Shearing

Oh the relief. We still haven’t started on the haymaking, what with the weather weeping onto the fields, but there were two dry days, enough for the sheep to shed the water from their fleeces and for the shearer to divest all of them from their coats. Some had pretty much moulted half their fleece already, others held on fiercely, so much so that it had felted round their necks and in some cases beyond, which makes shearing twice as difficult and time consuming.

The long curled fleeces of the Whiteface Dartmoors are particularly prone to felting and the loss of their weighty fleece (minimum 4 kilos) must make the sheep feel so much lighter and freer of movement now it’s gone. As the cutters glide through the parts that are not felted, the thin layer that is left is silvery and shines making the denuded ewes look as if they’ve been buffed and polished like a silver ornament. As of Tuesday at 2pm, the fleeces were all in wool sacks and the sheep free of fluff. I hadn’t been concerned about maggots, having checked them all as we always do, at least once a day for itching, scratching, twitching, sweating or biting, but literally the penultimate one to be shorn had half a dozen freshly hatched maggots contemplating a bit of skin burrowing as they sat atop a Torwen’s tail. No chance of that as the shearer clipped them off and away, making them homeless and abandoned, and the ewe maggot-free. No damage done.

The next day the first fleeces were sold to a craftsperson, but there are plenty left for other felters, spinners, weavers and knitters, as long as they are able to work with raw fleece fresh off the sheep, and don’t expect me to have done anything fancy with them. A number of shepherds will process their fleeces or have them processed in one way or another, making life easier for the crafter, but that’s not my particular bag. It’s raw or nothing.

Our shearer is the son of our original shearer, now retired from the game, and the son has now a very young son of his own. We will be ancient and crone-like and leaning on crooks if the grandson of the original shearer is ever old enough and so inclined to do shearing for us. I remember so well how the son came to shear with his father when he was a young teen and learning the game. He was impatient with himself and obviously hadn’t the skill or the experience of the father. But now? Now he has years of experience tucked away and his patience has emerged along with his skill. It’s heart-warming to see.

And this week was the 21^st anniversary of our arrival at the farm. It’s the longest I’ve lived anywhere; who know what the next 21 years will bring?