One Man and a Mule: Across England with a Pack Mule

Owing to the mule’s propensity for gnawing everything, any woodwork within reach should be smeared with soft soap.

The War Office, Animal Management (London, 1923)

A FEW HOURS after leaving Jason’s farm, Jethro was looking incongruous hitched up to a railing in the Kirkby Stephen car park. We were outside the livestock auction-rooms. A century ago, every farmer would have come here by horse, with or without the carriage. Now there was an expensive set of new Range Rovers and pickup trucks filling the spaces. Our Dodge van was by some way the oldest thing on wheels.

Farmers like to complain they’re not doing well, but a simple audit of their vehicles can tell you otherwise. We had tied Jethro off to one side; if he kicked out at any of the shiny Range Rovers in a fit of pique – or chewed a wing mirror, as mules do like to chomp on anything within reach – there would be a hefty bill to pay.

I could hear the auctioneer’s voice echoing out of the concrete pens where the sheep had been herded. It was unclear whether any old member of the public could just wander in, but after a couple of weeks with Jethro, I looked suitably weather-beaten to pass muster; most of the farmers were, anyway, more interested in checking out sheep than people.

Just outside the entrance, a farmer was muttering to himself as he left. I asked what was wrong.

‘I’ve spent too much money, that’s what’s wrong, boy! Got carried away.’

Inside the auction, a hefty-looking man sat on a bale of hay holding a Swaledale ram by the horns, peering intently into its face, eyeball to eyeball. As I walked down the long alleyway between the sheep pens, many other breeders and buyers were huddled down in corners in a way that strangely matched the sheep they were studying.

A couple leaning over a pen turned and caught my eye, as if they recognised me. But it was because they hadn’t recognised me.

‘Don’t worry, you can say you’re with us. Where are you from?’ asked the woman, who introduced herself as Ruth.

‘Really?’ I was both intrigued and puzzled. Nobody else seemed to breed mules in England.

The man laughed. ‘Mule sheep. Swaledale crossed with Bluefaced Leicester.’ Technically, a mule is the term for any hybrid between species.

‘Do you have Texel as well?’ I remained fascinated by these tough, bulldog-looking rams. ‘Are they as fierce as they look?’

‘A few. But they’re difficult. The wool’s so short, there’s not much to grab when you’re dealing with them. There’s no horns to hold. They’re all muscle.’

I asked about the key signs that people were looking for when they checked over the sheep.

‘The colouring of the black and white. That’s important. A lot of time’s spent plucking the grey hairs out using tweezers.’

I had already learned that sheep were ‘tonsed’, as it was called, their faces plucked of any extraneous strands as scrupulously as with any teenage girl attending to their eyebrows.

‘The size and shape as well. And they like the hair to be hard and the face to be hard. But not too much wool. They don’t like too much wool on a sheep.’

This seemed counter-intuitive. But long past were the days when anybody made any money from selling the fleece.

‘Tall,’ said Ruth. ‘Definitely tall. My dad always liked to say he wanted to see the daylight under them.’

‘We know the yow and the tup. We would never buy a sheep without knowing …’

‘To improve them. That’s the whole point. To get the bloodlines that you need. It’s more complicated than you think.’ They both nodded.

I asked how far back they went with a sheep’s genealogy: with the ‘yows and tups’, the local words for ewes and rams, of yesteryear.

‘Maybe a sire and a dam. And one more generation perhaps. But mostly it’s who you buy from in the first place,’ said Ruth’s husband.

I felt mischievous. ‘What about those people in the Lake District who say Swaledales aren’t tough enough compared to Herdwicks?’

‘Well, I’m a born and bred Swaledale girl. I’ll never leave until I’m carried out in a box. So, I would say they were the better sheep. Not just probably. Definitely.’

Her husband – whose name I never learned – came in with a more tempered view. ‘It’s horses for courses with sheep. They’re made for up there, the Herdwicks. It’s rough terrain. The Swaledale can be a bigger breed and they’re heavier. So, they don’t get about as well as the Herdwicks. Better for valleys. They’ve got shorter legs.’

Now they were warmed up, I asked how much a good breeder could clear in a day’s work at the auction.

