Winter on the Hill
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Winter on the Hill
a seasonal round-up of going ons on the farm
The thing about living by candlelight is we live sunrise to sunset. And the thing about living “close to the bone” up here on the hill is we really live the seasons. And there is something deeply restorative in that, the way it should be.
The shepherding year begins when the rams go in, with a new breeding cycle. The date the rams go in (and come out) determines our lambing dates and the months in between, the dark months, are spent in gestation for the excitement and restlessness of spring.
Spring arrives late on the hill. Our rams went in on the last week of November, just before the freeze, for lambs conceived and gestated on frost softened heather and gorse, to arrive late spring with (hopefully) the first flush of grass and mild enough conditions for being born outdoors. This is our first winter on the hill, and will be my first lambing here, outdoors (I have until now lambed the flock indoors, on our lowland holding). So before spring we must fence and try to fox proof lambing paddocks, build shelters, dig drains and fence off the wettest areas so that lambs are not born into bogs. I hope that enough of the pasture seed I threw down in September will have survived the winter floods—my lambing ewes will need sweet fresh grass to bring their milk in.
For now, the mountain sleeps under a blanket of brown, the red-gold hues of dormant moor grass and twiggy bog myrtle broken with dark shadows of evergreen heather that hugs the rocks and provides winter green for the sheep, supplemented with sweet meadow hay and even sweeter beets that they have learned to gnaw for the extra calories to keep their internal combustion firing. Ruminants keep warm by eating: the fermentative process of their digestion of forage generates an enormous amount of heat that keeps them toasty from the inside, so my job is to keep them well fed with good quality forages through the cold months when little grows. Hill sheep are hardy, thrifty animals that do well with little feeding on rough forage—I don’t feed any grain, just a handful each of concentrated alfalfa nuts and their small feed of hay and beets which they eat quickly and trample much into the mud where it will spread meadow seeds and mulch the soil—for the rest of the day they forage for themselves on the heather. They will happily forage through the wildest of weather, their thick, heavy fleeces protecting them against wind and rain, and they are wily animals with strong instincts that know the lay of the land. When given enough space to roam they find their own shelter among the rocks, tucked into low hollows or under overhanging cliffs. When we bring sheep into fields and barns we restrict their abilities to take care of themselves, and over generations they lose those abilities. Hill sheep are rarely brought in from the hills, they retain a wild, fierce and admirable independence lost to more domesticated breeds which can make them hard to handle and harder to fence, but that’s OK because they really don’t need much handling and they stay around for the feeding. I have a lot of respect for the hill sheep. For our first winter on the hill the weather has been unrelenting, a real test of their (and our) toughness.
Besides a week of unseasonably hard freeze in mid-December, it has hardly stopped raining. Torrential, pelting rain that hurls drops like freezing bullets from skies as black and moody as a death metal band. So much rain that some of the sheep got rain scald on their ears and noses (which I treat with an herbal cream that I’ll share at the end, that soothes and stops the spread). These sheep defy the skies, they are built for the hills and made of rock and rain, but there’s only so many weeks of perpetual heavy downpour even they can take before they start to look a little worn around the edges. So much rain that our saturated, peaty soil can’t take any more and it bursts gushing and gurgling from flooded wet meadows, and streams that are now rivers cascade down the hillside.
Under dark, stormy skies, the bare, brown hills look quite barren, but do not be fooled, there is life hidden in the bogs and heaths and a diversity of species up here not found in the lowlands: orchids and butterworts now sitting dormant in the sodden soil; bogbean, asphodel, cuckoo flowers and cottongrass now sleeping in the bogs; ponds and wet meadows that come alive in summer with dragonflies and butterflies; the rough grasslands hide pheasants and snipe and hares that race madly across the heaths in March, and frogs, so many frogs…
We are visited by a short-eared owl. We hear him at dusk, a low, barking, “ooh ooh ooh” as he wooshes overhead. And a brazen young fox that worries our ducks, safely locked in their little pallet house at night, and sets our dogs into a howling frenzy. I have watched it hunting voles under the sheep troughs and amongst the sheep, but the sheep are not bothered. Not yet. They chew their cud and eye the busy little intruder nonchalantly. High on our ever growing to-do list is to securely double fence the lambing paddocks to create a dog run where they can be left loose to patrol the boundaries at lambing time. I am often asked if we have predator issues and if so what do we do about it. I think such a nuanced and sensitive issue deserves its own post so I will write separately on it, suffice to say for now that our fox has done no harm yet, besides annoying us at night trying to get into our dog’s tripe bin. But our heads are not in the sand, we expect trouble, sooner or later, and we are prepared to deal with it (my Shetland sheep are tiny and will be particularly vulnerable lambing outdoors).
