I NEVER IMAGINED I had much in common with Queen Victoria but it turns out I do: collies. She loved them too. This was, naturally, very influential, because before she became devoted to them, collies were a Cinderella dog in the fashionable world. They weren’t lap dogs or sporting dogs, they were dogs who worked for a living and were treasured by their owners – shepherds and farmers – for their great skills, not for their looks. Their history stretches back to the beginning of civilisation.
So does mine: I’m very proud to call myself a shepherd. It’s one of the oldest professions in the world – yes, I’ve heard all the terrible jokes – but herding sheep and goats really does go back to primitive times. Hunters came first, of course, but it was the shepherds who tended livestock and the farmers who planted crops who moved civilisation on, and made it possible for men to put down roots, build permanent homes, and feed their families in safer, better conditions than their nomadic forefathers.
The men who rounded animals up, domesticated them, moved them from pasture to pasture, bred them to provide even more meat and better wool, are the men who laid the foundations of life as we live it today. As I go about my livestock work on the farm, or meet other shepherds through filming for Countryfile, I know that I have a connection that extends all the way back to the beginnings of domestication, about 15,000 years ago. I am part of a very long tradition, and by my side my dog Peg, and all the other sheepdogs I have known, are just as much a part of that tradition.
There are shelves full of old books about spaniels, setters, pointers, beagles, foxhounds and gundogs, but relatively few books about herding dogs. The men who owned them were rarely even literate, and so not likely to go into flights of fancy about their wonderful dogs. A shepherd will describe a dog as great if it can round up sheep, divide them, pen them. He doesn’t care about its colouring, the colour of its eyes, whether its ears are a perfect match. When they win prizes today, it is for their agility and intelligence, both of which they have in spades, and both of which are reasons they are so vital to me and all others who depend on them daily. A working shepherd in the market for a new dog is keen to know how well its parents were able to work, not how many rosettes they won at dog shows, and the dogs that sell for huge sums at sheepdog sales are bought for the working history of their forebears and the signs of ability they show.
The history of sheepdogs, as I have said, is as old as the story of domesticated animals, but it came relatively late to Britain. Domestication of animals began in western Asia, and that’s where dogs are first believed to have been used to herd animals. It was another 10,000 years, during the Bronze Age, that farming really began in Britain, with dogs guarding and then herding the flocks.
Herding dogs worked alongside the guardian dogs, the ones who lived with the flock, and then really came into their own after the need for protection dogs receded as wild predators disappeared and flocks could be moved around for better grazing. Now shepherds could turn their flocks loose and allow them to wander, but they needed to be able to round them up again. Dogs with an instinct to herd were highly prized, and breeding for the purpose began. Herding dogs are smaller than the guardian dogs, more agile, and, most important, they are able to be trained to respond to their master’s commands, whether it’s voice or whistle. They are not directly descended from the large protection dogs who would have been difficult to train for this job, and would have caused havoc if they had tried to move a flock by herding.
The ability to herd – to cast wide and round up a flock of sheep – developed when great swathes of the country were covered in forest, and sheep and goats would be left to crop the vegetation among the trees. The shepherd needed a dog that worked silently, outflanked the animals and nudged them together simply by his presence, but did not chase or attack the animals. Most importantly, the dog had to be able to respond to its master’s commands when it could not see him, because of the trees. It also needed, at times, to work on its own initiative when it spotted a problem – a sheep making a break, say – that its master could not see. Over generations this specific, gifted sheepdog evolved. The hills and forests of Scotland and the border country was a good breeding ground, but all across the country sheepdogs with traits peculiar to their particular area were being bred, all of them for the same purpose.
Agriculture in Britain developed massively in Roman times, when many independent farms were established with shepherds tending their flocks in different terrains and weather conditions across the country, including on remote hill farms, where even today the living is still bleak, tough, and essentially unchanged over the centuries. The farmers supplied the Roman forts and camps with meat and wool, and as the soldiers were often stationed in forts for years at a time, many of them, too, became part-time shepherds, with their own flocks and their own dogs. Sheep and goats were imported to Britain by the Romans from Spain and North Africa, where herding was well established, and dogs and herdsmen often came with the flocks. As the climate and terrain here proved to be good for sheep, the wool trade became a very important part of the Anglo–Roman economy, so the flocks grew, and so did the role of herding dogs.
The value of sheepdogs was recognised by the Roman writer Marcus Terentius Varro, who wrote: ‘Be careful not to buy dogs from hunters or butchers, for the dogs of butchers are too idle to follow the flock, and hunting dogs, if they see a stag or a hare, will chase after it instead of after the sheep. Thus the best is one that has been bought from a shepherd, and has been trained to follow sheep …’
The wool trade became the backbone of the economy of this country until the late fifteenth century, and to this day the Speaker in the House of Lords sits on ‘the woolsack’ – now a large wool-stuffed seat but originally a bale of wool – a reminder of the huge importance of wool to the nation’s wealth. The very name of my area, the Cotswolds, comes from the word ‘cot’, an enclosure for sheep, and ‘wold’ for hill, so it literally means sheep enclosure on the hills. It was well known throughout Europe in the Middle Ages for the quality of its wool, from sheep known as Cotswolds Lions which have long lustrous coats and a faintly golden hue to their wool. They remained very popular until after the First World War, when their numbers declined so much that they became a rare breed. Of course, we have a flock at Cotswold Farm Park, and their numbers are now building up well. I am proud to continue breeding these wonderful historic animals that have called this area home for many centuries.