‘Hundreds of thousands sometimes,’ said Ruth. ‘Last year, the top price for a single tup was £55,000. I know to an ordinary person, they all look the same, but they’re far from identical.’

‘£55,000? Isn’t that like having a Ferrari running around?’ I asked. ‘Loose on the fells. Scary stuff. Can’t a prize sheep get lost or, for that matter, stolen?’

Ruth shrugged. ‘We’ve got 800 to 1,000 sheep. You’re going to lose a few. They don’t look after themselves. Sheep will die for no reason at all.’

‘They’re very good at giving up the ghost, sheep. Very good indeed. You don’t notice the symptoms until it’s too late. Then they roll over and die. My auntie used to say, “A farmer could live off his losses.” And that’s a true saying.’

Still, even if most rams went for hundreds rather than thousands of pounds, it sounded as if a farmer could also ‘live off his gains’. No wonder those brand-new Range Rovers were parked outside with Jethro. And the pickup trucks were all tax-deductible, I learned, as they were used on the farm.

Throughout my conversation with Ruth and her husband, the auctioneer’s voice had been sounding like a metronome, ringing out the changes on the prices. I wandered over to the ring where sheep were being paraded by their anxious owners. It was noticeable how tall the farmers who had gathered round it were, not least because I was trying to see over their heads – perhaps due to the high proportion of Viking blood still swirling around this end of the Dales.

The area around the ring was very loud: the auctioneer’s voice over the PA, the clang of metal as gates were swept over concrete floors to move flocks of sheep and the farmers’ shouted conversations so they could be heard.

‘So how much did you get for that gimmer hogg?’ one well-upholstered farmer was bellowing to another, the hint of anxiety in his voice showing that the question was not entirely disinterested. Before he got an answer, the auctioneer introduced a new breeder who had entered the ring with a ram.

‘Now this tup,’ the auctioneer enthused in a booming voice over the PA, ‘is built like a proper tup.’

Meaning he was going to get the job done. You could almost smell the testosterone swirling around the room as the farmers started the bidding. They didn’t need any extra sarsaparilla drinks.

I left the auction rooms and wandered across the broad, handsome main street of Kirkby Stephen to the nearest pub, which like the others in town had been open all day for the sheep market. But if I was looking for a bit of peace and quiet after the hurly-burly of the auctioneering ring, I had come to the wrong place.

The Black Bull was full of noise. Men were punch-drunk with the business of buying and selling sheep for large sums of money before they even walked through the swing doors. Pints of beer were going down like water in a field-trough, much of it the appropriately named ‘Black Sheep’, the brewery founded by a rebellious member of the Theakston dynasty.

Some men were silently drowning their sorrows at the bar. For others, the talk was full of boasts and regrets – of prices paid and sheep mislaid, or at least not bid for hard enough.

I noticed an old man sitting very upright on a battered sofa in the saloon. He was wearing a three-piece suit with a tartan waistcoat, as if dressed for market day in The Mayor of Casterbridge; a handsome man with a mane of silver-grey hair. In each of his hands, he held a silver-topped cane, gripped tightly. Beside him was a much younger woman. They were the only people in the pub drinking wine, and by the large goblet.

The old man’s voice suddenly rang out over all the others. It was impossible to ignore. Nor was anyone trying. He was speaking in a firm, very deliberate tone, talking to the young woman beside him, but not actually looking at her, as if addressing the room.

‘I’ve spent a lifetime doing the wrong thing. I’ve had children and been married. I’ve had arguments with a great many people. But only now that I’m old and I’ve met you, Carol, do I realise what true love means.’

‘Maybe I’m a foolish old man for falling in love again at my age. But I don’t think so.’ And he took the hand of the woman beside him.

Carol did not seem the slightest bit embarrassed by this public declaration. I learned from the subsequent conversation, as did the rest of the pub, that she ran a sandwich shop in Burnley and had recently come over to Kirkby Stephen on a visit.

The old man noticed I was listening to him, like everybody else, and that I was a stranger. He beckoned me over.

We talked about my trip across country with Jethro. ‘A mule, eh? You don’t see many of those around. Unless they’re mule sheep.’

It was made of a curiously light material, similar to the titanium racing bikes in Jeff’s shed which you could pick up with a finger.

