Skirly Crag by Helen Percy sampler

HELEN PERCY, a former Church of Scotland minister, decided to change
her life and become a shepherd. In her first book, Scandalous, Immoral
and Improper (Argyll 2011), Helen tells of endurance and survival
of both familial and ecclesiastical abuse. Since leaving the Church of
Scotland in 1997 she has worked with victims of child rape in South
Africa and donkeys in the Kalahari Desert. Back home in the Highlands,
she has contracted for a number of eccentric farmers throughout
Scotland and Northern England, often travelling in a small van with
her sheepdogs, a tame duck and an epileptic hare.

Skirly Crag
The shepherd, her dogs, the hill and the hare
HELEN PERCY

This book is intended for informational purposes only and is not a
substitute for professional veterinary advice, diagnosis or treatment.
First published 2025
isbn: 978-1-80425-190-4
The author’s right to be identified as author
of this work under the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.
Printed and bound by
CPI Antony Rowe Ltd., Chippenham
Text and illustration © Helen Percy 2025

In memory of Ba Acheson, John (Jock) Kettles Phillips and
Lotta Magnusson, each of whom taught me something about
kindness, endurance and training dogs.

Contents
Author’s Note 10
Preface 11
Daybreak 13
1 Eeyore
The Road Not Taken – The Will to Live – Good Midwifery –
Being of Good Cheer – The Omen – Kebabs – Epitaph 15
2 Eeyore’s Staff
Tam – Deaf Geoff – Spot – Young Roy 30
3 A Fishy Business
Fleeced – Bringing A Criminal to Book – Guillemot 37
4 No Time to Wash
Faith In Humanity – Unlike Bo-Peep 49
5 Effin Fox-Harding of Forfochten
Meeting at the Mart – Forfochten – The Two Ronnies –
Cordon Bleu – Old Whores – The Entertainer 58
6 Losing the Rag
Trixabel – Empathy 75
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SKIRLY CRAG
7 Burke and Hare
An Easter Story 80
8 Give a Dog a Bad Name
Fluffy-Wuffy – Kevin the Wonder-Dog – Bad Dog 85
9 A Wet Lambing at Walmington-on-Sea
You Cannot Fool Them All – Dad’s Army – Going Dotty –
The Mysterious Exploding Sheep 91
10 Magic Water
Bully – ‘Witchcraft’ – The Shit Consultant – ‘Maintaining Cause’ 106
11 Foster Care
Seeking a New Position – Obsessions – ‘Spare the Rod and Spoil
The Dog?’ – Ouchaweebugger – Sagging at the Knees –
‘Thursday Night Is Chicken Night’ 120
12 Fialachd
Taigh-Na-Fialachd – Guantanamo Bay – ‘On the Seventh Day…’ –
Auntie Bum-Bum –The Hot Sun – Mismothering –
‘Cold Comfort Farm’ 128
13 Tender Young Things
A Small Sheep – A Distinguished Guest 146
14 A Runaway and a Robber
Jan-Jan – The Cheese Thief 153
8

contents
15 Heedfus R Slater of Tormuick
Things We Never Forget – Rocket – The Writing on the Wall –
Dressed for the Weather – The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats 159
16 Hinge Macfarlane and Soap Henderson of The Dowp
Armageddon – Unhinged – In Need of Soap – Gathering Nuts in
May – ‘One-Er… Two-Er… Three-Er… Four!’ – Ol’ Len –
Health And Safety – The Year’s End 171
17 Pigs, Ponies and Pleiades
A Nest of Pigs – True Gentleness – On Skirly Crag 190
Glossary 195
Acknowledgements 198
9

Author’s Note
Characters and locations have been disguised but not invented.
Events have been interchanged so that it is impossible to identify the
perpetrators of acts of stupidity or malpractice: for example, the dogs
described in ‘Guantanamo Bay’ belonged to diverse owners. If there
are actual farms named ‘Dunaird’, ‘Tormuick’, or even ‘The Dowp’
or ‘Forfochten’, I do not know of them.
Following a court verdict, actual names are used in the section
entitled ‘Fleeced’.
As the chapters are set in various regions of Scotland, for the most
part English is employed rather than local vernacular. Sometimes,
however, there is no substitute for the descriptiveness of the Scots
word.
10

