Gently does it, the shears are sharp, the sheep will feel the sweet relief of the weight of her fleece falling as she relaxes into the rhythm of the blades. There’s no fear, no force, only soft acquiescence as the sheep yields to my movements in an intuitive flow, something like that which comes between a horse and rider. This is my fourth year with some of these ewes now, and they know the drill better than I do, dropping themselves into the positions with just the lightest touch.
Belly first, then open up the neck and down her side. Long strokes up her back (she likes that bit as she can have a little snooze or reach for a nibble at the grass if I’m shearing on the field), and around and down the other side.
Shearing is high summer work, best done when the sun is high, the wool is warm and dry and the lanolin has risen. I have been given a rain reprieve to write this, and I’m glad of the rest. I clip my sheep by hand using blade shears, the old fashioned way. It’s a skill I’ve had to learn out of necessity through the years of having a flock too small to bother a shearer with, and also out of my desire for self-sufficiency, and the satisfaction of being fully engaged with every step of my craft, as a shepherd and in handcrafting with the wool. And part of what drew me to work creatively with the wool, from raising and shearing the sheep through processing, creating and living with the fibre, using it in my home, is that same deep sense of connection as eating from the land, knowing every step of the process, soil to sheep to fibre to hearth.
Although we already had sheep for years before we bought this land, I often say it was the land that led me to them. Beautiful, benevolent sheep, growers of wool and protein from cellulose and rain, munchers of mountain scrub that feed the soil as they go in that age old cycle of nutrient exchange. We have here a mixture of wet, rough, upland pasture and heath; marginal land that isn’t arable or “productive” to farm. We are very limited as to what will grow or keep here, we couldn't grow crops on it if we wanted to. But we don’t want to. We want to keep the wildness of the land while supporting ourselves on it, not tear it up; the heaths and grasslands must be grazed, not ploughed.
We started out on a previous farm a decade ago with lowland, dairy sheep, but conditions on the hill are tough and here only small, hardy, upland sheep will do. To thrive on an open mountain on the southwest corner of Ireland eating heather and moor grass and living on her own wits takes a tough sheep driven by strong instincts and the vigour of an “unimproved” breed (as if we could “improve” on nature’s perfect design or the robustness of generation upon generation of adaptation to place). So, it was the land that led me to these sheep. Sheep that are made for the hill and embody the kind of strength the land requires our sheep to have: thrifty and resilient with a spirit of the wild.
Primitive little short-tailed Shetland sheep, chosen for their small size, light, agile and thrifty, foragers supreme, and their superb, fine and colourful, double coated fleeces with a beautiful long outer coat and a super-soft, dense, thermal undercoat, in tones of stone, earth, heather and sky that mirror the landscape so that they look as though they were made of these hills. Shetland wool is beautiful, next-to-skin soft, the finest of the British breeds, so scrumptiously soft you could swaddle a baby in it.
And Mayo-Connemara blackface sheep, the wild west of Ireland’s strain of the unbeatably tough Scottish blackface, small (by commercial standards, though not as small as Shetland), incredibly hardy and robustly adapted to the sparse forage and wild exposure of our rain and gale battered hills. Their chalky white and grey-flecked fleeces are coarse, long, thick, heavy and flowing, designed to shed our torrential, North Atlantic rain like splashes off a duck’s back and when they stand up proudly on the highest rocks with their heads high and their backs to the driving rain like they were hewn from the hills themselves, their fleeces billow like sails in the wind. Once upon a time, fishermen wore outer clothing knitted from the weatherproof, unscoured (raw, “in the grease”) wool of these tough little blackface hill sheep, and it is still used for tweed and carpets, where durability is required.
But today’s expensive, designer “fisherman’s sweaters” are usually made from a mix of much softer, merino and other imported wools. What a crime, to import wool when we have such a rich resource growing abundantly on our hills and grasslands!
I’ll admit, I failed to appreciate the value of our sheep’s wool at first. Not because I didn’t see the value of it, but because we raised our sheep for food (meat and milk) and wool was just a by-product of keeping them that I didn’t know much about or what to do with besides mulch the garden (it makes wonderful mulch). Sheep are raised primarily for meat in Ireland, and they are shorn for their welfare (a result of 5,000+ years of domestication is that most breeds do not shed their own wool), not for the value of the wool which is negligible, giving a return of only a fraction of the cost of having the sheep sheared—barely even worth the effort of packing the wool and taking it to be weighed and collected.
Chatting with a neighbour last week who had just had his flock of a couple of hundred sheared, I admired the fine condition of his freshly shorn ewes over the gate while he bemoaned the “whole waste of time” that shearing is. I asked what he does with his wool, does he get anything back for it? He’s got two year’s worth piled up in his barn, he told me, and the cattle knocked it all over but it didn’t matter, he shrugged, because at 8c per kilo it’s “not worth the bother”.
Naturally, I began to conjure up all the wonderful ways I could make use of my neighbour’s heaps of precious, unwanted wool. But, alas, I am just one woman with a peg loom and it’s enough for me to work through the fleeces of my own little flock of thirty ewes.
His are a mix of mountain ewes with mostly coarse fleeces, like my Mayo-Connemara blackfaces—carpet wool, tweed wool, heavy duty, hard wearing wool. Finer quality, lowland fleece fetches a little bit more. I’ve seen a quote for around 20 pence sterling per kilo in the North for this year.
