Shear stress

I only use titles like Shear Stress to suck in engineers under false pretenses. Make them step away from their construction sites and get down and dirty [Q. What's brown and sounds like a bell? A. Dunnnng!] in a different way. Last year, on the 10th of July, we were much later that we'd like to be shearing our ewes. [R Shearing the rams by Tom Roberts 1890]. See also Ramming the Shears by Michael Leunig?  This year, the 10th of July came and went and we still hadn't seen Paddy the Clip; although we knew we were on his list. The only thing that makes farming viable as a way of making a living is if YouTheFarmer do pretty much everything yourself. If you have to employ 'hands' to do the ploughing, mowing, shearing, muck-spreading, milking and doctoring, then you'd go bloke. Contrariwise, if you can do these things and have the appropriate equipment, you can do them when it suits you.  If the weather is fine and dry, everyone wants to cut grass for hay or silage; the contractors are mad busy for all the daylight hours and into the night.  If you have, as we have, a handkerchief-sized farmlet, then you're going to be last on the contractors list and you'll probably miss the rain-free window in the weather, the dreaded ragwort Senecio vulgaris will be up in your meadows and the thistles Cirsium arvense will go to seed with abandon. The sky won't fall, but the farm will be a mess.

Yesterday we were off-site.  I was up in Dublin listening to Reports From The Frontier by a couple of bright young scientists in TCD. The Beloved went off in the opposite direction to look after Pat the Salt, her aged father. Young Bolivar was holding the fort and shaking sticks at the sky  to prevent the rain falling until Friday lunchtime because we'd been promised a shearing session on Friday morning. Mid-afternoon, I was on a noisy street in Dublin when I got a call from home to say that Paddy the Clip would be coming at 7pm and would I be coming too? I caught the next available bus to Enniscorthy, where'd I'd left my car that morning.  I had, I though, plenty of time . . . to buy some eggs, a bit of fish-for-friday and a bottle of plonk to wet the fleeces. Half way through this process, I got another call to report that Paddy was incommming in 10 minutes and where was I?

This year we have 24 ewes - up from 19 last year; which tells you how successful we were at the lambing in 2015; that and the freezer full of ram-lamb which we are slowly working through. Worse than having the shearer come early was the fact that a little drizzle had started: a wet fleece is ungood for quality: the moisture encourages bacterial and fungal destruction and may even lead to spontaneous combustion.  Anyway, I arrived about 10 minutes after the shearer and was able to throw on my work clothes and help unload the shearing floor from the trailer. We decided to do the shearing up in the polytunnel where it was a) not raining and b) less fly-blown c) nearer to an active electrical socket.  And it was done.  It took a couple of hours at about 5 minutes a sheep.  This is not record breaking but I don't think that I notably slowed up the process.  My task is to first catch your sheep, then up-end her and deliver her, sitting, to Paddy.  He then, without apparent effort, removes the fleece.  A much diminished animal is then allowed to rejoin her pals.

I only finished down on the floor once and that was more of a stumble than losing a wrestling match. But subduing sheep is a young man's task, I'm not as bouncy as I was, and Young Bolivar had a go. He is up for anything: carpentry, block-laying, stone-masonry, graphic-design and now sheep-dragging. Some sheep are harder to handle than others: this is partly glinting yellow-eyed malevolence but mainly due to weight. Some of the sheep you can almost lift with one hand and others are the size of a small pony. The fleece is proportional to surface area. Despite being late to shear we only had 2 sheep with fly-strike . . . same as last year.  If we kept proper records we'd know if they were the same animals and could off-load those sheep as trouble.  Then again, I'd rather 'off' the yellow-eyed monsters. Strike is caused by the blowfly [probably Lucilla sericata, Ir. = carrchuil] and a period of warm humid weather makes it more likely. The later you shear, the more likely that at least one such weather event will occur. Dagging, which I did last year, helps clean up the read-end and so reduces the likelihood. I still smell of sheep this morning but I'm happy we're done for 2016; not least because it rained all night and the fleeces would be sopping if we'd left the sheep out in the field unshorn.

The price of wool in Ireland is now €1.00/kg down from €1.45 last year.  Damn those Chinese for not wanting to make more blankets!