Preface
When I stand at the door of my shepherd’s cottage drinking my
morning mug of tea, I look out onto the face of ‘Skirly Crag’. The
word ‘skirl’ describes the starkness of the place. It is ‘stripped bare’
by the gales. The howling and screeching of the wind is akin to ‘the
skirl of the pipes’. The same word also refers to snowflakes swirling
through the cold air.
This book began as a series of ‘lambing’ diaries in different years.
Despite hardly having time to eat or sleep, I scribbled down each
day’s events as best I could. Over time my scrawl developed into a
narrative, including funny things that had happened, the exasperating
behaviour of the sheep and of my employers, and tales of wild and
vulnerable creatures that required my care.
Helen Percy
May 2025
11

Daybreak
Tramping in sturdy boots, an old trench coat knotted around the
middle with handy string, I am still in my nightdress. Underfoot,
winter-crisped bracken crunches.
Fronds, frost-fringed, mantle the ditches in Nottingham lace as the
pallid, peachy dawn struggles to rouse the world from the silence of
its rimy tomb. Life is kindled anew as a keener flame licks the flank
of the hill.
I must visit my flock at first light, for this is the favoured hour for
birthing: one ewe is already busy flicking her tongue over the younger
of a pair of twins. Sheep tend not to go into labour in the middle of
the night. They wait, rather, for the early streaks of daylight when
predators no longer lurk in shadows and the clarity of day enables
the ewe to protect her new lamb. Only if she is distracted by further
contractions and turns her devotions to a second-born can her
adversary, the fox, sleekit and still watching from the cover of the
purple-budded alders, dash in to snatch the sibling. Concerned for
her second, she is unaware that her first-born has rolled down a bank.
Trailing both lambs by their forelegs so that the mother will follow,
I move the trio to a more sensible place and flop one damp infant
on top of the other, remingling their scents. The new mum must pay
equal attention to both. If she fails to forge a bond with one little
lamb now, henceforward she will reject it and box it away from her
whenever it tries to suckle. I back away, leaving her to her topping
and tailing of her babes. She croons and burbles softly.
Trickling from the pinafore of Skirly Crag, the thin burn alternates
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between treble and tenor, baritone and bass as the gulley changes
depth. The glen stirs into wakefulness and the puppet lark is borne
aloft on trembling strings of song.
14

