The farm was in one of the fourteen green-purple wet deserts, in a dent six miles wide with its shoulders covered in scree and a rainy season that lasts twelve months a year. Always acid in the water, always vinegar in the ground. It’s a hanging land known for its lakes but we live in its hills. Cloudeaten mountains named fells. None of it is tall but all of it is steep and the slopes are topped with dwarf grass and soil thin as tea stains.
We raise our flocks on the sides of cliffs and teach each sheep to clear its plate – took them five thousand years, but they did it. Left nowt but bare rock, soaked black, and learnt to love the taste of moss. Everything fell down to the floor of Curdale Valley, back when meadows had wildflowers, and there it was flat enough to sell your sheep. Some folk decided to stay and build a village called Bewrith. It was a market at first, then they got at the coal under the fells, and then the slate, and when that was gone, it was where offcomers came to eat ham and chips on their way through to postcard country.
It’s all in Cumbria. The valley and the village and the farm. A made-up county with the border of England and Scotland to its north, though fitting into neither so well. Yorkshire and Northumberland to its east with the ridge of the Pennines keeping us safe from their inbred eyes. The Irish Sea to the west and the Isle of Man if you’re wanting a swim. Then to the south there’s the South and that’s never far enough away. People in the fells are as friendly as any that can be found. So friendly, they’ll spot your house up by a rock face and make sure theirs is built far enough away you can’t spot them back. Miles of nowt makes thick walls.
I don’t get into the village much now, and less back then, some thirty years ago. It never changes. It’s got two wet-dash pubs, one painted white and the other yellow, and that’s one pub for every twenty houses, and the homes are built of slate, jagged to look at, and the bricks are green on dry days and grey every other. The people in Bewrith, all two hundred-odd, they’d tell you all they had was the view and that was fine by them. All that’s needed to keep going would take care of itself since folk watched out for each other. Take your washing in if it starts mizzling, get the sandbags stacked when it’s flooding, keep an eye on your nan or your kids or your bloody wife. Keep their eye on you. More than one way to watch out for someone. Got to know when they’re ready to boil over so you can keep your boots dry.
That’s my way of introducing you to William Herne. The only one of us anyone wants to hear about. A sheep farmer. When people get talking about him – it’s always what a mad old bastard he was, like we saw him walking about with thieving and killing in him and just took shy at asking him to stop. But that wasn’t the William I knew, and I did know him, for longer than anyone still living and, since he’s dead now, I suppose for longer than anyone will get to. When I tell you he’d been a good sort for the most part, that’s because I think it’s the truth.
He was a farmer, a shepherd, better than some but no more special than most. The son of a farmer and the dad of a farmer and the husband of a farmer. He was quiet so we thought him principled, when he did speak it was to the point as if he read the paper too much. Kept to himself or his family as he could. He was houseproud yet never cleaned. Near the same age as me but you’d not know it. First hairs that grew out his chin were grey, and he never aged while always being bloody old. He wore this wax coat for the last seven years of his life and it fell dress-length. He buttoned it all the way up, so he looked like a man of God. His wife, Helen, she’d not let him keep it in the house, the coat, it stunk so bad of muck and wild mustard.
Like a lot of the hill people, the village didn’t see too much of him. Knew he was out there doing his work and you might run into him if you got lost in the fells or kept an eye on his stool at The Crown. He was well liked, though, respected even – was always a man you never wanted to bother with owt, but knew you could if it was needed. Took his role as a tourist attraction a touch serious. Would find more than a few offcomers talking of a farmer they could swear was staring them down a field away, or else they found him pointing to signs he kept about the place reading, Dogs off leash will be shot. If they laughed, he’d start barking at them like a dog himself.
Which is to say he’d always been some sort of mad bastard. To tell the truth we all are. Only thing in our heads is what’s about us. The sheep, the dogs, the fields. And when there’s only emptiness about, then I guess you’d call us empty-headed.
I’ll start with telling you about foot and mouth. Most won’t talk about it, worrying if they do that’ll make it come back. But without it, all you’ve got is what William did and not what made him do it. It began early spring in 2001. For us here in Cumbria anyroad. I gather it all started months before with some pillock in Northumberland feeding his pigs up on bits of other pigs from parts of the world where folk don’t look after animals. They say pigs will eat owt, sickness and all.
At the time I was back living on my dad’s farm. Montgarth it was called, a small place that peeled back from the road, scarce a thumbprint on the valley. The house we lived in and this storehouse next to it were forever sinking, inch by inch, year by year, pushing out the draining soil till the land pushed back and formed a banking all about it. From the way he kept it, my dad, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’d been left empty till you walked near and heard his dog yapping. The field walls were left to fall in on themselves and the gaps shod over with wood pallets and rolls of wire.
I’d been there maybe six months at that point, helping him out. He’d got so weak with it all that it made me forget why I left. Like everything he did he got weak in his own way. Was heading for his late sixties, what he’d call his eighties in workingman years. Could about lift a ewe above his head but was ten minutes getting up the stairs to take a piss. Three fingers on his right-hand curled inwards for good, and he could still work a pair of shears with nowt save his knuckles and thumb. He never asked for help, then you’d find yourself getting yelled at for not giving any. I tell you how it was with him. I’d been away for years as a driver. Working crop fields in sowing season, trailing clouds of lime the length of the east coast. Ground so flat you’d go for ten miles and still see the dust settling from that morning. Busy with all that, and he gave me a call, no clue how he’d got the number, and said, ‘When you coming home?’