Wealth from the sheep trade largely went to the church in the Middle Ages, which owned vast flocks of sheep, and to rich merchants. These merchants made enormous contributions towards the building and expansion of fine churches, known now as ‘wool churches’. (They are spread across East Anglia, another prosperous sheep area, as well as the Cotswolds.) The story is that they believed that endowing churches would help buy them an easy journey to paradise after their deaths. The legacy for those of us who live in the area is wonderful, architecturally important, church buildings around us.
Of course, wherever there were sheep in large numbers, there were also dogs in large numbers. A good working dog was a precious commodity. The word ‘collie’ for a working sheepdog has been around for many years, and there are arguments as to where it originated: it could come from a Gaelic word meaning ‘useful’, which these dogs certainly are, or, as I’ve mentioned before, it could be a version of ‘coaley’, a Scottish word possibly referring to dogs working with the black (or coal) faced sheep of Scotland and the border countries, which is still the most common sheep breed in Britain. These Scottish collies spread across the country, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century when Scottish sheep farmers and shepherds moved to East Anglia, bringing some livestock and, more importantly, the dogs used to handle the flocks.
The word ‘cur’ became a derogatory description of an ill-behaved mongrel of very mixed parentage, and in years gone by an insulting word for a scoundrel. But the name derives from the word ‘curtail’, which means to cut short. In the seventeenth century, taxes were imposed on dog owners. The only exemptions were for shepherds and others who needed working dogs for ratting or other jobs. To claim the exemption the dog must have a docked tail, or ‘curtul’. This led to all working dogs becoming known as ‘curs’.
Although shepherds and farmers were not normally the sort of educated people with time on their hands to wax lyrical in print about their wonderful dogs, there are exceptions, the most notable being a man called James Hogg, who became known as the Ettrick Shepherd, and who, in the early 1800s, published poems and magazine articles about his amazing sheepdogs. He was a shepherd in the border countries from an early age and educated himself through reading, eventually becoming a well-respected writer and friend of the literati of the day, including Sir Walter Scott and William Wordsworth. But it is his stories about his real-life dogs which endure, and which any shepherd today will recognise.
He had a dog called Sirrah, who he bought from a drover who was starving him and treating him badly. Sirrah had not been trained as a sheepdog, ‘and he knew so little of herding that he had never turned a sheep in his life; but as soon as he discovered that it was his duty to do so I can never forget with what anxiety and eagerness he learned his different evolutions. He would try every way deliberately till he found out what I wanted him to do, and when I once made him understand a direction he never forgot it again … He often astonished me for, when hard-pressed in accomplishing the task that he was put to, he had expedients of the moment that bespoke a great share of the reasoning faculty.’
Hogg told the story of 700 sheep which escaped their pens in the middle of the night, scattering in three different directions, and could not be found in the dark. Eventually he and his assistant gave up, but Sirrah did not return when called. The next day they found Sirrah holding the entire flock in a deep ravine, not one injured or missing. He had been there for several hours.
The status of collies shot up when Queen Victoria adopted them as her all-time favourite dogs – quite an accolade, because she was a renowned dog lover. When she and her husband Prince Albert built Balmoral Castle in the Scottish Highlands in the 1850s it triggered a fashion for all things Scottish, and that included collie dogs. The queen already had kennels at Windsor Castle with several dogs, but it was in Scotland she met and fell in love with collies. Many dogs were given to her – what do you give to a queen who has everything? Well, another dog never goes amiss, and with so many children, she could hand them all on.
The queen herself especially loved smooth-coated collies, and as a result these became the fashionable choice for carriage dogs for aristocratic ladies (not a job an active, intelligent collie would relish, but I guess they had servants to make sure the dogs got plenty of exercise before being taken out for stately trips in a carriage!) The queen’s favourite, called Sharp, lived until he was 15, and there is a statue of him on his grave in Windsor Home Park. After Sharp, she had Noble who lived for 16 years, and in his final illness was attended by the queen’s own physician, who also had to give her a sedative because she was so distressed. He, too, has a statue on his grave. Next came Roy, who was with her until she died. Although she had many other dogs these three were special: they lived inside her palaces with her, and from pictures and the statues, I’d definitely describe them as border collies, although that name was not used until later, in the early years of the twentieth century (border collies were not recognised as a breed by the Kennel Club until 1976).
Partly influenced by the royal patronage, wealthy Americans were also impressed by the cleverness of these dogs and breeding for commercial purposes began, with canny Scots farmers and shepherds selling their best-looking dogs (but never their best working dogs). Scouts went around country markets buying up dogs, purely for their looks.
Two things happened at roughly the same time. Although local farmers and shepherds had for a long time held competitions among themselves, properly organised sheepdog trials began to spring up across the country. The first was held in Bala, North Wales in 1873, with ten dogs competing. The following year there was a trial in Scotland, and they quickly spread.
Today, I’m really pleased to be involved in the Countryfile coverage of One Man and His Dog, a competition between England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, with a junior and senior member in each team. I’ve always loved watching trials, and I’m constantly amazed by the highly refined skills of these super dogs. So it’s terrific to get to meet the competitors, both two-legged and four-legged.