Shaun the Sheep

Shaun Shorn the Sheep! You'd have much more fun to watch an episode of, like, Shaun the Sheep [see R,R]. But I'm playing the Web-Log card here and now to record when things happen on the farrrrrm, so we don't need to remember over my two week event horizon TWEH. We are blessed to have Paddy-the-Clip 3.7km NNE of here; he's prepared to come up our bucketty lane in his scut-truck, unload his board and clipper-hanger, change his boots and trews . . . to shear a dozen or 15 sheep. In a just world, like a plumber, he'd have a call-out / set-up charge and then an hourly rate. Perhaps he does in his head. We pay what he asks and consider it a bargain. His core business at this time of year is shearing scores or hundreds of sheep in one place with his tea and dinner thrown in and someone to catch the sheep and deliver them arse-down on his station. It's a work out, for sure, even then.

Paddy has his day-job as a farmer, his family-time, his strong-farmers-too-busy-to-shear to juggle; it's okay if we're low down on his list with our piffling small flock. And then there is the weather: it's wrong to shear wet sheep: the shearer gets soaked and it is impossible to dry wet fleece. Wet fleece ferments and has been known to spontaneously combust. It amazes me how efficient sheep are at drying fleece when it is still attached; shorn wool not so much. And everyone appreciates that shearing is an animal welfare issue. Sheep are really uncomfortable wearing woolly jumpers in high summer and fly-strike [and then maggots] is a real problem.

On the last Sunday evening in June we took a call from Paddy to say that it seemed dry enough; he could fit us in; and would be round in half an hour. Whoa, no! we replied as we looked out at a drubbing thunderstorm and down-pour. We had to "take a rain check" with the promise that he'd try again later in the week. Tuesday tea-time he put us on 30 minutes notice again, so we dropped everything and assembled our part of the necessary kit [fleece-bag, very old clothes, electric-cable, hat]. Then we druv the sheep from their paddock up to the sheep-handling unit to wait. Ideally ya should starve sheep for a few hours before shearing as they have been know to stress out and die under the clippers if they're brim-full of grass. 

It actually took an hour or more before we heard the jeep rattling up the lane. But, at 4 minutes / ewe it took only one hour to relieve all the sheep of their burden. Plus a bit of time to set-up and an equivalent interval to de-construct the caravanserai, pack it up and say goodbye. Ten minutes later a light drizzle started to fall, so this year we made it in a nick of time. It is absurd how diminished [R] sheep are without their fleece. The following fore-noon we took the bag of wool into the Agri-store and were quoted a price of 10c/kg. Our cropping weighed in at 45kg and our neighbour who works in the agri store said it wasn't worth cutting a check for €4.50 but that when they had shifted the parish's wool off the the wholesaler, they'd call us in and we could be paid in Mars bars or a [small] box of wood-screws. It's just not worth their while in this economic climate for them to trade in fleece and they only do it as a good-will gesture for their customers.

Last year the price of wool was 20c/kg. In 2016 is was €1.00/kg and 2015 'twas €1.45! We didn't get sheep-shorn until 17 July 2022, nearly 3 weeks later in the year and at least two of the sheep were (mildly) maggotty. Paddy is of the opinion that the higher the farm, the lower the cases of fly-strike. That is credible. Upland plots in Wicklow are used to grow certified seed potatoes which are much less riven with Potato-virus X PVX and Potato-virus Y PVY which are spread by aphids. The idea is that uplands are so windy that the poor bloody aphids cannot settle. In Netherlands, [because no mountains] they grow their seed potatoes in the windswept polders actually below sea-level.

wool waste

We lost a sheep at the beginning of July. Dau.II was home for her first home visit since Marmalade weekend at the very end of February. It would be more accurate to say that, while looking for apples, she 'found' a sheep that had expired in a quiet corner of the field. The fallen animal guy is now charging a mighty €30 for the call out on top of the €30 for EU-compliant disposal. That's a big increase from €35 all in back in 2017. It was definitely worth our while to deliver the carcass (double-bagged) to the rendering yard in the back of my Red Yaris (windows double-open). On the way home The Beloved offered to buy me an ice-cream! The very next day, I was counting the sheep, found I was one short and, casting about, saw two legs sticking up behind a stand of rushes. As I approached, with sinking heart, Lady Bracknell echoed in my ears "To lose one sheep, Bob, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness".  But it was okay, the misfortunate beast was merely 'backed' and, on righting, gallopped off to join her rellies. Getting backed is a condition when, with a full wet fleece and an unlucky lie of the land, the sheep rolls over onto her back and cannot struggle upright again. By midnight she will be fox-food. That's one reason why real shepherds go out to look the sheep several times a day. After the long dry Spring, the warm drizzle of late June meant that fly-strike was increasingly likely