But let’s weigh my neighbour’s wool up based on the price he told me for his wool, down here: a mountain type ewe that’s rearing a lamb might produce a fleece weighing around 2-2.5kg (I’m generously assuming she’s had a good year and is well fed, and shearing is well timed), so that’s 16-20c worth of wool per sheep. The cost of shearing averages at around €2.50 per sheep, so, less the best price of 20c per sheep he might get back for his wool, my neighbour is shearing his flock at a loss of around €2.30 per sheep, or €230 per hundred sheep—and we haven’t even taken the farmer’s own labour or hired help into the equation; sheep must be gathered off the hill for shearing, requiring at least a morning’s work with shepherds and dogs, and then penned and handled for the shearer; and then the wool, if it is to be sold, must be packed and transported to the collection depot. That’s a lot of work and additional expense for maybe €40 return on a flock of a two hundred. No wonder they throw it away.
When Irish sheep farms are running on an average profit margin of around €7 per ewe, propped up by land subsidies, the cost of shearing is significant and receiving a fair price for their wool would make a very real difference to farmer’s livelihoods.
No wonder so much effort is going into developing breeds that shed their own wool, and don’t require shearing. I find that a shame. Thousands of years of selective breeding for an incredible, natural resource that has been as valued as gold and no other fibre can rival. It seems pretty crazy to me that our wool is now so worthless, the bulk of what does make it to collection then shipped off to be processed overseas, while we import New Zealand merino wool for expensive knitwear and clothe ourselves in plastic.
Anyway, I began looking for ways to get creative and add value to my sheep’s wool because I wanted to make good use of all the resources given to us by the animals we raise. And we have a policy on our farm that every animal must have dual purpose, to make the best use of our own resources.
Feeding and managing the flock for good wool production while also producing lambs is a fine art. They need good feeding, enough protein to grow babies and wool (but not so much as to grow their lambs too big); their mineral balance must be just right; they must be kept reasonably clean and not confined to poached mud; a hard season or an outbreak of lice or mange would be catastrophic to my wool crop. These are all things a wool grower must watch closely for over the year. Timing of the clip is important; I shear in summer to coincide with the natural summer “rise” in the fleece which is very evident in hill sheep, and the “break” or thinning of the fibres that occurs from nutritional stress when ewes are raising lambs. Genetics, too, play a big part; fleece quality, colour and type are all considerations when making breeding and culling decisions. I am running Shetland rams on blackface ewes to improve the wool quality of the blackface while retaining its hardiness and ability to grow well and fat on heather and rain.
I’m no wool expert, I know nothing of microns or spinning count, but over the last few years of breeding for and working with my sheep’s wool I’ve learned what to look for, what works for me, and it’s given me a much greater insight into my sheep’s health and nutritional needs. Overall I’m looking for strength: even the finest of staples should take a sharp tug without breaking. Poor, brittle wool is easy to spot on the sheep—it’ll look scruffy and thin, and it’ll feel brittle. Anything that poor goes on the compost and that ewe’s health and nutrition assessed.
The rest is really down to breed, wool type, intended use and personal preference. In my long, double Shetland and blackface fleeces I’m looking for length, thickness and weight; I like long, flowy fleeces, the kind that billow like sails in the wind, but that’s just me. Curls are nice, too.
In my fine Shetland and Jacob spinning fleeces I’m looking for crimp, that’s the zigzag wiggles along the staple that give the fleece its spring, and a dense, closed fleece. In our wet, exposed conditions on the hill, these fine spinning fleeces, especially the more open the fleece, are less suited—they're just not as waterproof as the double coats and tend to suffer more staining and skin problems. There’s a reason the blackface sheep with its rainproof fleece is indigenous to our hills.
The fleece tells the story of the sheep, the land and the season, and good wool begins with good shepherding. I don’t know what all the answers to the bigger questions are, but I do think it comes back to localisation, and that perhaps by recognising and bringing back the true value of our native wool and traditional wool crafts—spinning, weaving, knitting, felting, crafts that were once necessary skills (women’s work) in every home—we might also recognise that craftsmanship begins with the farmer, the shepherd, the sheep, the soil.
Thank you for reading.
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As always, you and I come to similar conclusions on thoughts about how well suited sheep should be to the land. And how important fleece type is to the sheep's survival and well being. Those same fleece qualities are useful to man for different applications. Handspinners with skill and experience covet the Shetland fleeces for their texture, color and next to skin softness. Here in the states, I developed a good customer base of handspinners online selling for a range.of $18 to $25 per pound. To deal with shipping costs, I asked $10 from the customer and I paid the difference. It amounted to each of us paying about 1/2 the shipping cost. It takes a bit of marketing effort to build that customer base. As for the wool that is best used for outer wear and rugs, that market is more challenging. Finding that niche depends on finding evolved companies that recognize the importance and value of wool as a resource. There are shoe companies that are now incorporating wool, as well as other companies looking for sustainable resources. Some are now using wool for insulation in buildings among other applications. The trick is to match farmer with these companies. Government could be useful in doing that, but it is more often up to the initiative of the farmer to find that market. I hope your neighbor finds a home for his wool, someone that will appreciate the value of a natural fiber. I agree, man can never improve on what nature has developed. Many attempts have been made to duplicate wool's unique traits. Nothing has come close. The public needs to be educated on this. Sharing your experience is so important to that end. Thanks so much for doing what you do. In my post shepherding days, I hope I can find a way to share info with folks. Have lots of fleeces saved up and plan lots of projects in using those fleeces as soon as I can get my new house unpacked and in working order. Thanks again for a brilliant post.
I homeschooled my ons for a while, and each year we would spend a few weeks at a Benedictine monastary that was also a working sheep farm, reason being that the monks needed help and we enjoyed lambing season! This brought back very pleasant memories of that time, and the beauty of the land where the farm was. x