Coincidentally, showing dogs became popular at much the same time as trialling began to emerge, and breeders started to turn their attention to how the dogs looked. The first Crufts dog show was held in 1891, with 2,000 dogs competing. Nowadays, Crufts is a four-day event with classes not simply for the appearance of competitors, but for obedience, agility, flyball and heeling to music. Nonetheless, the overall champion is awarded for the dog which best conforms to its breed standards. In the 104 shows held since 1905, it’s interesting to see that collies have only won three times, the first being a ‘Scotch’ collie in 1906, probably as a result of them still being popular with the royal family. (Queen Victoria’s daughter-in-law, Queen Alexandra, was very keen on rough-coated collies, and bred them at Sandringham House.) Despite their few years in the fashion sun, they have resolutely remained as working dogs, proving themselves in agility and flyball rather than parading round the ring being assessed for their looks.
In the early days of dog shows an interesting challenge was issued to the show fanciers from working dog owners: a competition to demonstrate that show dogs very quickly lost their ability to work, by setting them a task of rounding up sheep. That’s exactly how it turned out: the show collies barked, yelped and lost control of the sheep. The winner of the sheep herding was a working collie called Maddie, who may not have had the looks but certainly had the ability to move sheep around. I’m not sure it meant the show dogs had ‘lost’ the ability to work – they had never been allowed to work, and had no training. What a shame for them: as you know by now, I personally believe dogs are happier if they work, and literally thousands of years of breeding by shepherds and farmers have made sheepdogs what they are today, finely tuned to the demands of the job, without so much as a thought for how they look.
Today there are many different types of herding sheepdog: Welsh collies, rough-haired collies, Shetlands, smooth-haired collies, border collies, kelpies and Huntaways, plus lots of continental breeds. Some breeds are no longer used for their original purpose, but they all have their origins in the proud tradition of the working dogs of farmers and itinerant shepherds, who relied on them for a living.
When I look at Peg, and at any of the sheepdogs I meet as I go about my work as a farmer or filming for Countryfile, I know I am looking at hundreds, even thousands of years of history, and it’s a history I love being part of.
I enjoy all the stories we feature on Countryfile, but naturally the ones that speak to me most are the ones where I meet shepherds and farmers who are doing the same job as me, but in wildly different terrains and climates. I love watching them work sheep, and I am full of admiration for what they achieve. The way some of them live and work makes life at Bemborough Farm look like a walk in the park …
Perhaps the most spectacular was when I joined the shepherds of the high Alps in Switzerland to bring a huge flock of black-nosed sheep down from their summer grazing near the Aletsch glacier, a journey which involved herding them along a precarious mountain path and across a narrow bridge over a thundering, icy river. I had to travel up to the village where the sheep belong, Belalp, by cable car, as there are no roads. The annual movement of the sheep is spectacular, and it was a privilege to see it, but, boy, did those shepherds earn my respect as they clambered across this rugged territory to bring their livestock more than a thousand metres down the steep mountain to winter in kinder pastures.
I helped out with similar challenging missions to round up and move animals in difficult terrain here in Britain when I visited Devon for the annual check-up carried out on the feral goats of the Valley of the Rocks, near Lynton. They lived up to the name ‘mountain goat’ by running away from us up near-impossible rocky inclines. Then again, I helped introduce sheep to the magical island of Tintagel in Cornwall for the first time since 1896. With some difficulty I assisted the Tintagel property manager, Matt Ward, and assorted helpers get a small herd of Soays along a wooden path, across a bridge and up 148 steps, so that they could graze the land around the ruins of the castle built on what legend says was the home of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table.
In all of these cases it was decided not to use dogs as they may have chased the animals too close to the cliff where either dog or livestock may have fallen to their death, so the herding was all done on foot by humans. This can prove very tricky, particularly as the animals you are trying to round up are far more agile and quicker than you.
The reason the Soays, a hardy Scottish breed of sheep which I know well because we have them at Cotswold Farm Park, were introduced to Tintagel is to help manage the land and preserve rare species of plants. The sheep graze on the coarse grasses which, left untended, would out-compete and eliminate the valuable, diverse plant life. Matt told me that he was hoping the sheep would increase the number of wild flowers from hundreds to thousands of different species.
The use of sheep and other animals to manage and preserve the landscape is a common theme in the shepherding programmes I’ve made for Countryfile. It makes so much sense. But I was taken by surprise when I filmed a flock of sheep on a beach at Ainsdale, because I had no idea that sheep could live on sand dunes.
Ainsdale is a 13-mile stretch of beach and dunes between Southport and Formby, on the north-west coast. It’s a wide, sandy beach area that was once used by locals to run rabbit warrens, when rabbit was an essential animal for the family pot. Sadly, the rabbits were wiped out by myxomatosis in the 1950s, and it was only some time later that ecologists and other experts realised what a good job they had been doing of managing the dunes, chomping away at the vegetation to keep it in check and allow different species to thrive.
Now the 253-acre site is maintained by Natural England as a National Nature Reserve. There are waymarked paths for the public to use, but because of the diversity of rare animals and plants, people are not allowed to wander all over.