‘That’s been crafted from narwhal.’ He looked at me with bright blue eyes. ‘Impossible to get nowadays. You’re not allowed to kill them. This one is over 200 years old.’

He took it from me reverentially, and skittered the tip across the saloon floor in front of us as if the cane was tap-dancing by itself.

Now that I was closer to him, and could see the stretched skin over his still-handsome face, I could see that he was in his eighties at least. There was a bright pin in his lapel and a spring to his step, like an elderly Fred Astaire. He used his pair of canes to steer his way past the respectful men who made way for him as he headed out into the bright street with Carol.

‘If I were you, young man,’ he called over his shoulder, ‘I’d leave the mule behind. Settle down and find yourself a wife.’ He laughed.

There wasn’t time to tell him I was already married; or that my career as an itinerant muleteer was a brief one. I ordered another pint of Black Sheep instead.

On emerging sometime later, after a man had tried to sell me a surplus ewe (‘It will follow along behind your mule and then you can always eat it on the way’), the main street was gleaming as a little light rain had washed the cobbles. Unlike many of the market towns I had visited, the place still had a vibrancy and not only because of the sheep auction. There was a Coast-to-Coast fish and chip shop, a Coast-to-Coast walking-gear shop and a bustling tourist information centre in the old cloisters.

A lot of this was due to one person. By including Kirkby Stephen as a key stopping point for his Coast-to-Coast route, Wainwright had put it on the map.

‘I know there’s a plaque in the main square, but shouldn’t they put up a statue to Wainwright as well?’ I asked, imagining a handsome bronze of the man, map in hand, a little stooped like Churchill outside the Houses of Parliament, and equally grumpy.

‘I was born in what is now the Coast-to-Coast Fish and Chip Shop,’ said Mark, who I guessed was in his fifties. ‘Fish and chips was Wainwright’s favourite dish. I remember him eating it. And you’re right, we wouldn’t get any visitors at all without him. Half the businesses in this town would have gone bust. Nobody had ever heard of Kirkby Stephen before Wainwright. These days, the hotels get a bucket-load of people staying right through the season. Something like 150 come by every night.

‘I always refer to the walkers as swallows. They start arriving in the spring, mass in the summer and then by autumn they’re leaving. It’s not just because of the cold. You need long days to manage the stages. By November, the light’s fading too early.’

I asked him if the going would be good on Nine Standards Rigg, the next section of our walk east, which was known to be boggy. Or more particularly, if the going would be good for a mule.

‘Well, I’ve never tried taking a mule, to be honest! Or wanted to. But it’s been dry for so long, this is probably as good a time as any. Springtime is the worst. That’s when people get caught out, because there’s sunshine, so they’re not expecting the ground still to be so wet from winter.

‘There was a fellow sunk in last year. Rescue team had to get him out. He was carrying a big pack. Went down to his waist. Got sucked right in and couldn’t get back out again. He came into the shop later and told me the story or I wouldn’t have believed it. Apparently, he was stuck for over an hour before the rescue team arrived. And his girlfriend took pictures of him stuck in the bog while they were waiting.’

‘Well, at least he’s got something to remember it by, I suppose … I chatted to people afterwards and the problem was he had such a big pack that once he started going into the mud, he kept on going. And he was too heavy for his girlfriend to lift out. But that’s a one-off. Usually Nine Standards Rigg is as safe as houses.

‘And it’s the halfway point on the Coast-to-Coast. The watershed as well. The old county boundary between Westmorland and Yorkshire. A landmark on the skyline for people to follow.’

This was true. We had seen the iconic stones of Nine Standards Rigg for miles when approaching Kirkby Stephen.

Mark had some thoughts about how the Coast-to-Coast path had changed in character since Wainwright first devised the route in 1973.

‘It used to be just British people who walked it. The sort of people who had used his guides in the Lake District and then followed through with this. But now it’s much more international. More than half the people who come through are from overseas. And those international travellers usually want their kit carried for them, so there are lots of services that have grown up to help. You know, drive their luggage round to the next destination while they walk. That’s been a big change. In the old days, everyone carried it themselves in a big rucksack.’

