’d pick up some supplies. Our trailer, although in good working order, did have a couple of issues that made it less user-friendly. The handbrake at the front was so stiff that in order to release it I had to jump up and down on it (a peculiar sight) and it had no jockey wheel, which you need in order to attach the trailer to the vehicle towing it. It had met its demise long ago, as a result of our forgetting to lift it when setting off. Consequently it required two people and a fence post to get the trailer on or off: one to lever up the front and the other to back under it or drive away from it. This was a problem that Clive didn’t seem to take too seriously.

  ‘I hate this trailer,’ I’d say as I reversed up to it yet again in an attempt to get it realigned before setting off. ‘It’s a nightmare gettin’ it hitched.’

  ‘Just don’t tek it off then,’ was Clive’s solution.

  This meant that I couldn’t just dump it in the field after I’d let the sheep out. No, I had to trail the damned thing with me. Anyway, this New Year I was hungry, and decided to get myself something at the drive-through McDonald’s. In hindsight this was not a good idea. There was a fair bit of traffic about considering it was a bank holiday, but I’m used to driving about hauling a trailer, so I didn’t worry when I saw the sign about limited headroom. I thought this usually meant no lorries. It was only after I’d shouted my order into the speaker and was edging forward in the queue that I saw that there was an overhang at the next window, where they hand out the food, and it was far too low for the trailer. There was nothing for it but to reverse out. Now, it seems that a large proportion of the population of Darlington had also decided to go for a McDonald’s, and there was a long queue behind me. I rang Clive, which is my default response in any crisis.