But one creature that is allowed to wander in the winter months is a flock of 250 Herdwick sheep. I’m a great fan of Herdwicks: they are tough little animals who live on the Lakeland fells, so they are accustomed to rain, snow, sleet and anything else mother nature throws at them. They stand as solid as rocks, undeterred by howling gales and blinding rain. Flocks from remote and difficult hill farms are often sent to kinder pastures to over-winter, so I wasn’t surprised by the fact that these fell dwellers go away for a holiday each year. But a holiday to the beach?
I took Peg to Ainsdale, hoping she could help out rounding up the flock. Peg was new to me at the time and this was the first long journey we’d done together. She was great, travelling peacefully and sleeping in the back of the truck outside the hotel where I and the film crew were staying. She was such an easy companion, and I couldn’t believe my luck in having her. Because I don’t know much about her early years, I had no idea if she had ever been to a beach or seen the sea before. So prior to linking up with Dave Mercer, the senior reserves manager for Natural England who is overall head of the conservation project on the dunes, I took her across the sand to the sea. She went in up to her waist when I threw a stick, but she never went out of her depth and she seemed a little bit nervous of the waves. Collies are not renowned as water dogs, so I wasn’t surprised that she jumped a bit when the waves swept in, but I already knew she was a brave little dog and she didn’t seem at all fazed by it.
It was a beautiful day, with a wintry sun taking the edge off a chill breeze, and the view of the dunes was impressive. What surprised me was the amount of vegetation.
Dave explained: ‘If left alone this area would be a birch forest, or even an oak forest. But a forest is not as rare as an open dune landscape, so we’re halting the degradation of the dunes with our four-legged lawnmowers, the sheep. This area has a European designation as a special area of conservation, and if we want to keep the diversity of the plant and animal life here, we have to hold the dominant vegetation at bay.’
The dunes are a natural sea defence that prevent flooding and maintaining them means keeping the right sort of grass, the type that binds the dunes together. Dave told me that the dunes are home to a really large population of Natterjack toads, with as many as 50 per cent of the British population living on this coastline in some years. They are so noisy that they are known as ‘the Birkdale chorus’, Birkdale being the neighbouring stretch of the sand dunes. As well as the toads there are great crested newts and sand lizards.
There are also 473 different species of plant, including the heath dog violet, which is the food source for the very picky caterpillar of the Dark Green Fritillary butterfly. Other rare flowers include dune helleborine, seaside centaury, yellow bartsia and sticky stork’s-bill. The plants encourage all sorts of insects to live and thrive on the dunes: it’s an interconnected web of life, and I can appreciate how tricky it is managing the area for the benefit of so many different creatures.
That’s where the sheep come in. They’ve been grazing here for over ten years, starting with a small group to see how well they survived and whether or not they had the right impact on the vegetation, which had been uncontrolled since the rabbit population disappeared. The flock is contained in a wide parcel of land, and when they have exhausted the grazing there they are moved on to a different area. And moving sheep is a job for sheepdogs, so I hoped Peg was going to be useful. It was going to be a real test for her, as she would be operating among the dunes and for much of the time not able to see me, just responding to my whistles and shouts. Dave gave me a tip: climb to the top of a high dune so that I could keep an eye on her as much as possible.
Easier said than done: the sheep were roaming happily among the dunes, but Peg and I made heavier weather of it, unused to walking on sand and constantly sticking our feet into hidden rabbit holes and tripping over the rough scrub. Peg was, as ever, very eager to work, and she shot off like a bullet when we sighted some sheep, going round them and encouraging them to flock together. They disappeared from my sight behind a sand dune and so did she, but I knew she was still working, using her own brain. Sheep have an amazing instinct to collect together whenever they see or hear a dog, or hear a shepherd’s whistle, and they were soon running in from all around, funnelling through tight gaps in the dunes, and heading down to the gate we were trying to get them through.
Peg wasn’t the only dog rounding up the sheep. Tony Meadow, the reserve warden, and his assistant Sophie Bray, were also there with Molly, a five-year-old collie, and Tato, another collie who was retired from his working life, but more than happy to help out. They worked together as a team and we drove the flock on to fresh grazing.
The sheep are on the dunes from October to April, and they thrive, returning to the Lake District well fed and with none of the foot problems sheep can get in winter, because the sand is so dry. Herdwicks have proved to be the best breed for the job: when some Icelandic sheep were brought in they were a lot less successful, not being used to being moved by dogs and not thriving in the damp of the north west of England.
While I was there I saw another animal that has been brought in to crop the dunes. Seeing sheep was a big enough surprise, but it was even more bizarre to see five rare breed Shetland cattle, which were being trialled as another way of managing the vegetation. Since my visit a couple of years ago the breed of cow has changed and the dunes are now host to a small herd of Red Poll cattle, who, like the sheep, come to the dunes to spend the winter months keeping the vegetation in check. It’s a win-win situation: the dunes are maintained, and the farmer gets his sheep or cattle looked after without having to provide any winter fodder.
It was a similar conservation project that took me to Snowdonia a few months later, real hill-farming countryside. But there are special habitats for wildlife and plants here, too, and it’s a juggling act getting farming and conservation to work hand in hand, in a way that benefits both.