1
Eeyore
The Road Not Taken
Despite a childhood spent perched atop a five-barred gate proffering
bunches of weeds to our bovine neighbours, their long rough tongues
rasping my bare legs, there is no agriculture in my blood.
One of my grandfathers was a pig-man, but when the swill was
poured out along the troughs I was terrified by the barging and
squealing of a hundred ravenous weaners. Witnessing a bold brown
hen flutter onto the rim to peck at their fare and lean in too far, I
registered horror as, within seconds, all that was left of Henny was
half a dozen feathers floating in the broth. The owner’s gleeful son,
revelling in my dismay, threatened to toss me in next. I fled. No, I
preferred being in the bake-house with my other granddad, elbowdeep
in giant sacks of flour and kneading mounds of dough.
My baker’s-daughter mother was a bus driver, my father a sales
representative: boxes of biscuits, tins of soup, cigarette papers and
matches were stored in our back room at various times. Once he stacked
the shelves with sample bags of knitting-wool and piles of tartan scarves,
but that was the closest I came to the sheep that produced the yarn.
We never had a dog. My mother disliked those animals intensely.
We were allowed cats, rabbits and guinea pigs as pets, never anything
that barked or whined or might pee up against her plant pots. The only
working dogs I saw, from a distance, were retrievers and foxhounds.
Bizarrely, therefore, I had a yen to be a shepherd since I was about
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SKIRLY CRAG
thirteen. This romantic but enduring notion derived from an antiquated
book randomly pulled off a shelf in the library, still memorable for
its advice on weaving willow and birch into windbreaks to shelter the
lambing ewes in severe weather. Hadn’t I been doing just that in my
earlier village school days when I played with my toy farm animals
and made them enclosures and stalls out of broken twigs?
At sixteen, a friend’s dad, a hobbyist, asked me to feed his fifteen
Suffolk ewes while the family went on a sailing holiday. I was in my
muddy element. When he returned, the man offered me fifty quid or
a ewe-lamb to start my own flock. My mother refused to entertain
my obvious choice and made me take the money.
Stymied, I embarked on a different career path and studied
theology. I chose the smallest of Scotland’s university towns, its
ancient stones washed by the salt-spray of the sea, and was ordained
seven or eight years later.
The countryside of my childhood summers was made up of flat
fields of wheat or barley and lush cattle-grazing. It was a far cry
from the lofty peaks, snow-spiked even in July, and the tumultuous
highland rivers to which I migrated. English woodlands that
augmented autumn’s patchwork of plough, stubble and standing
corn, these pick-n-mix cloths stitched together by twiddling lanes and
hedgerows of amber maple, were exchanged for Scotland’s gunmetal
skies and the fire of scarlet berries exploding from solitary mountain
ash saplings that clung to slabs of dark rock by their gnarly fingernails.
My new life I owe to having run out of the church door and being
taken on as a raw apprentice by ‘Eeyore’.
Eeyore farms a knobble of land in a remote corner of my erstwhile
parish. His need for a labourer and mine for new work coincide.
I carry water buckets and sacks of oats, pitch hay and spread
straw in the pens. I’m not qualified to do any but these most menial
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EEYORE
tasks. Most farmhands have been driving tractors since they were in
nappies. Here I am in my early thirties embarking on a second career
and all I know is that a Massey Ferguson tractor is red and a John
Deere, green. I have never shorn a sheep.
The Will to Live
Born two drams below par, Eeyore is well aware that he’s nicknamed
after the glum donkey in AA Milne’s storybooks, with whom he shares
a ‘nothing ever goes right and I’m not long for this world’ outlook.
‘I don’t want anyone to help me out of my hole,’ he wails, whenever
I suggest some minor plan to make his life more comfortable.
‘That loaf I baked for you last Monday is growing mould. You
haven’t even started it.’
‘I don’t have time to cut it. I’d rather have ready-sliced bread
from the shop.’
Eeyore’s sheep have a better diet than he does. His fridge contains
no more than a square of rock-hard cheese, half a tub of margarine
and a yellowing head of broccoli that I bought for him almost a
fortnight ago. There’s a desiccated mouse in a trap beside the cooker.
It must have been there for the best part of a year to have achieved
this wizened state.
‘I’ve made you a pie, Eeyore. It’s just out of the oven.’
‘I can’t stop to eat it. Too much to do.’ He says this as if it’s my fault.
‘I haven’t had anything to eat since six o’clock this morning but I’m
never finished working till after ten o’clock at night. I’ll just microwave
a “meal for one” then. Anyway, my tooth hurts. I can’t chew.’
‘Well, I brought you oil of cloves for your sore tooth last week.
If you won’t use it…’
‘I keep hoping I’ll die soon. What’s the point of treating my
toothache if I’m going to die soon?’
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SKIRLY CRAG
‘This room’s freezing: why don’t you let me take down those
drab, thin curtains and put up some bright, cheery ones with thermal
lining?’
‘I already told you, I don’t want anyone to help me out of my hole!’
Eeyore has lived in his current ‘hole’, which I call ‘Happy Valley’,
for fifteen years. Since moving in, he has only unpacked a handful of
cutlery, a few pots and dishes, and just as many clothes as he needs for
one week while the previous week’s load is in the washing machine. A
decade and a half and there’s not a single picture up on the wall yet;
not so much as a clock on the mantelshelf. Most of his furniture is
still stacked up in the back room. As for the windows, he never opens
those mustard and dirt-brown swirl-patterned drapes; they remain
strung across the panes by their few unbroken yellowed plastic hooks,
fending off the fecund light of day.
‘Nobody ever comes to see me!’
‘Oh, Eeyore! Why would anyone come to visit you? You’ve only
got one chair!’
‘I do have a sofa.’
‘Yes, but it’s out in the back shed. The mice are making free with
the stuffing from the cushions. You could bring it into the house, but
there’s fifteen years’ worth of junk piled in front of it.’
‘What’s the point of bringing furniture out of storage if I’m going
to die soon?’
‘Is it not time you bought yourself some new socks, Eeyore?’
His dialect becomes broader the more entrenched he decides to
be. ‘Ah’ve twa pair on the noo. The taes wis oot o’ ane pair, and the
heel oot o’ t’ither, so I jis’ put oan ane aben t’ither. They’ll see me oot.’
(‘I’ve two pairs on at the moment. The toes were worn out of
one pair, and the heels worn out of the other pair, so I just put one
on top of the other. They’ll last until I snuff it.’)
‘I’ve made a pot of stew. Will you come in for your tea?’
18

