The memory of Herdwick sheep

When I was still a young woman living in Nottingham, my mother knitted me a beautiful coat out of the wool from Herdwick sheep. The coat had a high roll neck that kept the heat in, and buttoned up down the front to my knees; it had no pockets. There were thick lines of cables running its length which traced the contours of my body. I don't know what happened to that coat, but it recently reappeared from the folds of my memory when I read this snippet from a collection of writings inspired by the Lake District. The name – Herdwick – caught my attention. I kept reading, found another word to hold on to ("heaf") and then set about some research. The breed is known for the attachment it forms to the place it lives. The ewes must teach their lambs the place of their birth, a process for which this beautiful word has been coined: 'heafing' (also "hefting"). When a new flock is introduced onto a pasture (for example after the devastation of the foot and mouth epidemic at the turn of the century) it is necessary to help them heaf to the new place if the shepherd wants his flock to stay. Once it is done, it seems to prove indelible for the sheep who henceforth transmit it from ewe to lamb. It is not an innate knowledge, but must be transmitted, and once done, forms a mark that binds the sheep in its body to its land. This note from the Canon H.D. Rawnsley describes how sometimes something written into the landscape by man also makes an indelible mark in the mind of these sheep. The quote is from Norman Nicholson's anthology, The Lake District (Penguin 1977)

A Crack about Herdwick Sheep

1. Homing Instinct

The most remarkable characteristics of these Herdwick sheep are their homing instinct and their marvellous memories. Of this latter there are many proofs to hand. For example, a flock of sheep, driven down a road which was blocked at the time, had to pass through a gate, and so back again through another opening in the wall to the roadway. This was when they were being driven back to the fells. They did not pass along that road again for many months. The road was no longer blocked, and the wall had been built up, but as soon as they came to the place where the wall had been built up, they all topped the wall and insisted on going back again through the gate. I have myself seen a flock driven along the road, suddenly, when they came to a certain place, spring into the air, and was told that at that particular point in the former year, a pole had been across the road, and the sheep had jumped it when they came to the place. Though no obstruction now existed, they leapt over an imaginary pole.

But the homing instinct is the most remarkable feature of their character. If a lamb, after being suckled on the mountain ‘heaf’ or place of pasture, is taken away from it after six or seven weeks, and carried miles away, it will never forget the place of its infancy, but will, as soon as the restless feeling of the next springtime calls it to the mountain tops, if it has the opportunity, make its way though fair or foul over miles of country back again to its ‘heaf’. I have met solitary sheep in the dales wandering back from their far-off wintering pastures to their fellside ‘heafs’, and once, late at night, I came upon a ewe passing up the Keswick main street, probably on its way to Helvellyn. I have heard of a flock being sold at the Cockermouth market, and taken right away to Skinburness on the Solway, with the result that the bulk of them went back of their own accord to the mountain heights, miles away to the south of Cockermouth. [Canon H.D. Rawnsley, By Fell and Dale (1911)] pp. 322-323