‘I’ve no plans to,’ I told him. ‘I’ll be getting a place of my own soon, earning some cash. You ever heard of that? Making a life for myself like you always talked about.’
‘Doesn’t sound like it.’
‘You going deaf?
‘Less than you might think,’ he said.
I was back in my old room the week after.
We were waiting for the new year to bloom when we started hearing about it. Not on the local news. Radio even. But whispering, foot and mouth’s back. For people who spend all day with nowt but sheep for company we don’t half get some gossiping done.
Foot and mouth. Only folk old as my dad remembered what it was.
A letter turned up. Sat on the floor all morning before we gave in to take a look. It was full of pictures, a catalogue of raw-mouthed stock showing us what to watch out for. The sheep getting lazy, getting skinny. Lying like their bones are nests. Legs not moving, head and eyes not moving. Blisters on their feet, feet white, feet rotten. Blisters in their mouths, on their gums or tongues. Hot and cooked all over. Lambs born dead like they’re smarter than the rest. All that and it said to keep our flock indoors, or as close to that as we could fix. Keep it from spreading across the fells. My dad looked at the letter and told it to eff off. ‘I’m not doing that.’
‘Sounds like that’s what they’re asking for. Doing nowt.’
‘None of it, then. I’ll let the flock go where it wants. Sheep can make up their own minds.’
‘Says they’ll die if they get it.’
‘Aye, and to stop some of them from dying they’ll all be fit for being killed. Make any sort of sense to you?’
‘More to it than that.’
He told me to eff off.
For the bigger places, the farms needing maps to find the toilet and barns that tunnel the length of a field, they could have indoor sheep. Nightlights to calm the lambs and slam gates crossed to make hotel rooms for every gimmer, gummer, tup, and wether. Take them for daily walks on leashes through their feedlots and less crowding to be found about the bed straw than at a post office. That wasn’t us. If we called Montgarth a smallholding, then others called it a hobby plot. Only two hundred sheep left in the flock then. You’d think that’d make it easier, but we were headed into lambing. You couldn’t ask the mams to hold their bellies a few months while we locked them together in the two fields close to the house.
Our flock was living wild on the open fells a thousand foot atop the valley. We left them to wander the slopes and crags beyond the last stone walls – ones built to keep back the mountain fog. They made their dinner of what curled about rocks and lumped trees, skins of lichen on the faces of outcrops, some of it glowing greener than what spills out Sellafield. Sedges, whipping grass, string-stem ferns hid in the cracks of boulders, and winter heather that sprouts pink and reddens with the cold. My dad was being maungy and locked himself indoors in place of the stock, watching telly and swelling his chilblains on the hotlamp heater, with the only dog we had by his side.
I set off while it was still night. The sheep slept higher than where the flycatchers and doves roosted in cragfolds, and higher than where falcons nested watching their dinner below, and they’d lie on bare ground with steep rims at their backs, pressing their ears to the floor, listening for tumbling rocks. No place for quad bikes and if you’re talking sense, no place for people. I climbed over the pasture gates as practice for what was to come and there were two domes of rock that let you know you’d left the grasslands of Montgarth. The first slope past them is what we called eating your crusts. Wind stuck to it like a river, and you knew the end was close when you were rubbing grit out your eyes. Once you’d crawled over that, you came to a wide crest that made every gale fresh and there was a slow ridge along its back to the top of Gum Knott. I kept one foot in scree and the other on spongy turf. Walking steady. Before day comes over, you don’t know how alone you are out there. There’s no edge to the ground and any bump could be a bluff and there are boulders big enough to mistake for the sky, but it’s not so hard going when the only trail is the one your family’s spent sixty years treading out.
I saw the flock when my torch caught one of their eyes on a wide ledge of bracken. Lying in a pile to make windbreakers of themselves and taking turns as blankets. Had to wake them. Yelled loud enough to taste my throat and heard their bleating back. Waited as the lot of them clambered over, counting sheep on sheep dropping down the ledge, yan, taen, tedderte, medderte, pimp. Trick of moving a herd is to get them on a leader, on a bellwether, so the rest will follow. We call them sheep for a reason. In normal times, that leader would be me and they’d walk close enough that if I took a plunge off a cliff, they’d go down with me. But it was my dad they were used to, and a bucketful of pellets only kept their minds for so long. Left me the bloody dog work. Clapping under their chests so they skipped through my arms, shouting so they learnt the words, stick slid across their ribs shunting them like their mams once did. Held my crook in both hands to collar the jumpers and steer them off the mountain. Ewes in lamb are as keen for listening as any pregnant lass. By the time we were back at the domes of rock, I was wearing one of the bastards over my shoulders.
Image © British Library
Scott Preston is shortlisted for the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award. The winner will be announced on Tuesday 18th March, 2025.