Mark paused as if unsure I was being serious. ‘Well, I suppose they could,’ he said, diplomatically. ‘Maybe. But certainly, it’s now the long-distance walk for which Britain is best-known abroad. People come from all over the world to do it.’

I could see why this had happened. The Coast-to-Coast (or, to use a dreadful abbreviation, the C2C) is a far more attractive walk than, say, the Pennine Way, which as the poet Simon Armitage pointed out in a book is one hell of a slog, and one, moreover, which keeps to the same sort of landscape throughout. Whereas the Coast-to-Coast crosses from the Lake District through the Dales to the Yorkshire Moors on what is almost a heritage trail from Wordsworth to the Brontës, with a bit of James Herriot thrown in for good measure.

However, despite its huge popularity, the Coast-to-Coast is not an official long-distance path. This might appear a purely academic distinction. But official long-distance paths get special funding earmarked for them by Natural England, the body which maintains the National Trails. Whereas the Coast-to-Coast has to look after itself.

Which is why when we had taken Jethro along the sections of the Coast-to-Coast walk that were bridleways, we had often been surprised that they were so little cared for. And for that matter, under-signposted. I had met many walkers who had got lost, particularly in bad weather. A whole BBC television crew had run into trouble crossing the next section past Nine Standards Rigg.

So when I joined up with Jasper again, who had been setting his own world to rights, we led Jethro in some trepidation over the lovely Frank’s Bridge that takes you out from Kirkby Stephen towards Nine Standards Rigg. The sound of the sheep market slowly receded in the distance. As the lane took a dip under some trees past a damp little gully and stream, with Jethro clip-clopping along with his usual freshness at the start of a walk, we came to a wonderful bank of ferns hiding in the shade.

Ferns must surely be one of the great unacknowledged pleasures of the English countryside: ferns growing out of dry-stone walls; hart’s-tongue ferns; big glaucous-leaved ferns, black and green, some exotic, some familiar. We get them all over the country, from the South Coast to where I was now in the North, and in every shape and size. Wild ferns are one of our natural assets; yet perhaps we don’t appreciate them as much as we should.

One attraction is their antiquity – which also means resilience. Young dinosaur hatchlings would have nestled under ferns back in the day. They are one of our oldest plants, the spores remarkable for their ability to disperse so efficiently; much more so than by the seed–plant life cycle with which we are more familiar. In places, this can cause problems, as anyone who has tried to deal with bracken knows. But in the damp, dark places of England, where the spread of ferns tends to be limited, they can come into their own.

Not far above, we passed the big quarry at Hartley, almost completely shielded from sight, save for the one small turn of the lane which revealed it. The path diverged so that instead you got a beautiful view ahead of the Dales and Standard Nine Riggs. Yet the whole of the next valley alongside us had been decimated by the quarry. It was a wasteland of stripped limestone stretching for some 100 acres, gleaming pink like flayed skin, with a puff of smoke at the bottom from the last activity in the plant – although most of that was now coming to an end.

It made me think that we lived in a sort of Potemkin countryside, where all the bad stuff – the mines, the quarries, the wind-farms – were nicely screened away, while we were marshalled along a few polite narrow corridors of protected greenery.

Jethro was advancing well up the hill. There was a green verge alongside the lane which made for good going, which was lucky, as there was a reasonable haul ahead to Nine Standards Rigg. There’s nothing like walking across the country, particularly with a mule who, being unshod, is very sensitive to surfaces, to make you start thinking more about those surfaces. You worry what might abrade the hooves or make for more comfortable going. It reminded me of when I was a teenager riding along country lanes on a motorbike, when you become so aware of tarmac or the lack of it: the sudden ruts and gravel that could unseat you.

All went well until we passed a field with some alpaca grazing. I had a few alpaca of my own back home, so could cast a professional eye over these ones. Jethro, who had probably never seen a camelid before, was less sanguine. He bolted suddenly and it was only with some effort – and a few choice muleteer oaths from Jasper – that we recaptured him. But by now this was something at which we had plenty of practice.

As we climbed higher, Jasper was amazed at how hostile everything was botanically in the uplands above Kirkby Stephen. ‘Wherever I turn, it’s thorny and thistly. Look at all this stuff! I can see numerous stinging nettles, lots of gorse spread out over the hillside, hawthorn trees and dog roses. Spikes, spikes, spikes. Thorns, thorns, thorns. Basically anything that’s got protection so it won’t get eaten by sheep or fell ponies. Nature red in tooth and thorn.’