EEYORE
‘I dinnae think it. I hae t’ ging ’n’ lift a deid yow.’
(‘I don’t think I’ll bother. I have the corpse of a female sheep to
take to the dead-pit.’)
‘You’re a contradictory old miser, Eeyore. You whinge about the
price of a bag of beet-pulp to feed the sheep, but you spend £2.30
every week on The Scottish Farmer: you could take out an annual
subscription and it would be only two-thirds the price. Look, they’re
even offering a free pair of welly boots if you do!’
‘I may not get the benefit of it. I could die afore the end of the year.’
‘Eeyore! Honestly! You only have to survive for eight months
just to break even!’
Eeyore’s favourite breed of sheep is the Bluefaced Leicester. Lugubrious
and stubborn, these most miserable of creatures fit in well in his
ownership. Is it that people grow to be like their animals or the other
way about?
Bluefaced Leicesters are soft southerners. The Roman-nosed, leggy
ewes produce silken ringlets of high-quality wool, plenty of rich milk
and twins and triplets to drink it. They are most prized, however,
for their male progeny. The cream of these lads will be crossed with
Eeyore’s Scottish Blackface hill ewes, often called Blackies, which are
weather-proof and tough with thick, carpet-grade coats. This marriage
produces what’s known as a Scotch Mule; the ‘best of both’: grown up,
the cross-bred daughters are better survivors than their fathers, and
produce more lambs and more milk than their pure-bred mothers did.
They will ‘do’ outside in windswept fields – though perhaps not high
up in the heather – and their finer fleece is worth marginally more than
the shearing team charges to clip it off their backs. The coarse wool of
the Blackface sheep, on the other hand, does not even cover that cost.
Eeyore bemoans this fact frequently. (Needless to say, the majority
of his sheep are Blackies.) His few precious Bluefaced Leicesters are
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SKIRLY CRAG
cosseted. They are utter wimps in this northerly climate. One shower
of rain and they dissolve like sugar mice. It’s necessary to carry on a
race of pure ‘Blues’, however, so that there will be plenty of rams to
create that perfect hybrid, the Scotch Mule.
Early on in the year the ewes are pregnancy-scanned. From then
on, those carrying twins or triplets will be separated from the ‘singles’
so that they can be fed a bit extra. The lucky mums carrying only
one lamb, however, will be rationed: if a ‘single’ lamb grows too big
inside the womb it will be a struggle for the ewe to push it out when
the time comes.
Eeyore’s default setting of gloom extends to his thoughts on his
sheep. I watch his face as the operator of the ultrasound machine
hands him the slip of paper informing him of the overall results.
If many of the ewes are bearing singletons, Eeyore is down-in-themouth
about it being a ‘poor’ lambing percentage. If, however,
plenty of triplets are predicted, his reaction is, ‘There’ll be too many
bloody lambs! I’ll be up at until midnight bottle-feeding the blighters!’
Whichever way, it will never be right for Eeyore.
By March, my list of duties extends to helping in the ‘neonatal
unit’. Eeyore’s Bluefaced Leicester ewes are housed in sheds at birthing
time as their lambs are born with hardly any woollen coat and scant
survival instinct. They’ll scarcely tolerate being outside except in
the most reliable months of a Scottish summer and are notoriously
dull-witted. Many of them seem not to know what an udder is for!
I spend hours each day crouching in a pen in a back-breaking pose,
supporting lambs on legs that seem to be made of jelly, shoving them
underneath their dams and encouraging them to feed. Some of the
lambies are such dunces that it’s necessary to place their jaws around
the teat and squirt the milk down their throat. A few brighter sparks
taste the nectar and do latch on, but the dopier lambs either slide off
the teat or clamp their teeth so hard they make the poor ewes’ nipples
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EEYORE
raw. The longer they are left without the life-giving liquid, the less they
seem to want it. These pathetic creatures have to be given lessons every
few hours, for days on end. Eventually either they discover the notion
for themselves or they expire out of sheer cussedness. Meanwhile, their
mothers dance from foot to foot and refuse to cooperate. They tire of
being haltered in a corner time and again while their weedy children
acquire a basic skill that should be innate.
In time, I learn to recognise when a ewe is struggling to give birth.
After considerably more time, if Eeyore is outside and fails to hear
me shouting for him, I can catch her and capsize her, puzzle out the
tangle of limbs inside her and deliver her lambs. As yet I have no
experience with tractors or quad bikes and I do not have a sheepdog,
and so I am of no use out in the yard or in the fields.
Good Midwifery
If Eeyore cannot lamb a ewe, no-one can. This black-faced ram lamb
already has stout, horny protrusions budding from his crown, and
he’s not even born yet. They won’t shift past the little ewe’s pelvic
bones. Eeyore finds a piece of electrical cabling out of an old cooker
and feeds it behind the tricky stumps. He tugs hard on both ends,
slowly drawing out the triangular-shaped head.
The poor ewe must have been in agony with her child’s hornbuds
wedged inside her like that. Eeyore blames the current fashion
for breeding Blackie rams with magnificent but excessively wide-set
appendages. He agrees it’s hard on the ewes if this kind of oven-wire
intervention is needed in order to extricate their progeny.
Oh, but the ewes know how to use their own sets of pointy horns.
If I am trying to worm or vaccinate them while they are packed together
in the handling facility, every tenth or twelfth Amazon warrior will
whip round, lower her head and charge. She thrashes her head from