Anyway, it was clearly time to call Paddy-the-Clip and have him shear the sheep ASAP. He's a pillar of our community and shears across three counties. He's also our nearest neighbour across the mountain (the journey [map R] is about 3x longer by road) and has been right neighbourly in the matter of sheep maintenance. Not least in the fact that he'll come to us and set up his rig to shear a few handfuls of sheep when on another day he might get paid for de-fleecing 300-400 sheep. Since my thumbs started going weird, I can no longer be trusted as efficient sheep-catcher at shearing and have been politely asked to keep out of the way. That means more work for Paddy but does mean that he isn't bent double all the time and can stretch his back between sheep. And with Coronarama we can't even give him his dinner. Getting the sheep all bald was really good news for them (two were getting the beginning of maggoty) and us. The bad news is that the World Wool Market effectively closed in February. Paddy told us a risibly low price was being offered at the local Agri-Coop - I heard 15c/kg but may have been mistaken. Whatever it is well down from €1/kg for 2016, let alone €1.45/kg in the heady days of 2015. Shearing alone costs about 50c/kg. Last year it was the same, so now we have two cu.m. of close packed wool waiting for the market to recover.

This is crazy because there is at least one Irish company selling sheep wool for thermal and acoustic insulation at €8/kg in convenient 100 or 150 mm thick rolls. More power to them of course, because adding value is the only way forward in agri-business whether it's productifying fleece or making ice-cream or cheese from milk.

Bleh bleh it's hot in here

Yesterday, after a dry start, it was threatening rain [R snapshot from the www.met.ie rainfall radar] coming in from the West in a front. We were also promised a couple of hours of our shearer's time "in the evening". You can't for a variety of reasons shear sheep in the rain: the electrics short out; the wet fleece starts to ferment and it gets slippy under foot.  So I was a teensy bit antsy in case we missed our window of opportunity - it's about 3 weeks later than we'd like to be shearing.  Time was, the shearing hereabouts was left till July because wool was worth folding money and the longer you left it the longer the wool. Those were the days when young chaps were told to pick up every bit of stray fleece and stuff it in the bag.  Then the price of wool collapsed and it cost more to shear than the wool was worth.  A few years ago, it was down to €0.40c/kg which meant that each fleece was fetching €1.50 and costing €2.00 to produce. You had to shear anyway as a humanitarian gesture - it's no fun sitting on a sunny park-bench perspiring in a scarf, hat, woollen jumper and overcoat, surrounded by flies.  And also as good husbandry: if the sheep get "the strike" [myiasis], the maggots have a field day under the wool and the the raw inflamed flesh attracts more flies until you have a bloody mess and a sickening sheep on your hands. For closely related reasons, good husbandry dictates that dagging is a good idea and I felt pretty smug yesterday when only one of the sheep had a really shitty arse; me having cleaned everyone up with scissors and detergent at the end of April.

Half an hour earlier than expected we heard Paddy the Clip and his trailer rattling up the lane as the clouds started to look really lowering. We were also fortunate to have Dau.II present as an extra pair of hands.  She is a notorious light packer and had come for a four day visit (including someone's birthday party) with one pair of jeans.  Nevertheless, she waded into hoosh sheep into the crush, open gates, close gates, go fetch a glass-hammer and generally be handy. "If my friends don't like me smelling of sheep, they're not very good friends are they?" The heavy lifting fell to me, my task being to deliver each sheep seamlessly to the shearing floor just as the fleece of the last one was scooped into the bag by The Beloved.  I'm getting better at this, as I need to, because a fully grown ewe weighs almost as much as I do and they don't generally like being turned upside down.  I sometimes wish I'd done Tae-Kwan-Do when I was young . . . er, no I don't.  But it's much easier to divert the energy of the sheep like a zen master into useful directions than to batter it out head-to-head.

Only 2/19 of the sheep were a wee bit maggoty and getting their fleece off will be enough to dry/fry any insect survivors.  We now have a cu.m. of wool to take to the Co-op.  Prices are up this year as high as €1.45/kg, so we'll make a very modest profit on the work. It's amazing how diminished and deflated sheep look after shearing [imgur image]but b'god they're a lot happier in their own skins. Next sheepy task - The Ram.