The Nine Standards stood out clearly on the horizon. A local wit back at the pub had told me there had originally been ten of the upright cairns, but that one of them had been removed at some stage, ‘because Nine Standards Rigg sounds a lot better than Ten Standards Rigg’.

The nine cairns strode across the ridge in a self-confident way. They were shaped like beehives. No one knew how old they were. That’s the thing about stone: it doesn’t date. They could have been a few centuries old or a few millennia. Up close, the stone was stacked carefully, if without any particular precision. Nor were the cairns of equal size.

They reminded me of the cheap set design you see in old TV shows like Star Trek or Stargate, of which my wife was an avid fan – a shorthand to signify that the intrepid crew had landed on a different world. The stone beehives would have made perfect cover for a phaser shootout.

It was unfortunate that we had no way of beaming ourselves out, even if Scotty’s transportation system could have handled 300 kilos of mule. Ahead was a considerable walk down through the bogs before we could reach Ravenseat.

It was a beautiful clear day and we had reached what was a defining watershed moment on the walk, almost exactly halfway from west to east. I had the momentary illusion I could almost see from coast to coast. Up to the north, the gleam of the metal cars moving along the A66 looked like a flock of geese. They seemed on a different planet to me; indeed, I felt on a different planet myself, moving among these strange cairns on the top of Hartley Fell as if I had just been teleported there by some alien device.

It was an experience I had already had several times on the walk – when we had arrived, for instance, at the desolate Sunbiggin Tarn in the middle of nowhere in the Howgills, or the valley of Smardale with its railway viaduct swinging across a deserted landscape: those lacunae of wilderness which still lay within a country that in others ways had become so tame.

Down across some notoriously waterlogged bog – the area that the unfortunate man had sunk into while his girlfriend documented the occasion – lay the oasis of Ravenseat, at the head of the Yorkshire Dales.

I already knew this tiny hamlet of three or four houses from an earlier visit I had made, to assess the lay of the land and determine whether it would be suitable for a mule. On that trip, I stopped off at Ravenseat because the setting was remote and idyllic, and one of the farmhouses offered a full tea at a reasonable price. A stream came rushing down from the hills past a tumble of stone and slate houses and under a small humpback bridge. Most of the neighbouring fields had a small barn at their centre, perfectly square and looking for all the world like little Monopoly houses that a player had put down to show he owned the property.

A gaggle of other walkers had assembled at the trestle tables on the grass outside the farmhouse with an air of communal anticipation. It was, after all, exactly four o’clock.

‘It is,’ said a woman with a Yorkshire accent. ‘I mean that’s what made her famous.’

‘Don’t you know? This is where “famous Amanda” lives. Or does usually. But she’s not here at the moment. Somebody else is doing the tea.’

I caught up. This was apparently the home of Amanda Owen, bestselling author of A Yorkshire Shepherdess, which, as it said on the cover, was ‘the story of a farmer’s wife and shepherdess, living alongside her husband Clive and seven children at Ravenseat, a 2,000-acre sheep hill farm at the head of Swaledale in North Yorkshire … How a rebellious girl from Huddersfield, who always wanted to be a shepherdess, achieved her dreams.’ Helped by a TV series, it had made her a local celebrity. And she now had eight children.

Ravenseat boasted a shepherd’s hut where you could stay for bed-and-breakfast, so I signed myself up and came back in the early evening after what had been a baking hot day. Harvesting had begun that week and there were neat bales of hay in black plastic lining the fields. Kids were playing in the farmyard. A small boy poked his head out of an upstairs bedroom window and directed me towards the shepherd’s hut.

This stood off on its own by an enchanting little ghyll, surrounded by ferns and beautiful tall foxgloves. Swallows and dippers were swooping over the water. The hut was long and rectangular – more like a railway carriage – and ‘comfortably appointed’, with a log-burning stove and a bed across the far end. The small bookcase was lined with past editions of the Swaledale Flock Book in case anyone had problems sleeping. An old Bush radio was still set to the Third Programme on long wave. I turned it on experimentally. It worked. The armchair had a sheep’s fleece draped over it. Plain curtains framed the small windows and the tongue-and-groove pine panelling felt warm and inviting. An old wooden shepherd’s crook was tucked into the corner.

