Alix Chidley-Uttley

Lockdown was a strange time for us all, in varying degrees. I don’t want to write about Covid because I don’t know anything about it that anyone else doesn’t - and because sometimes it’s good to distract yourself from the calamitous state of the world as it is - (arguably always has been in varying degrees)! So let us talk about something I could prattle on about all day, sheep and of course lambs.

We do at our roots enjoy the bucolic image of tumbling hills and bleating lambs, much more so than perpetual news updates of doom and gloom. You’ve seen the flurry of televised ideals on the rewarding graft of country life. The reality of rural domesticity might be SLIGHTLY more arduous than a W.H Davies poem, but as he wisely once scribed, ‘What is this life if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare’ … so, to South Shropshire and its blithefully endless charms.

I come from a farming family, as far back as my late grandfather’s stories would travel, that and miners. Lead miners. Knowing nothing about the latter, I decided to devote my ramblings to the first part, and though my knowledge of farming is not what you’d call encyclopaedic, I do know how to pull a lamb or twenty! Thus, to lambing and all the joys and dramas of that really rather infamous time of year. Winter has such an appeal to me, I enjoy the seasons variations and I love a good knitwear game so it’s a natural partnership. Winter means the Tups are ready to, well, let’s beat around the bush (to coin an unfortunate phrase!) to get down to it; to make the ‘beast with two backs’, or at least to mount the backend of a ewe … We fetched the ewes off the Stiperstones Hills, detail of which I shall save for another story. Relaxing in the fields and blithely unaware of the ascending brigade of testosterone coming (sorry!) their way. The boys are back in town, they Tups do their business, one assumes more than once. Let me deliberate of these Tups because I adore them, as does my uncle. I have them feeding from my hand, not sure my uncle would approve of that of course! – where was I, ah yes, the ewes and their fecundity. Ewes impregnated and tested by our eccentric (and no doubt straight from the casting of a Midsomer Murders) scanner, we press fast forward to labour day. Well, labour days, these things come in bouts and much like their human counterparts, their due date is little more than guess work, some come early, some late, some come fast, some straightforward and others believe me, are not straightforward!

Impending drama …

Lambing season hath arrived. Wordsworth said, ‘A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by one after one’ - although I think he was talking counting sheep as an aid to sleep. Sleeping is something of a rare commodity during lambing and although he is right in that they do pass one after another, leisurely is not always their pace of choice. Sometimes a day will pass with no sight of so much as a lambs trotter, then the night seems to produce something of a whirlwind of lambs, just as I am pulling one you will see in your peripheral a ewe licking her lips, sniffing the air and pawing the ground, baby en route. You may also delight in the broody ewe taking the lamb of another ewe, she hasn’t yet lambed but someone has and she has spied that baby and as the old saying goes, the early bird catches the worm – then to bottom inspection, clear as the sun at day, you can see who has lambed and you have the joy of taking that lamb from the yet to give birth mother and gift it to its rightful mother - whom god willing is keen and hasn’t been distracted by a bale of hay! Show her the lamb and guide them to a pen, sounds marvellously easy doesn’t it, not always. The ewe is interested then either through angst or appetite becomes distracted or runs off in the wrong direction. All in a day’s work but at 2am in your pyjamas, wellies and a woolly hat it all becomes a bit All Creatures Great and Small. Ewe in the pen, baby in there to, spray the naval with iodine, step back and check the mum is doing the motherly thing and then to bed – well no, probably not, because another three ewes are in labour. All the while Serge is tied up at the gate watching and wondering when we can go back to bed – by bed I mean the sofa, there is something easier about leaving a makeshift bed on the sofa than your own comfy bed, only fractionally mind because is sleep is precious sleep after all, that rarest commodity.