Diary 9.0

Moving Sheep

The National Library Of Wales has some great historic photos of sheep (and some other things, too…). They’re great pieces of evidence of the ways that the bodies of sheep have been changed through breeding, even over comparatively short time spans. Everyone knows (…) that there was an explosion of breeding and experimentation in the late 18th and early 19th century, in which most of the modern British breeds were settled, but the breeds seem to have continued to develop and change. A Kerry Hill from the 1920s is a quite different looking sheep to a Kerry Hill from the present day – this makes for a confusing story in trying to track how sheep farming has changed over time.

Shearing Sheep

We sheared the sheep this week. A friend who knows what he’s doing came over and taught me to do it – it had previously been described to me as the single most physically difficult task on a small holding, and the only thing I would say is that doesn’t include how mentally demanding it is too. My legs are still aching, my shoulders are still aching, and by the end of it (I did three, with a lot of assistance) my brain was completely fried. I remember reading that in World War Two, the claim that artillery soldiers got all the girls, because they spent their time lifting shells into the guns, all day every day, shirts off in the sun, resulting in bronzed muscular physiques. I wonder if the same might be true of sheep shearers.

It was made harder by the fact I’m left-handed – it turns out that the shearing process isn’t symmetrical, so it got quite confusing trying to work out where I was supposed to be trimming, but we got there in the end. My friend Mike doesn’t actually shear his own flock, but he’s been working with sheep for 35 years and I think he has the odd one or two to shear per year, so he keeps his eye in. I had hoped he would show me how to do it and I would be set for life, but I think it’s going to be a multi-year apprenticeship before I am ready to do it alone. It’s been just another reminder that you can walk past those  little white animals pottering around fields across the country everyday without ever imagining the depths of knowledge embedded in their presence.

While I was learning to shear

While I was learning to shear, my wife was dealing with another problem that had come up at short notice. I went to walk the dog first thing & I came across  a huge buzzing noise and a swarm of bees comparable in size to some of the bigger trees. Eventually they settled on a branch, and I got in touch with the Cardiff and valleys beekeeping swarm hotline. A guy came to collect them – a swarm of bees is apparently a valuable thing – but in doing so he convinced my wife to take up a new hobby. So now we have a hive tucked down in the corner of the field. No doubt it’s another door opening onto a world we’ve been blissfully ignorant of to date. Apparently there might be 20,000 of the bees in the hive. Fortunately they don’t need shearing.