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side to side and bores straight at my shins. These Blackies are semi-wild
animals. They are handled infrequently and resent human contact.
Another tip from Eeyore: washing-up liquid works wonders as
a lubricant. This isn’t just a cheapskate’s alternative to proprietary
obstetric gel. It is the perfect consistency – although the ‘value’ brands
tend to be on the runny side, and there’s a considerable amount of foam.
I am kneeling beside a ‘gimmer’, a two-year-old sheep having her first
lamb, whose cervix has not opened up. It feels like the aperture of a
vacuum cleaner bag, with one of those hard rubber rings that secures
the mouth of the sack to the end of the pipe; only it’s smaller. The hole
is the size of a tenpenny bit. My hands are much slimmer than Eeyore’s
and so I’m the one designated to massage and stretch the neck of her
womb with the tips of my fingers until the band gives. Eeyore goes up
to the house to fetch the dish-washing liquid. When he returns and I
hold out my free hand for the bottle, it’s ‘Zingy Lemon’ he’s brought
me. ‘Eeyore!’ I exclaim. ‘Why didn’t you bring the “Apple Green”?’
Only a man would dream of using ‘Zingy Lemon’ as a gynaecological
gel!
Though he can deal with a difficult birth with more expertise than
most vets, Eeyore’s degree of anxiety is directly proportional to the
value of the animal in question. If it’s a mere ‘carpet-wool’ sheep, he
keeps his cool. When it comes to one of his pedigree ewes, however, he’s
hoping for a good solid lamb that could fetch a fair amount of money
in six months’ time. Now Eeyore goes into full-blown panic mode.
Without even gauging the possibility of extracting the lamb himself,
he’s already pulling out his mobile phone from one pocket and the keys
to his jeep from the other. ‘We’ll never get it out! Never! I’m phoning
the surgery. It’ll be a Caesarean at the vet’s, I know it! I just know it!’
By the time he’s reversed the trailer to the door of the byre to
load up this particular ewe and drive her into town for an emergency
C-section, I’ve examined her and used the techniques Eeyore has
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EEYORE
taught me. She’s not a long-limbed Bluefaced Leicester, but one of the
pricey pedigreed Texel ewes on which he splashed out last autumn,
as a new venture. These sheep are pig-shaped ‘butcher’s favourites’.
They have fat derrières and square shoulders; the prime cuts for meat.
There’s hardly any ‘neck’ on a Texel lamb. There’s not so much as a
dimple between the back of the skull and the shoulder; no space at all
to slide in even two fingertips and loop a piece of cord around each
front foot and tug them forward one after the other. All the same, it’s
surely worth a try, before going for the blue-light run! I remember
Eeyore’s instructions when he was in a more rational frame of mind.
The only way with these Texels is to bring out the head first, not
the legs, he’d said. I daren’t risk doing this without squeezing past,
somehow, and first roping those feet. Once the head is pulled, the
legs will be tucked up underneath the torso. Unless I attach strings
to the fetlocks which I can use to bring forward the toes when I need
to, the shoulder blades will be stuck fast.
I am fumbling in the dark, but at last I have the cords fastened. I
clench my teeth in pain as I ease my finger joints over the top of the
lamb’s head and draw it out from the too tight portals of the cave.
The back of my hand is crushed by the hard knobs of the ewe’s pelvic
bones. Goodness knows how much it must hurt the stoic sheep.
Yahoo! A head! Now I delve back in for the forelegs.
Being of Good Cheer
The Bluefaced Leicesters frequently carry triplets, and occasionally
quads. Sometimes a bellyful of lambs in the late stages of pregnancy
is too much. The mother’s own proteins can break down as she puts
so much energy into the growing foetuses. She’ll come over all faint
and wobbly and keel over. A large injection of calcium under the
skin can revive a sheep with ‘twin lamb disease’ miraculously. In less
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SKIRLY CRAG
than a minute, she will clamber to her feet. If she will glug sweetness
from a bottle, that can aid her recovery too. But sometimes, nothing
works. Occasionally a ewe sinks to the ground, won’t eat and is just
too heavily laden to rise.
One particular Leicester has been in this state for days. She’s been
‘drenched’ with syrup drinks. Glucose and calcium have made no
difference. The vet has prescribed a different injection that we hope
will induce her labour. Even if it means losing the lambs, there’s a
chance the ewe will pick up if she can be rid of her burden. Still she
just lies there in the straw, head down, ears low. At last, she does go
into labour. She is very weak, but Eeyore uses his skill to relieve her
of her premature lambs. Kneeling beside the expert as he works with
the mother, I try every trick he’s taught me to make the creatures
breathe, but even the stronger of the two survives only a few minutes.
The ewe is given fresh straw and water and I tempt her to eat some
molasses. A fitter sheep might be persuaded to adopt a triplet from
another mum that doesn’t have enough milk for three. This lass is
too unwell to nurse another’s offspring.
Eeyore throws her dead lambs in front of her nose. ‘There! That’ll
cheer her up a bit!’
He has a funny notion of what might bring ‘cheer’ to someone,
does our Eeyore.
The Omen
The work ethic within Eeyore is so strong he’s verging on manic. The
job has to be done yesterday. Whether we’re checking teeth, treating
feet, worming, vaccinating, weighing, marking, ear-tagging, dipping,
weaning, spraying with insecticide or titivating for the sales, those
sheep have to be driven into the stone-built enclosures and rushed
through the series of holding pens and alleys as if the devil will be
24