I was busy taking in this interior detail when there was a knock on the door. One of the children, Reuben, was outside. He was twelve, he told me. Despite the baking temperature, Reuben had been deputised to light the wood-burning stove – indeed, was determined to do so, despite my protestations about the heat.

‘It won’t take a moment,’ he said, as if that might be my concern. And nor did it. Reuben was clearly good with his hands.

He asked me what I did and I explained, self-consciously, what was expected of, but rarely delivered by, anyone describing themselves as a travel writer. Feeling that this might be falling a little flat, I mentioned that my son Owen, who was twenty, had just started to train to be a pilot – a far more impressive occupation.

‘I wouldn’t want to fly. I don’t like the idea. I like home best. I want to be a mechanic. I like fixing things. I’ve been fixing up a go-kart. I’ve got a muck-spreader. I fixed that up as well. And I fixed up a tractor for a wedding.’

Reuben was clearly, like his parents, entrepreneurial. Within five minutes, he had persuaded me that he could mend an old strimmer I had lying in a shed hundreds of miles away to the south.

As I had been walking a fair bit that day, and Clive and Amanda themselves were nowhere to be seen, I bedded down for the night, lulled by the sound of the stream outside and the warmth of Reuben’s expertly lit stove. I didn’t need the Swaledale Flock Book to send me to sleep.

Next morning, Clive arrived bearing a large breakfast tray. He was bearded, good-humoured and clearly in a hurry to get on with the harvesting before the weather broke. I only met Amanda for the first time when I wandered up to find the shower, which was in one of the outhouses. She was standing in the farmyard, tall, blonde and striking, with a warm grasp on life. After checking that all had gone well with my sojourn in the shepherd’s hut, she wanted to know what I was doing.

‘You want to come by this way with a mule? I don’t see why not. I don’t know anybody who’s ever done that, along the Coast-to-Coast. And they all come through here. You’ll just have to choose your bridleways carefully when you get down below Keld.’

I told her my theory that the reason there were so few mules around in Britain was that in the past they had been considered a ‘Catholic animal’.

‘People always think I’m Catholic. Because I’ve so many kids. But I’m not.’

There was an interruption as Clive came by, herding some sheep that needed clipping. I noticed that Amanda looked a bit fazed, standing in the bright sunshine in the middle of her yard.

‘It’s all right. It’s all seeming a little unreal today. It’s just that I had a baby daughter two days ago.’

‘Premature. She was born premature. So she’s in the unit at Middlesbrough seventy miles away. She’s fine. She’s doing well. But everything’s strange, as if I’m floating. Nothing quite seems real.’

She invited me into the kitchen for a cup of tea. I needed one to help me recover from this news. None of her children – or for that matter Clive – had mentioned that Amanda had just given birth to another baby. But then with eight kids already, perhaps they had thought it wasn’t newsworthy.

A phone with the loudest ringtone I’ve ever heard went off somewhere in the kitchen. Amanda located it and hesitated before answering – rightly. It was a cross customer for the shepherd’s hut, asking in a loud voice – so I could hear every word – why she hadn’t heard back about her booking request. Which was ‘very inconvenient’ as she had to make plans. Amanda gave the woman time to get it all off her chest.

‘Well, the thing is, I had a baby two days ago. It was premature, so a bit of a rush. She’s at Middlesbrough hospital at the unit, so I can visit every other day. And I’m hauling bales of hay around in between. So, I’ve been too busy to answer emails.’

I could hear the alarm in the caller’s voice as she started backtracking and apologising in the mortified way only the English middle class can do. She sounded like Lynda Snell from The Archers.

‘Oh, I’m so, so sorry. So, so sorry. I should never have rung. And is she all right? Is the baby OK?’

‘She’s fine,’ said Amanda firmly. ‘Life goes on, after all. Now, what were the dates you were asking about?’

