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their whole lives until that point on some of the rockiest and most unforgiving mountain terrain in Britain. Like a lot of farmers in the twentieth century we were keen to keep the most modern improved sheep we could on our land. And our modernizing farming worked okay, in a world with abundant and cheap fuel, fertilizer, feedstuffs, and cheap labour. But keeping improved breeds on land that is a bit too tough for them is hard work: they ail more, eat more, grow slower than they should, and ultimately die sooner. Later, as oil and feed prices rose, and the cost of the inputs on our farm rose, we would learn that native breeds like the Herdwick are the best suited to a life with little supplementary feed in this landscape. But, at that time, Herdwicks seemed to us noble, but like a thing from the past. Herdwick sheep are sometimes misunderstood as being a rare breed, or existing purely because of nostalgia or because of Beatrix Potter and the National Trust (because of its role in buying some of the farms here to conserve them and, through that, conserving the fell flocks in situ). Herdwicks aren’t rare, with more than fifty thousand breeding females, and they are still the only commercial sheep for the highest Lake District fells. They are currently experiencing a renaissance of interest as farmers try to find ways to farm tough land with fewer inputs, and because people are waking up to the quality of their traditional, naturally produced and tastier meat.
    Each breed of sheep has its own community of breeders that come together at different auction markets for the sales. So my grandfather knew and dealt with farmers from across the Swaledale country, from the Lake District in the west to Durham in the east, and from the southern Pennines to the Scottish borders. The auction marts are in many ways the centers of our way of life, the places where we come together to trade but also to socialize. When I was a child, they were situated where they always had been in the centers of the local towns, with sheep and cattle still walked in from local farms. In the last thirty years they have mostly moved to the outskirts of the towns to industrial estates—in the name of scale and modernization. But I think something important has been lost through this, a link between people who live in towns and our world.
    The different breeds also have their own calendars, with everything from lambing to clipping being carefully timed to fit the annual growing cycle and to ensure that they are in peak condition for the autumn sales, which are mainly breed specific.
    My grandfather went to these sales and bought lambs from the high lakeland fells in the autumn to fatten during the winter on his better land. These lambs are called stores. He sold them a few weeks later when they had put on weight and condition for a profit to the butchers at a “fat lamb” sale. I can remember being taken to buy them, when about knee-high to the grown-ups, to the little auction mart at Troutbeck. It is just over the brow of the fell from our farm, a mile or so as the crow flies. It was little more than a tiny wooden octagon-shaped shed, topped with a corrugated tin roof, surrounding a ring where the sheep were driven for sale, surrounded in turn by acres of pens holding thousands of sheep. The ring was a sea of sawdust, surrounded by wooden seats where the buyers could congregate, facing the wooden rostrum of the auctioneer. The sheep stood outside in long rows of pens made of wooden or metal hurdles (gates). Drovers, some still wearing clogs, and all with sticks or flapping plastic feed bags would bring the sheep to the ring or walk them away. As each pen was bought in the ring the buyer’s name would echo down the pens from one drover to the next until it was scratched in chalk on the little blackboard on the pen gate. On wet days the heat of the sheep would result in a damp, wet, woolly smell. Steam would rise from their backs. They’d