EEYORE
upon us, and upon them, if they’re not all through by teatime. He’s
always pressing on, rushing up behind the sheep and slamming the
gates behind them. He yells at me to run faster, to vault over the
fence rather than waste seconds climbing it, to grab a sack and flap it
violently to scare the animals and chase them into the next section. He
tries to squash 300 sheep into a fauld that’s only capable of holding
270 but, ‘Bags of room! Bags of room!’ is his constant cry. I’m never
sure if it’s the dog or me that’s being urged forwards, since he shouts
at both of us in the same manner. If I tell him he’s plain crazy raising
his blood pressure like this, his response is always that we will ‘run out
of time’. Time for what? The ewes panic, spin round to face him, and
burst back out of the pen, terrified by his almost demonic hollering
and roaring, and by the sound of his feet pounding behind them.
They are even less willing to enter the trap on the second attempt.
To the sheep, he wears the number ‘666’ on his forehead. They think
they are about to die. I argue with him that, if he would only move
quietly and calmly, he’d have them penned more easily because they
wouldn’t about-turn until the latch was already fastened. He doesn’t
appreciate this logic. ‘But we’re going to run out of time: I can see
dark coming!’ is all he forebodes.
It’s midsummer in the Scottish Highlands. The sun doesn’t set
until eleven o’clock at night.
Kebabs
At the end of Stage One of my apprenticeship, Eeyore gives me a
little sheep of my own. She has dark, chocolate-coloured wool, each
ringlet infused with ginger and tipped with cream. Eeyore describes
this multi-hued fleece as plain ‘black’ and regrets that she cannot
be registered in the Stud Book. She was one of a set of triplets, a
greedy girl from the start, and he took her away from her mother
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SKIRLY CRAG
and bottle-fed her so that her correctly coloured brothers would have
plenty of milk and grow well.
That ewe goes on to produce lambs for me for nine years; all
bouncing twins or triplets and once even quads. Some are chocolate,
some white-fleeced with classic grey-blue legs and faces. Not one of
her progeny ever needs to be taught how to suckle. She uses her nose
to usher each one of her children around to her udder and has them
guzzling in no time at all. Why would anyone breed from a ewe that
was dozy herself as a lamb, if it is possible to select for intelligence and
vigour instead? I’m certain that stupidity in Bluefaced Leicester lambs
is hereditary. The majority of Eeyore’s ‘Blues’ would not have survived
without a human being teaching them how to suckle. I’m not impartial,
it’s true, as I am so proud of my super-intelligent ‘Mensa-Sheep’.
The year that Mensa gives birth to quads, she manages to keep all
four of them with her right up until the day they are weaned. Usually,
a triplet or quad that is forced to share a teat and is always second
in the dinner queue will have to make do with the ‘dregs’. It may
grow well enough at first, but eventually will fall back, not putting
on weight, not drinking enough to thrive. If it is not removed from
its family and bottle-fed, it may fail to survive altogether. Mensa,
however, disciplines her four children and makes sure the first two
don’t take too much, so that there is enough for the second relay.
The four lambs grow at exactly the same rate and look like clones.
They are never far away from her. She always knows where they
all are, even if one is fast asleep behind the hay bales, out of sight.
Most ewes would mislay one member of such a large family – either
deliberately or through innumeracy. Many sheep struggle to count
to two, let alone four!
I always make sure that Mensa has plenty to eat herself, but I never
have to supplement the milk she has for her large family.
The day comes for all the lambs to be separated from their mothers.
26