I instinctively liked Amanda. She was quick, funny and passionate about farming. And down to earth. If she was famous, she gave no signs of knowing it. I also admired the way her children had untrammelled access to a life of messing around on the land and the farm. ‘Beware: free-range children’ ran a sign on the drive, although a greater danger to any traffic were the assembled bits of farm machinery and kids’ scooters scattered on this remote valley road, all waiting for Reuben’s mechanical attention.

‘We still make the smaller conventional square bales of hay, rather than the usual big round ones people like these days,’ Amanda told me. ‘Because we can’t get a bigger baler into the fields. And the square ones Clive can lift himself into a barn in the winter if the animals need extra food.

‘Though if he can lift them now, when we are making them, he says they’re too light.’

She looked at me expectantly. It was lucky I had helped with the odd harvest for local farmers in my youth.

‘I get a lot of people who come through here who are difficult to talk to about the countryside. They’re lovely people, but we’ve not got much in common.’

I asked how she managed to find time for her writing – given the children, 2,000 acres and a lot of sheep, as well as a husband. Not so much a pram in the hallway as a tractor parked in the bedroom.

‘It’s impossible in summer. Too much going on. But winter is perfect. It gets dark early. We haven’t got TV here. So I can work late into the night.

‘I can always tell what mood I’m in when I write. If I’m angry, it comes out in the book. Fifteen minutes when you’re in the mood is worth two hours when you’re not.’

Her great model was James Herriot and his It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet books.

‘I love the way he writes about the remote bits of Yorkshire. It’s the reason I chose the publishers I’m with. They do James Herriot’s books. And they put me out in hardback first, before the paperback, like old-fashioned publishers used to do!’ As Amanda’s book was a top-ten bestseller, the publishers must also have been pleased with her decision.

After the book’s success, she was asked, which gave her considerable pleasure, to write an introduction to the James Herriot classics for a centenary edition. And her own books – for The Yorkshire Shepherdess led to a sequel and she had, she told me, recently been commissioned to write another – had brought the realities of life in the Dales to a wide audience.

‘In my own writing, what I really enjoy are the details. Like baler twine. No one else ever really writes about baler twine. But it’s what holds a farm together. Round gates. Round children, holding clothes up. Round stable doors. I don’t know what I’d do in life without baler twine.’

I knew all about baler twine. Annis had given me copious instructions about how to use it to tie Jethro in his horsebox stall.

Before I left, Clive asked me to have a look at his prize rams which were being kept in a barn to pamper them in advance of a big sheep auction later that month. To my surprise, there was an electric fence running around the inside of the barn walls, something I had never seen before.

‘Looks high security,’ I said to Clive. ‘Even Hannibal Lecter didn’t need that.’

‘It’s so they don’t try to headbutt or scratch the walls,’ he explained, ‘which would ruin their colouring.’

Two rams were huddled together in the centre of the barn. One had bigger horns than the other. Like narcissistic male models, they had positioned themselves to show off their best attributes; if able to, they would have draped their arms over each other’s shoulders.

I made the appropriate cooing and aahing noises about their fine features and well-tonsed faces. They were being kept in the ovine equivalent of cotton wool – straw bedding. Even so, Clive worried there might be a risk of them getting fluke.

‘The thing about sheep auctions,’ she said, ‘is that you can never know which way it’s going to go. Also, you keep looking at the tups so much in the run-up to the auction that you end up believing they’re better than they are. But it takes two to make a sale. The worst is when you start off with two rival bidders and then they decide to share the tup, so put in a low joint bid. The best is when you have two rival bidders who hate each other. We once had two bidders and we knew that one of them had stolen the other one’s wife! Which was perfect.’

Even for someone with as firm a hold on life as Amanda, having a small baby in a premature unit while trying to carry on normally was a big ask. I was impressed – and also annoyed by the many people I later met along the way, particularly the women, who were suspicious of her.

‘Famous Amanda? You know she’s not really from Swaledale. Now, I am …’

So what if she grew up in Huddersfield? It made me respect her even more. Why should it matter that she was not ‘to the farm born’? She had always longed for the rural life, and left a job as a bored shop girl in Boots to find one and made it happen. As my grandfather Lawrence, who came from the farming Bragg family at Wigton, used to tell me, ‘You should always be careful what you wish for as a child. Because you will surely get it.’

Chapter 7

An Auction of Love and Sheep