The farm I visited, Hafod y Llan, was bought by the National Trust in 2000 with the aim of preserving the mountainous area that was being overgrazed by the sheep. After reducing the number of sheep from 4,000 to just under 2,000, it was clear there were still problems. The Trust did not want to reduce sheep numbers further, but after looking at the conservation work of hill farmers in the Alps and the Pyrenees, they decided the way forward was to actively manage the sheep with a shepherd on the mountain with them all the time between May and September, moving them away from sensitive places where overgrazing was damaging the plant life.
It is a five-year project, and the aim is to have flower-rich mountain tops with grazed valleys below. The problem is that the sheep that live on this land are, like most sheep on hill farms, hefted. This means they have a particular area of the mountainside which belongs to them and their own small group of sheep. The lambs are taught by their mothers that this is their patch, and the ewes teach them the terrain, where to find shade, where to find water and all the pitfalls to avoid. To move them to different ‘hefts’ or ‘heafs’ (the word changes depending on which part of the country you are in; the Welsh word is ‘cynefin’) is going to take a long time and careful management.
I went up there when the project had been going for a year, and when the farm had just appointed a second shepherd to help cover the long hours that have to be spent up on the mountainside with the sheep. It’s a lonely job, but very fulfilling for the right person who loves sheep, has a good four-legged companion and doesn’t mind his own company.
I met Arwyn Owen who manages the farm for the National Trust and I asked him why the sheep needed this special, full-time attention. He explained that the sheep need more management.
‘They are not always eating what we want them to eat, and without intervention they linger in some areas and graze the vegetation too closely. These are areas where the wildflowers and plants need to be safeguarded. So we’ve gone back to the way things used to be, with a shepherd actually on the hill with them all the time in daylight hours. He leads the sheep to the areas that need to be grazed.’
With Peg by my side I climbed up the mountain to where the latest recruit to the shepherding project, Daniel Jones, was going about his job of checking where the sheep were cropping. There were about 800 Welsh mountain sheep. They’re a lively little breed whose thick, coarse wool protects them from the harsh Snowdonia weather. In different parts of Wales there are derivatives of the same breed with various Welsh names: as well as white Welsh mountains, there are Torddu, or Badger Face, with a white body and black belly. Torwen are the reverse – a black body and white belly. Black Welsh are, as the names suggests, black all over, and the little Balwen have black with white socks and a white tip to the tail and are the only one of all the Welsh sheep considered a rare breed.
The flock were dotted around us and I realised how difficult Daniel’s job is. It’s not like moving a flock: he has to monitor individual sheep and move each one when it’s in the wrong place. I commented that he must be fit; Peg had romped up the hill but I was breathless by the time I reached him. He described his job as ‘awesome’, and said he had learned a lot in the six weeks he had been there.
‘There’s a lot of walking, and without dogs we’d be pretty useless up here. They’re an essential tool, and we couldn’t work the sheep without them.’
I noticed a small box attached to the collar of Dan’s dog, which I recognised as a GPS tracker. Dan explained that it records where they have been working and how many miles they have covered. There are also fixed cameras dotted around the hillside which monitor the movement of the sheep. Combining both technologies shows where the sheep are grazing the most.
Dan was happy for me to let Peg have a go bringing a few sheep down from an area above us where they were not supposed to be. Working individual sheep on steep slopes was not something either she or I are used to, and I’m afraid Peg in her eagerness did move the sheep a little bit faster than Dan wanted, the ewes charging down the mountain at a bit of a lick. Unlike me moving a flock, when speed helps, the art here is to be able to move individual sheep so gently that they don’t realise they are being nudged. I reckon Peg and I would get the hang of it if we practised …
I was amused when Dan told me he knows by sight several sheep that are persistent offenders, always grazing in the wrong places. He even puts a blue mark on the naughty ones so that he can pick them out more easily.
Although it is clearly an idyllic and ancient way of life (if you don’t count the trackers and cameras), I wondered how the project was going in terms of saving rare plants, so I met up with Sabine Nouvet, who is the National Trust conservation ranger for Snowdonia, and who is monitoring the project.
‘It’s very encouraging. We have plants like heather and bilberries that are starting to recover, and we’re hoping that the new shoots that are appearing now will survive.’
She led me further up the mountain, to show me the little green bilberry fruits, and heather with new shoots.
‘Bilberries respond very quickly to a change in grazing,’ she told me. ‘We had some heather flowers last year and we are hoping for more this year.’
She also explained that it wasn’t simply a matter of saving the plant life: the sheep are also benefitting, because the diversification is bringing back plants that are more palatable and nutritious for them. The sheep and the ecology of the mountain are both gaining from the project.
For me, the most satisfying thing was seeing a shepherd working in the old-fashioned way, alone with nothing but his dog and his sheep, upholding a very ancient tradition.
Another very traditional shepherd I met for Countryfile is a young woman called Ashley Stamper, who works on the Cheviot Hills of Northumbria in the harshest of conditions. The work she does very much follows the old, largely unchanged, routines of centuries of shepherding, with her dogs by her side and only a quad bike and some good waterproof clothing to distinguish her from the men and women who ran flocks on this land for generations past.