EEYORE
They are four or five months of age, and no longer need milk. I feel
such a heel this afternoon. My ‘Super-Mum’ keeps those four lambs
beside her right the way through the handling system, first within the
packed-out outer enclosure, then pushed into a smaller one and finally
the square pen where the lambs are sprayed with an anti-parasitic
chemical before being put through a ‘shedding’ gate, separated from
the ewes, and loaded onto Eeyore’s trailer to be transported to a new
field. All of the other mothers fall to eating grass immediately, paying
no heed to the bleats of their lambs. They seem relieved to be rid of
them at last. But Mensa, mother-of-quads, blares and hollers after
the ramp is raised. When Eeyore drives off she chases after the trailer,
still calling out to the lambs that are crowded within. Half an hour
later, when he turns into the gateway to collect a second load, she
belts across the field to greet the empty vehicle, thinking he’s brought
back her beloved ones.
I feel such pangs in my heart for her. I beg Eeyore to take away the
three male lambs, but to let her keep her only daughter with her. Can
we not let her wean that last one herself in due course? Surely her milk
will dry up eventually? Eeyore shakes his head. ‘The remaining lamb
will feed only from the teat it’s been used to sucking. We don’t want
the ewe to continue lactating and for the other side of her udder to
develop mastitis.’ Eeyore is right. Surely, though, there must be a way
of easing the emotional distress caused by separating farm animals
from their offspring? Wild creatures wean their young naturally and
some human mothers speak of allowing their children to breastfeed
‘to natural term’. In order to produce food commercially, certain
interventions are necessary in the lives of farm animals, but I do begin
to wonder about some of the old, accepted practices.
When I go to check on the lambs an hour or so later, they all have
their heads buried in the fresh green grass Eeyore has been saving
for them and are chomping contentedly. There’s much to be said for
27

