ewes to produce the Suffolk, without doubt, the most famous fat lamb-producing sheep in the world. In 1778, Coke started inviting local farmers to view his sheep at the annual sheep shearings. These gradually developed into farming seminars where new ideas were discussed and debated. By 1818 open house was kept at Holkham for a week, with hundreds of practical and theoretical agriculturists, farmers from all districts, breeders of every kind of stock, assembling from all parts of Great Britain, the Continent and America. The mornings were spent in inspecting the land and the stock, and at three o’clock as many as 600 people sat down to dinner, spending the rest of each day in discussion, comparing notes and exchanging experiences. Copying Coke’s example, improving landlords in many other parts of England, such as the Duke of Bedford at Woburn, or Lord Egremont at Petworth, began holding similar meetings. These evolved into the county and regional agricultural shows held every year in Britain, of which the most famous are the Great Yorkshire Show, the Royal Highland Show at Edinburgh, the Royal Norfolk Show near Norwich, the Royal Welsh Show at Builth Wells, the Royal Bath and West Show at Shepton Mallet and the Royal Cornwall Agricultural Show.
To accommodate the need for agricultural expansion, another wave of Parliamentary Enclosure Acts was passed in 1760 and continued almost yearly for the next century, during which three million hectares of common land, mostly heaths, moor and fen, were enclosed. Droves of small subsistence farmers and out-of-work farm labourers and their families left the land. The lucky ones stayed in rural areas and found casual jobs road building, or as navvies planting hedges or building walls for the new enclosures, whilst their wives worked in one of the cottage industries – weaving, knitting hosiery or making gloves. Many thousands gravitated to the mills and iron founaries of the industrial North or emigrated. In the North of England and southern Scotland thousands of acres of marginal upland, heath and moorland was enclosed and let to tenants as sheep-grazing dispossessed the cottars (peasant farmers) and small tenants, who rented a few acres to grow basic crops and had traditionally grazed their few scraggy beasts in the hill valleys. The more enlightened landlords built ‘model’ villages to house those that had moved off the land and established light industry to provide them with employment. The Marquess of Tweeddale built the village of Gifford to accommodate the cottars moved from their small holdings in the Lammermuir Hills. Flax was a popular crop grown in the lowlands and a weaving industry was established in the village with a sunken bleach field in which the made cloth could be steeped in a lye solution to whiten it. Lord Lynedoch built the village of Pitcairngreen for the same purpose, confidently announcing that it would become the Scottish Manchester, and the Duke of Buccleuch built the village of Newcastleton and established a handloom industry. Other dispossessed farming families made their way to the new Scottish industrial towns such as Glasgow or New Lanark.
THE INFAMOUS CLEARANCES
The ‘Lowland Clearances’ are scarcely remarked upon by historians compared to the highly emotive and romanticised ‘Highland Clearance’ that started when Highland lairds employed lowland or English agriculturalists to improve their estates. Highlanders in the often heavily overpopulated straths and glens were forced to move to make way for sheep, sometimes under conditions of considerable hardship. Many took the option of emigrating to Canada and America, whilst others were moved to crofting townships on the coast. The thin, acid soil of the Highlands – particularly on the western side proved to be too shallow to sustain large flocks of sheep for long, and numbers were already falling when the first fleeces began arriving from Australia in the 1850s, causing the bottom to fall out of the wool market. As the sheep went, the red deer population increased and stalking started to become part of the increasingly popular Highland sporting experience. This led to the establishment of deer forests as prime land use, and by the end of the nineteenth century the area of land managed as deer forest exceeded two million hectares.
Graziers who rented hill land first had to clear it of scrub and, on peat soil, old rank heather by slashing and burning, the oldest method of improving ground known to man. Because of the topography of the ground, it was never going to be possible to fence the hills, so the early graziers, appreciating the delicate nature of hill herbage and its susceptibility to overgrazing, devised a method of ‘hefting’ the sheep. Each area of the hill was assessed on its potential sustainable stocking rate and then the number of ewes considered safe was taught to graze on each particular area, known as hefts. The hill breeds are, by nature of the land they live on, almost wild animals and naturally very territorial. This characteristic was an enormous help in the initial process, but even so, it was enormously time consuming. Circular stone-walled enclosures called stells were built on, or near, each heft and the sheep shut in them at night. By day, a boy or an old man would stay on each heft, keeping the flocks separate.
Gradually, over several years, the sheep on each heft became acclimatised to their own ground. To maintain this territorial knowledge, every year ewes that had reached an age where they could no longer productively survive the harsh conditions were sold off the farm and a proportionate number of ewe lambs from each heft retained, thus the grazing territories became inherited knowledge, passed from mother to daughter. The sheep on the hefts at my farm are the lineal descendants of those established 250 years ago and it is not unusual to see family groups of great-grandmother, grandmother, daughter and her lamb, all grazing together in the same group. Eventually the sheep ceased to be shut in at night and reverted to the instinctive grazing pattern of wild animals. In the afternoon they make their way to the safety of high ground and rest there until dawn. As the sun comes up, they slowly graze downhill to the sweet grass in the valley bottoms and, depending on the hours of daylight, they then start making their way back to high ground.
This natural ‘rake’ performed by hill sheep every day of their lives is what makes the husbandry of hill farming possible. The one glaring indication that a hill sheep is in distress is if it does not follow flocking behaviour. A hill shepherd’s day starts with his circuit of high ground; if a sheep is hanging back whilst the others are all grazing downhill, there is something amiss. In the afternoon, the shepherd goes round his low ground and the same principle applies. It is particularly pertinent at lambing time; ideally, as with all wild animals, a hill ewe prefers to give birth a few hours before dawn as this gives them time to recover from the birthing process, clean the offspring and see that it has suckled and is able to follow her before any danger that daylight might bring. A lesser proportion give birth during the day, after they have reached the good grazing of the lower ground and whilst there is still time for the lamb to be up and suckled before the trek back. Therefore a shepherd looks for likely problems on high ground in the early morning and on low ground at night.
The other essential piece of knowledge which is passed from generation to generation by the hefting is that if a hill farm changes hands the sheep always stay on the farm and an extra price over their market value is added for ‘hefting and acclimitisation’. Were they to go, it would be virtually impossible, in this day and age, to replicate the hefting and a new flock would simply surge round in a bunch, eating out the most palatable herbage until all the goodness had gone.
Hill farming would not be possible without the shepherd’s collie: ‘A single shepherd and his dog will accomplish more in gathering a stock of sheep from a highland farm than twenty shepherds could without dogs, and it is a fact that without this docile animal the pastoral life would be blank. Without the shepherd’s dog, the whole of the mountainous land in Scotland would not be worth sixpence. It would require more hands to manage a stock of sheep and drive them to market than the profits of a whole stock would be capable of maintaining? This observation by James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, is as true today as it was in 1800. A trained sheepdog in action is a wonderful sight and I consider myself privileged to have spent my farming life working with a succession of fantastic examples. Sheepdog trialling started 1873 at Bala in south Wales and there are over 400 sheepdog trials held every year in Britain, ranging from Nursery, Open, National Championship (a three-day trial held in Ireland), to the International Supreme Championship, which rotates between England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, with each country sending a team of fifteen
