Herdwicks: The 'smiley' sheep that shaped the Lake District | Hacker News Reader

Herdwicks: The 'smiley' sheep that shaped the Lake District

bbc.co.uk

39 pointsbananapear13 comments

This is the Twitter account for a shepherd on Twitter whose flock is made up of Herdwicks: https://twitter.com/herdyshepherd1 Every time I visit his timeline I end up in a farming Twitter scroll trance.

For those looking for a longer form than Twitter, his first book is great: The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape (https://www.amazon.com/Shepherds-Life-Dispatches-Ancient-Lan...).

Rebanks also has a new one out last year, but I haven't read it yet: English Pastoral (https://www.amazon.com/English-Pastoral/dp/0241245729). Anyone have opinions?

I've read both and think English Pastoral is marginally better.

Less sheep, more general farming stuff and stronger narrative of old-school farming with his grandfather to modern industrialised then to present where he's doing more regenerative agriculture.

You can get a signed copy from his local Lake District bookshop btw: https://www.samreadbooks.co.uk/product/EnglishPastoral/2244

There's the old story about a supply teacher coming in to teach a reception class in a Lake District primary school for the morning.

The teacher decides to do some literacy work and points to a picture of a sheep on the wall. "Now, class, can anyone tell me what this is? It begins with 'S'."

Silence from the class.

"Anyone? Maybe you've seen them in the fields?"

Still nothing. She decides to work with one particular kid who looks quite exercised by the whole thing.

"Maisie, have you ever seen one of these before?"

Maisie replies exasperatedly: "But miss, Herdwick begins with a H!"

This made me laugh. It brings together the absurdities I've noticed going back home over the years.

I could seriously see this playing out with Ewe (locally pronounced yow) over Herdwick! Particularly with some of the valley primaries which are just a handful of farming kids.

Great story!

Perhaps the original has changed since, but surely we need 'smiley' in the headline? Outrageous editorialising. :)

At last a somewhat sane headline from BBC. By their usual practice in recent times it would be patterned something like: 'The unknown mystery animal that shaped the Lake District'.

And yet here I was, going to the comments first (as is tradition), wondering whether Herdwicks is an individual sheep with the power to terraform, or a breed of some mild historical significance.

Well, I guess 'terraforming' is an overstatement, but hill farming in general and the sheep specifically have had a profound effect on the landscape. This link is to a polemic, but it also contains plenty of references. https://www.monbiot.com/2013/05/30/sheepwrecked/

Considering how much damage sheep do to the landscape and how unprofitable sheep farming, I think we'd be off paying sheep farmers to re-wild the hills

Yep I've been thinking about adding some little babydoll southdown sheep here to my hobby farm -- mostly because they're cute but also so I don't have to mow as much and to help weed the vineyard and make some manure for the garden and to give my border collie something to do -- and what I've noticed is that almost everyone keeping sheep around here is doing it for the same kinds of reasons. They're cute. Keeping sheep gives that pastoral feel. (As my teen daughter would say ... It's cottage-core). It's something their family did. Etc. Almost nobody is doing it because it's profitable.

At least around here (southern Ontario) it wouldn't be an environmentally problematic thing, but there are definitely places in the world where the land _and_ economics would be much better off without ruminants and returned to a natural state.

I've heard of goats used for "terraforming". Several U.S. states have used them to remove invasive plant species (by eating them, because goat).

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