Badgers keep to themselves but we see signs of them where they snuffle for worms and nuts in the leaf litter, under the hazels. And we frequently see buzzards and kestrels hunting over our high ground. Buzzards in particular are an awesome sight having made an impressive comeback from extinction in Ireland. For there to be apex predators like the badgers and the birds of prey, there has to be an entire, functional, vibrant ecosystem to support them. The small creatures they hunt are exposed on the open hills by the starkness of winter.
The wooded creek that runs along our southern boundary is an impenetrable jungle in summer, thick with thorny undergrowth and rampant, sprawling willow branches intent on tripping and whipping any who dare try to enter. But, in winter, when the leaves fall and gaps open in the thicket I can climb down and crawl under bare branches into another world where the shelter of the trees maintains a constant, soft environment, riotous with plant life that contrasts and compliments the sparseness of the winter hill. An old, earthy world of mosses and mycelium, rich with decay and soft, fertile mud and thick green moss that cloaks the bones of sleeping trees, lush and dripping, where even the air smells alive.
Down along, the creek widens into a half acre perhaps of natural woodland thickly carpeted with brambles and our boundary line is lost to the undergrowth. There is clearing work for the goats to do here, which will be carefully controlled to limit their browsing to the brambles, not the trees. But, that is work for another season. For now, the goats are busying themselves with stripping all the bark off their log cabin. Dairy goats do not share the hill sheep’s tolerance for rain—they need housing, so the first thing we did when we knew we would be wintering on the land, was build them one. They have free access out onto the hill every day, but they don’t go out if there’s a hint of rain. In fact, I can forecast the day’s weather quite accurately based on whether or not the goats go out in the morning. Mostly, they do not, and as my husband often remarks when he sees how much straw I pile onto their deep litter bed and how fat they are on their beets and hay, why would they? Goats like their comforts. Goats love sunrise, so on the occasion we get one, I open their gate early and they take themselves up to the highest rocky ridge above the willow grove for prime vantage to bathe in the morning rays. They’ve done a really good job browsing on the woody heather up there, and it is already springing back with a flush of fresh green.
The ducks came into lay on Christmas day—what a gift! They are young ducks and this will be their first laying season, their internal clocks triggered by barely lengthening daylight hours no sooner than the solstice had passed, and, I am sure, the flood of nutrients in the form of bug bodies and slime that they filter from the overflow of bog water that runs through their little fox-safe winter pen. They love the rain and they waddle out to quack and splash jubilantly in the freshened mud with every freezing, pelting downpour. They love life and they shout it from the puddles, as loud as they can. If you want an easy keeping farmyard animal to cheer up the dull days of winter, ducks are the one. They could crack a smile on a rain cloud, for the sheer joy of existing. Fresh duck eggs with yolks of concentrated sunshine are a bonus.
When dark falls, the day is done. Curtailed by limited power and indoor space, short daylight hours and horrendous weather, long, dimly lit evenings stretch and we can only batten down the hatches and curl up by the fire and listen to the rain and the wind batter around our little hut on the hill, and dream of summer. We work hard and break little all year, so I welcome the short, dark days of winter, rising late with the sun and settling in early, the slower pace after the race of summer and fall. The twice daily routine chores of keeping animals fed and comfortable keeps me tied to the land and flock—to home—and the work is heavy, if slow, but I don’t mind, it is what grounds me. I would sleep through deep winter curled up in the womb of the earth like a bear, to emerge when the willow buds burst.
Spring and all its light and new life will come soon enough. Winter is for deep rest and the gestating of dreams.
I will write a seasonal farm post quarterly so Spring issue will be in the midst of lambing. Subscribe down below to get the fresh newborn bouncing bundles of fluff delivered to your inbox.
**Link to the herbal cream that I use to treat rain scald, etc (this is not an affiliate link, it’s just a good product that I use and wish to share, you can buy it elsewhere, I get it in my local pharmacy)
Winter on the Hill
Poetry. I think I felt some rain.