Herdwick sheep and scratchy wool

We have just got back a four-day escape to the Lake District. The idea was to celebrate mine and K's birthdays (which, believe it or not, were on Friday and Saturday respectively) at the top of some large mountain or other, but as I'm sure you all will have worked out by now, it rained. And then it rained some more. Finally, there was some rain, and all thoughts of climbing even fairly small mountains were shelved in favour of rather more modest rambles.

Being the intrepid lasses we are, we did manage a few smaller walks despite the endless downpours. I reckoned that it was an important step on K's path to genuine Britishness that she was heard to utter the words 'I think it might be getting brighter' on beholding a patch of sky that was a slightly lighter shade of grey and that she donned waterproofs and set out on a two hour walk even though it was already raining and showed absolutely no signs of letting up. Who needs a citizenship test? While we we on these slightly soggy walks, we met quite a lot of sheep.

These sheep are Herdwicks, the traditional breed of the Cumberland and Westmorland fells. Uk readers may remember that they were hit particularly hard by the foot and mouth epidemic of 2001, not only because Cumbria was badly affected but because each flock is 'heafed' to a particular patch of mountainside, meaning that the farmers can allow them to graze freely after they have lambed in the Spring without having to worrying that they will end up somewhere they shouldn't be. Personally, I am incredibly glad that Herdwicks are still prevalent in Cumbria. Those who complain about British farmers (and I'm not saying that such complaints are always unreasonable) should still remember that they do a lot of invisible work in keeping the landscape looking the way it does - I for one do not especially want a Lake District covered in birch scrub. In any case, they are an attractive breed and very much part of traditional Cumbrian heritage. And I'm told they taste nice.

There is only one problem; they are completely uneconomical to keep. They are bred mostly for their meat, but since they only have one lamb, it is hard for them to compete with other upland breeds like Swaledales which reliably have two lambs even in fairly harsh conditions. Their wool, although extremely hardy and warm, is practically unused, to the extent a few years ago, the British Wool association offered to pay farmers a penny a kilo for their wool 'as a goodwill gesture'. People want mohair and cashmere, apparently, and the only reason that Herdwicks ultimate survive as a commercial breed is because of government grants and because many of the farms are owned by the National Trust and are obliged, thanks to Beatrix Potter (a well-known Cumbrian sheep-farmer), to keep Herdwicks on their land.

But what about people who like scratchy, smelly wool? I admit that this is not to everyone's taste, but as readers of earlier posts might have noticed, I actually like the kind of wool that still looks and smells like it once belonged to a sheep, and there's nothing like a slightly scratchy and hard-wearing jumper for a day in the garden, a Sunday afternoon welly walk or just an afternoon curled up in front of the fire with a cup of tea. I was therefore extremely pleased to discover another new range of 'plain' wools on a rainy Saturday morning in Keswick. To my mind, these are even better than Sirdar's eco-wool, because they are produced from exactly those British breeds that struggle to find a market for their wool - including Herdwicks!

So for anyone else out there who doesn't mind a few tickles in their jumpers, allow me to recommend these to you. Not only these yarns plain, simple and hard-wearing, but they help Cumbrian farmers keep their beautiful landscape exactly as it is known and loved.

Now all I need to do is to find a decently plain knitting pattern to match...

Harvest time

The most exciting thing that has happened to me this entire summer is that I learnt to drive a tractor yesterday. A tractor! And we got to ride on the trailer as it was towed through the farm to pick up the next load of straw.

The reason for this was that K and I went wwoofing at Fen End Farm. I had emailed Ken (the farmer) earlier in the week to ask if Saturday would be a good day, his reply was 'we will probably be stacking straw in the barn. Help is always appreciated'. He certainly wasn't joking.

When I close my eyes today, this is more or less what I see.