Yet in some ways, Ashley is very different from those shepherds of yore. For a start, she’s not from a farming family. In fact, quite how she has ended up living in the lee of the Kielder Forest and working a flock of north of England Blackface sheep on the Otterburn ranges, where the landowner is the Ministry of Defence, is, to me, a surprising story, and hearing it made me think of my dad, who also had no family background in farming. I recognised in Ashley something that he must have had: an urge to work outdoors, close to nature, at one with the land. Something that they both intuitively knew, without having any experience of the life, as I was lucky enough to have as a child.
Ashley’s mother and father both work in different branches of the beauty business, her mum as a beauty therapist and her dad running a company that has developed and sells tanning machines. As a child, the only connection Ashley had with the great outdoors was her love of horses.
At her school near Edinburgh, Ashley was studying for her Highers (the Scottish equivalent to GCSEs) when her parents bought her a beauty salon. She was 15 at the time, going to school in the morning, and rushing out to run the salon at lunchtimes and after school in the afternoons, putting herself through courses in accountancy, beauty therapy, massage, reflexology and holistic therapy, managing staff who were many years older than her. She even opened a wedding dress shop at the rear of the salon.
So far, so very girlie, and clearly Ashley had a good career laid out for her when she finished school. But she wasn’t happy. She’d sold her pony to a farmer and to keep in touch she spent a few school holidays helping out on the farm, and she realised that these were the happiest times of her life.
So, despite having won accolades as one of Scotland’s youngest entrepreneurs, and as the world’s youngest salon owner with a good wage coming in from the salon, at the age of 17 Ashley decided she would never be happy working inside all day, and beauty therapy wasn’t what she wanted to do for the rest of her life.
‘Dad said I was mad, and told me I needed to knuckle down and get on with the business. But I was adamant: I wanted to go to university to study horses. When I looked into it, though, horses wouldn’t take me far enough, and I realised what I needed to do was take a degree in agriculture.’
Without enough qualifications to get on to a degree course, Ashley went to college for two years to get Scottish Vocational Qualifications, combining her time studying with working on the farm where she had spent school holidays. She’d gone from having money in her pocket every week to working on the farm free in return for board and lodging, staying with her grandparents while at college, and relying on her mum for subsidies.
‘But I was so happy, I knew this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. The people I was working for, Pam and Paul, taught me lots, including how to train a sheepdog. I also found some local contracting work to help out financially.’
The first year of her four-year degree course was in Dumfries, and the following three years in Edinburgh. She had a beaten-up £300 car, she didn’t go out socialising and she got stuck into her studies, getting excellent results.
When I met her she was still in the final year of her degree, attending uni only a couple of days a month and studying at home, with the rest of her time spent working on a large farm up in the hills looking after sheep. It’s clear she loves her job, and when I watched her loading sheep onto a lorry for market, I could see she has the calm personality that you need around animals.
Where she works on the Ministry of Defence ranges where the army test heavy artillery and rockets, the landscape is constantly changing because of the explosions and there is only so much work she can do with a quad bike. ‘Thank goodness for the dogs, I couldn’t manage without them,’ she said. Because nobody is allowed on the ranges when firing is in progress, she often has to get up there at 4.30am to check on the sheep, and be off by 9am.
It struck me as a very tough life, but Ash told me she prefers being up on the hills to having the sheep down in the valley.
‘It changes all the time. You think you’ve learnt the hills and then one morning the fog is down in front of your face and all of a sudden you’ve no idea where you are. When you are on the hills by yourself and the mist is in and it’s just you and your dogs, it feels very special.’
Ashley rents a small cottage from another local farm, where she lives with her three border collies, Dot, who is a quarter kelpie, Jim and puppy Mo.
‘I’m very lucky, everyone helps me out,’ she says.
‘When I could no longer stay at the farm where I was working for nothing, because I needed to earn money, Mum said “Come home”. It was tempting, it would have been very easy. But I knew I couldn’t leave this valley, the people here, the sheep. At the same time I was homeless with three dogs and two horses. Luckily by then I had a boyfriend, James, and his family let me stay for a while, then I was offered the cottage. Another friend had a garage full of furniture she did not need, two friends took my horses and one horse now has a loan home. It was a real community effort.’
One chunk of very welcome help came from the Prince’s Countryside Fund, a charity set up in 2010 by the Prince of Wales to improve the prospects of family farm businesses and the quality of rural life. One of the major worries for the future of farming in this country is that the average age of farmers is 59, so in conjunction with the car manufacturer Land Rover the Countryside Fund launched an initiative in 2016 to give five young people under the age of 35 the chance to drive a Land Rover Discovery Sport for a whole year to help them in the difficult early years of their career. It was the head of agriculture at her university who told Ash to apply.
‘I had to put in a one minute video of why I needed the Discovery to help with my work. I was in Edinburgh, without my dogs, and I was up against the deadline to apply. So I borrowed a collie from Mum’s next door neighbour, a pet dog who has probably never seen a sheep, and I had a couple of feedbags and medicine bottles in the back of my old car. We filmed it pretending it was 5am and I was hauling myself out of bed for work. I’m really surprised I got through the first round, because the dog was so fat I had to lift her in and out of the car …’
Luckily, after interviewing Ashley over the phone and visiting her on the farm where she works, the team from the Countryside Fund and Land Rover could see how she would make great use of the car, especially commuting from Northumbria to Edinburgh.
‘I put the two people who came to assess me on the quad bike and took them up on the hills where I work. I think they were impressed by the vastness and hardness of it all, and the long hours we work. They could see my little car was overflowing with feedbags, medicine and dogs.
