She looked different. It is weeks since the snowdrifts melted, and she has been in good health, but now she looks hollow and has an ear down. And although I did everything to save her life, she deteriorated quite quickly and died a few days later. Pneumonia. It wasn’t the snow that killed her but the wet weather that followed. We are not sentimental people, but we share our lives with these sheep. We care about them. That ewe was born on our farm seven years ago. Since I bought the Herdwick ewes, I have built up a flock that live on our intakes. Although Herdwick sheep are predominantly fell sheep, there are a number of flocks beneath the high fells. Some of these specialize in producing tups to sell, taking advantage of their enclosed land (which lets you control the breeding more tightly than you can on a high fell farm where lots of tups have to be released together with many hundreds of ewes) to have a smaller but high-quality flock. For the past ten years we have kept some of our best male lambs from those Herdwick ewes and sold them each autumn to other farmers.