When I was a child, I used to sometimes play in barns of straw, making wendy houses and dens out of bales. By the end of yesterday we had shifted somewhere in the region of 400 bales of straw and stored them in the barn, scrambling up and down the 'steps' made by stacked bales to haul straw right to the roof. Not a job for anyone with fear of heights or a predisposition to hay fever, or indeed an allergy towards bloody hard work. Ken told us that each bale weighs about 25kg, so that makes a grand total of 10 tonnes of straw that passed through our hands. Even allowing that each person didn't lift every single bale, I still reckon that I personally picked up, carried, stacked and generally flung around 8 tonnes of straw. We were still out working on the fields at 9pm, trying to bear the rain forecast for today. I watched the astonishing beauty that can transform even the most ordinary landscape as the red glow of the set sun faded from the sky and an ethereal dusky mist spread over the fens, and yet must confess that by that point I was thinking only of a cold beer and and a hot shower. Muscles are complaining this morning that I didn't know I had - I don't actually think I've ever worked so much that the muscles in my hands ached. This was with a tractor to carry the bales, one machine to bale them, and another to pick them up from the field and stack them on the trailer. I've said it before and I'll say it again, who needs a gym? Particularly since gyms don't tend to include tractor-driving lessons.

I suppose some people would say that gyms leave you with slightly fewer scratches and bruises, neither do they contain quite such a risk of plummeting from a great height from the top of a great stack of straw while struggling to wedge a bale into position in the eves of a barn. Yet however much money I spent, I don't think I could get any more satisfaction than I did from watching skylarks rise over the field as we were bumped and jostled us over a field of stubble in the late afternoon sun.

Time to yoke the oxen?

There was an interesting photo in The Times this Thursday of a British farmer ploughing his acres with the help of Oxo and Marmite - two of his cows. This is a picture I'm more used to seeing in the margins of medieval manuscripts., but according to Charles James of Lower Kenneggy in Cornwall, the soaring price of fuel in Britain led to him train the Frisian and Gloucester Cross to carry out jobs normally done by heavy machinery. Certainly there is a lot to be said for this, eco-wise. No fuel costs, little pollution (if you don't count methane cow-farts), free manure and totally self-sufficient. Ken down at Fen End Farm has tried his hand at ploughing with heavy horses, with good results (although he usually uses a tractor). Rising fuel costs are clearly a major problem for the UK's somewhat embattled farmers - last time I was visiting my parents in Yorkshire, the unpopularity of the government for their high fuel prices was palpable and a local postcard manufacturer had even come up with some cards claiming that farmers were diversifying (a genuine buzz word amongst the farming community) by lending out their sheep to mow lawns for those who could no longer afford to fill up their lawnmowers! Intended as a joke, but perhaps animals might increasingly be found doing jobs generally done by machines, especially for farmers with small holdings or a small percentage of arable land? The cost of oil might have to rise a bit more before employing sufficient labour is actually cheaper, but it's definitely tending in that general direction.

Having said that, ploughing with cattle looks like bloody hard work.

Now to fry some courgette flowers for my dinner. Something tells me that I've lost a little of my hardy northern heritage.

WWOOF!

K and I have a dream. A dream that one day we will actually have some land (instead of just a patio) to grow most of our own food and keep a cow, some chickens, maybe some bees and sheep. Well, a lot of people have this dream, but I've been brought up by my down-to-earth rural parents that it's no good just to be a dreamer. We are aware that currently we don't have the faintest about keeping cows or making hay and that we are unlikely to find the time to go to agricultural college any time soon. So, in the interests of being more than just dreamers, we have a new hobby - organic farming. Thanks to the lovely people at WWOOF (that's Worldwide Workers on Organic Farms, for those who don't know), we've got in touch with Fen End Farm - an organic farm about six miles out of Cambridge whose owners are happy to have some extra pairs of willing if unskilled hands every other Saturday. So far we have helped put up fencing, fed cows, shovelled shit and de-thistled a field! Currently, I can't look at a thistle without wanting to charge at it with a spade.


Credit for this wonderful idea must go to K. We've actually been members of WWOOF for about a year with the intention of using it to have a working holiday one day (preferably somewhere scenic with hills), but we hadn't managed to find the time. A month or so ago, however, K read an article in the newsletter encouraging more people to be 'weekend wwoofers' and so build up more skills over a longer period of time at one farm. Apparently the organisation began to encourage people to do just that, but it has increasingly become orientated towards those looking to travel, so that people are more likely to go and work in the Andes for a month than they are to go and help the farmer down the road with his lambing. Long-distance travel is all very valuable, of course, has great potential for the exchange of ideas blah blah blah, but runs the (all too familiar) risk of ignoring what is going on in your own backyard. Cambridgeshire may not be very sexy (or hilly, for that matter), but it is where we live. If only it had a few more hills...