‘The only sad thing is that I only get to keep the Land Rover for a year. Then it will be back to another old banger, I guess. I’ve been a bit spoilt, having such an amazing car.’
One of the things about Ashley that intrigues me is that she has chosen, for her university honours project, to study sheepdogs. As she told me: ‘There’s not much data that shows how much work these dogs do, so I’m looking at energy consumption, comparing working dogs with non-working dogs.’
It will be useful to have some scientific data – although, I must say, I don’t need any stats to tell me that my dogs, and dogs like Ashley’s, are burning a lot more energy than the average family pet. Her project has two other parts; one on how dogs gather sheep, to assess whether they could ever be replaced by drones (like me, Ashley thinks this will never happen, but she’s carried out an impartial study). The other part is an attempt to analyse the behaviour of dogs competing at sheepdog trials.
Ashley told me she was nervous about meeting me, because my dogs look so well behaved when they feature on Countryfile. She was worried hers would let her down. But I reassured her that mine are not perfect and sometimes the same scene is shot over and over until they do it right. I must say, working with her, I think she is doing really well with her dogs, and they are lovely animals.
Does she ever wish she’d stuck with the beauty business? ‘When it’s 4am and howling with wind and rain outside, it takes a bit of strength to get out of my bed. But I never seriously think about changing my job. I’ve never wanted to go back. Sometimes when Mum has to attend a big beauty show in London, I’ll go with her to help her out – I owe her for all the support she has given me. So I wear a dress and makeup, do my hair. I like being girlie sometimes, and I sometimes give friends a massage, or do waxing, but I don’t miss doing it every day, and I do miss the farm whenever I’m away from it.
‘People tell me that with a degree I should go after a graduate job, earn a lot more than I do as a shepherd. But it’s the part of the job I love most, and find constantly challenging: it’s a lot trickier for me starting a tractor and picking up a bale of hay than it is writing 3,000 words on the protein requirements of ruminants. I know that if I took an inside job, after a couple of days I would crave the hills, the farm, the dogs.’
As I met Ashley and her dogs just before Christmas, filming for a Countryfile Christmas special, she and I popped in to hear the choir at a local chapel, Bowden Kirk, practising for their Christmas service. Lay minister Pam Walker explained to me why dogs are welcome in the church.
‘It’s a tradition in the borders, especially at times of festivals like Christmas, for sheepdogs to come to church. Dogs are part of the family as well as working companions, so shepherds would naturally bring them along to church.
‘It was a bit strange for travelling priests, not used to the area, who were puzzled as to why their congregation was not standing up at the appropriate times in the service. But if they did stand, the dogs would get up, assuming they were off home. So it was easier, and kept the atmosphere more holy, if everyone stayed sitting down.’
As the choir sang, appropriately, ‘While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night’, Ashley’s three dogs settled down very contentedly and never stirred. It’s wonderful to think of those old shepherds whose bond with their dogs was so strong that they went everywhere with them, even to church. And it’s wonderful, too, that the church welcomed them.
Ashley is a fine example of a young person who has been attracted into shepherding, and I’m passionate about enthusing other young people to take on the job. If the average age of a farmer in Britain is 59, we need as much young blood as possible.
So I was very happy to travel with Peg up to Cumbria, to visit Newton Rigg college, which is a few miles from Penrith in the rugged, high fells of north Lakeland, where an exciting new course has been launched, the only one in the country dedicated to sheepdog handling.
The course, which has attracted 15 enthusiastic young students, is run by Derek Scrimgeour, a top dog trialler and sheep farmer. When I caught up with him he was impressing on the students how important it is for a shepherd or dog handler to stay calm.
‘The dog buys into your mood. If you are loud, excited and rushing about, the dog will be the same. It’s a technique you learn. I’m not a naturally calm person,’ he confessed, ‘but I can act calm.’
Derek enjoys passing on tips and skills to the youngsters, particularly the things he had to learn through making mistakes when he was their age.
Matt Bagley, from the college, was instrumental in getting the 20-week course off the ground and he believes as passionately as I do that we need to encourage the shepherds and farmers of the future in any way we can.
‘It is fundamentally important because the bond between a dog and a handler is so special, and if we don’t harness it in young people we may lose these skills. In this terrain a quad bike is of little or no use. You need a dog to do the job quickly and efficiently. When you buy a tractor, you get a manual, but not when you get a dog. All dogs and all handlers are different.’
The youngsters I met that day all seemed to be enjoying themselves, and knuckling down to learning their whistles.
One student at Newton Rigg college who doesn’t need to do a sheepdog-handling course is 16-year-old Tom Blease. Tom was partnered with my old friend and mentor Dick Roper in the 2016 One Man and His Dog competition, and they were the winning team.
Tom now combines his studies at the college with an apprenticeship on a sheep farm near Ullswater, and he’s intending to do more trialling. He says, ‘I am earning a bit of money to pay for my own sheep and for when I can start driving, and I’m doing something I really enjoy,’ he told me.
That’s the key thing: enjoying the work. It’s what gets us all, me included, out of bed on cold, wet mornings and outside into the fields. I’m thrilled that at Countryfile we’ve established a Young Farmer of the Year Award, for under-25 year olds, because these youngsters are the future of farming in this country.