SKIRLY CRAG
comfort eating!
When my chocolate-coloured Mensa grows old and barren, she
spends a winter being spoiled with a special softened feed mix, but
she is still thinner than her juniors even after the ensuing summer’s
rich grazing. Missing her front teeth, she cannot eat as well as the rest.
Her friends are gobbling up the crumbs while she is still savouring
her first mouthful. With the prospect of another cold mid-winter,
it seems unfair to keep her. Now I plead with Eeyore to shoot her,
though he keeps telling me I’d ‘get twenty quid for her at the meat
market’ if I sent her away.
How can I send the old girl to a frightening place where dealers
will bid on her? After the gavel has fallen, she’ll be loaded onto a
big lorry with 300 sheep she doesn’t know, travel seven hours down
to Birmingham, fear her impending slaughter and finally be ground
into shawarma – just for the sake of twenty pounds? Not for twenty
times twenty pounds will I do that to her. One sun-bright morning
early in November she leaves the other sheep in the field, and follows
me into the yard. I put down a scoop of her favourite cereal in front
of her nose. She is engrossed in her breakfast when the bullet comes.
She has not one moment of anticipation or fear.
A farm is a factory, a major end-product of which is meat. Even
the Leicesters – which produce the highest quality wool-fibre, whose
female lambs become mothers themselves and whose male lambs are
often kept to become sires – will end up in a tin of pet food one day.
I am thankful that I am paid to look after the sheep while they are
alive and my wage does not depend directly on the meat trade. The
days when I have to weigh fattened lambs and load them onto a lorry
are the closest I come to shaking hands with the butcher.
Once I ask Eeyore what he likes best about working with sheep.
‘Me, I love the welfare aspect,’ I say. ‘I enjoy helping the ones that
are ill or injured and making them better. And you?’
28

EEYORE
‘Selling the buggers!’
I cannot help laughing.
Eeyore has his soft side, but when it comes down to it, sheep are
his livelihood. One day I take a town friend to visit him. We stand in
his front room that has only the one chair. Waxing lyrical about his
favourite ewe, now deceased, Eeyore points to a framed photograph
which is the only adornment on his dresser: ‘Best yow I ever had, that
yin. Bred a tup lamb out of her that fetched £15,000…’ My friend
is impressed by Eeyore’s evident sentimental attachment. She waits
for him to add that when that sainted sheep grew long in the tooth,
he gave her fitting burial in the garden and planted a tree beside her
grave…
‘Aye, the best yow I ever had,’ he rues. ‘I only got £28 for her
when she went for kebabs.’
Epitaph
What if each one of us had engraved as our epitaph a saying we used
often in life? I wouldn’t know which of Eeyore’s favourites would win
the count: ‘I don’t want anyone to help me out of my hole!’, ‘There’s
bags of room!’ or ‘I can see dark coming!’ Any of these would be
pretty much appropriate, inscribed on a gravestone.
29

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