I can’t leave the subject of herding dogs without looking at New Zealand Huntaways. I’ve been to New Zealand twice, but on my first visit, when Duncan and I were making our way around Australia, New Zealand and North America on next-to-no money, I didn’t get much chance to see Huntaways at work. Then, we spent a month pruning kiwi vines and the rest of our time driving around enjoying the breath-taking scenery. I’d heard of this special breed of New Zealand dog, and after working with Bob the kelpie in Australia, I was interested to see them. But I was slightly put off because I was told they barked from the moment they were let out of their kennels in the morning until they went back at night. I now know that this is not the case; although barking is an important part of their skill set, they are taught to do it on command, not incessantly.
The farmer who generously gave me and Duncan somewhere to stay did have a Huntaway, a remarkable three-legged dog that brought the cows in for milking in the morning, but because I was not working with livestock I didn’t see a Huntaway working sheep.
I went back to New Zealand to make four programmes for Countryfile at the end of 2016, and this time I saw Huntaways working. They are beautiful black and tan dogs – they look like great big Labradors with a dash of hound in the mix. Nobody knows their exact heritage; they were first mentioned by the ‘huntaway’ name in the late nineteenth century. They were developed in response to farming in the hilly countryside. The vast sheep stations needed dogs that could work for days on end on steep, rough terrain, covering great distances. The sheepdogs brought by the settlers from Britain worked silently, but occasionally one would bark, and this was seen as useful, because the dogs had to work out of sight of the shepherd. So barking traits were deliberately bred for, as well as the agility, stamina and the intelligence needed for a dog that can work to some extent independently of his master.
A Huntaway does exactly what its name says: they hunt away, and they are not used for rounding up sheep. Their job is to take the huge flocks of sheep that are farmed out there up the mountains or along the valleys. In New Zealand it is normal for one man to handle a flock of 2,500 to 3,000 sheep, compared to here where it’s usually one man to at the most a thousand. The dogs are therefore vital, each one doing the work of a couple of men.
The sheep in New Zealand are very hardy Romney sheep, which originated on the Romney marshes in Kent. They have been toughened up out there by natural selection: if a ewe can’t lamb on her own or rear her lambs, they and she will die. Only the fittest live, so the surviving flock is naturally strong. Also, through careful genetic selection, the New Zealand farmers have bred sheep with worm resistance, foot-rot resistance, good growth rates and other desirable traits. So the sheep may have originated back here in Britain, but now we import them from New Zealand. At Bemborough Farm we buy New Zealand rams to put on our Romney ewes.
People sometimes ask why New Zealand lamb is so cheap: they have the advantages of very low overheads, with vast flocks and limited manpower, plus their grass grows all year round, not seasonally like ours. And much of that low production cost is down to these fantastic dogs. A collie wiggling about at the back of such a large flock would not be seen by the hundreds of sheep at the front, but the booming bark of the huntaway tells all 2,000 of them that there is a dog around, and the shepherd can work them from as far away as two miles. It’s really impressive, watching one of these Huntaways zigzagging at the back of a huge mob of sheep, barking and controlling them.
During the Countryfile trip I also saw Huntaways driving a herd of Welsh black cattle, which were owned by an 83-year-old farmer who was as tough as his dogs. He lived in an old, very remote farm bungalow, two hours’ drive down a forest track. I genuinely thought I was lost and was considering turning back, when at last I came to the farm. He works with his two grandsons, two collies for rounding up sheep, and two Huntaways, which get up behind the cattle and push them in the direction he wants them to go. I could see how responsive they were, and how quick to avoid getting too close to the cows. The farmer used whistle commands, and he had a whistle that told them to ‘speak up’, or bark.
He also had a remarkable little black and white Jack Russell, called Rhondda, who would travel about on the quad bike and hang out with the working dogs, occasionally dashing away to catch a rabbit. He lived outside the bungalow in a box he shared with a cat, and they curled up together. If the men went away for a few days they left food and water and both the cat and Rhondda fended for themselves outside. I asked one of the grandsons: ‘What does the dog do when you’re not here?’
‘I don’t know – I’m not here,’ he replied, pragmatically.
Much as I admired Huntaways, because they are really lovely looking dogs, and I thrilled to the sight of them working, I wouldn’t want a Huntaway back here. I simply wouldn’t be able to use it to its full potential. We have small fields, and we don’t need to drive enormous flocks over long distances.
While I was out in New Zealand, I heard about Pig dogs. They are cross-breeds with some qualities of herding dogs and border collies, with a touch of hound so they bark and have a good sense of smell, and genes from pit bull terriers so that they are brave and have strong jaws. The end result is a dog that barks when it smells pigs and will hunt them, but rather than chase them away it rounds them up back towards the dog’s owner. Once the pig stands its ground the dog will grab hold of it. I recognise the skill of the dog but I’m rather glad I never witnessed it. Hunting wild pigs is a popular pastime, especially in the more remote areas. It is talked about as a great night out at the weekend in the same way that people here talk about a night down the pub. Whole generations of families – fathers, sons and grandsons – turn out together with their dogs. Pig hunting for sport also happens in America and Australia. The New Zealanders still have a bit of a frontier attitude, but sports like this in the UK were banned centuries ago.