As night was falling I went on a final check to count heads in the little patch of green outside our sheep-handling unit. Two handfuls of t'buggers had escaped into the haggard through a saggy bit of fence. That was okay but one of the lambs had twisted his neck in the sheep-wire and fallen backwards off the wall. We prefer to have the lamb hung for a few days after slaughter rather than hanged as the method of dispatch. Note to self: always carry pliers when doing the rounds, they can, as here, save distress or worse.  Note to self: good fences make good neighbours [Frost] but clear boundaries also make life easier for everyone - must resolve to replace with wire that is a) upright b) taut c) without gaps at the bottom.

Agent Fuchsia

Agent Orange is no longer available. Its zenith = nadir was during the Vietnam War, when the US military sprayed it liberally over the countryside - jungle, fields, gardens, whatever, whocares? - as a defoliant. That made it easier for helicopter gunships to spray death at anything bigger-than-a-breadbox that was still moving on the ground below. Agent Orange was a 50:50 mix of  two herbicides 2,4,5-T [2,4,5-Trichlorophenoxyacetic acid] and 2,4-D [2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid - prev] and particularly horrible because the 2,4,5-T was contaminated with long-lasting human- and animal-carcinogenic dioxins. 

Meanwhile back at the farrrm . . . Monday 18 July was the hottest day ever recorded in Ireland and the previous two weeks had been hot and dry; which is fine for holidaying city-folk but ghastly for sheep who are still togged out in winter fur-coats. It was a nick-of-time relief when Paddy the Clip promised that he'd come for shearing on Sunday evening. One of the ewes was in a particularly bad way having fly-strike at the shoulder which had peeled off the fleece and started a spiral of destruction as more flies were attracted to the damaged flesh. 

On Sunday therefore we [The Beloved, Dau.II and me makes three] went to round up the sheep for shearing. When we hooshed them out of the gate and up the the lane into the holding-unit, I was annoyed to count only 60 legs and 15 heads - one short.  And dismayed to realise that the missing data was our fly-struck ewe. We returned to the field, paying particular attention to the boundaries because sheep can crawl under hedgerow bushes for a snooze. TB and I had almost met at the far side of the perimeter when Dau.II called out "She's here . . . and she's alive" as the sheep wandered out from a shoulder-high stand of bracken. Shearing went off without further hitch: there were no more maggots and nobody died. The struck-ewe was drenched in a fly-lethal cocktail of chemicals and all the sheep were as ready as could be for the heat-wave the following day.

But damme if I was going to spend the rest of the Summer looking for sheep in a bracken forest which filled a square ~20m x 40m in the SW corner of the paddock. Walking sheep will usually scramble out of such places if you approach anywhere close making "hut hut hey-oop" herding noises; but a dead sheep is invisible in dense bracken until you trip over it. In a way you're better off waiting a day or two when the flies and crows start their noisy deconstruction. Easier to find and a bit less weight to get into the wheel-barrow.

0700hrs Monday morning found me (in my best pink Together For Yes t-shirt, all full of tea and with a sharp scythe) making a start on clear-felling the bracken forest. It was hot but I was hard and steadily mowed a neat enough 2 x 40m strip; paused to touch up my scythe with a whetstone; and then mowed another parallel adjacent 2m strip. I completed more strips on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday listening to my latest audio-book. By that time Monday's windrows were turning a pleasing dried brown and and I was confident that there would be no hiding-place for sheep. Agent Fuchsia?? that would be me! The After picture [above] would be more informative if I had the use of a drone.

Note to my future self: it took me a steady 15 minutes to mow one strip or 2 - 2½ hours to clear that forest. But 20 x 40 m is a tiny [8%] fragment of a hectare or maybe 1/5th of an acre. That suggests a day's consistent work will mow 1 acre = 40% of a hectare. My biceps are now officially massive.

Shorn the Sheep

Farmers are immersed in uncertainty but, like surgeons, have to live by their decisions. Actually for surgery, it's the patients who live (or die) by that decisiveness.  In farming, you may go out of business if you knock the hay just before a month of rain but nobody is going to die. Sometimes the prices at the mart seem derisory but you have to sell anyway. And sometimes in farming, good judgment and good fortune and good weather pay off and you make so much money your accountants have to dig up some losses allowable expenses, lest The Revenue takes all the fun out of your Win.

As tractorless, barely competent, micro-farmers (7 ha. 15 sheep), we are prone to a whole other layer of powerlessness. Last year, the grass (and other excitingly diverse species) in our 4x traditional hay meadows didn't get knocked till October! Irish weather runs to rain, or at least drizzle, so when a window of several consecutive dry days is forecast then everyone wants the mower, tedder, baler and wrapper in that order and Now. Mowers-for-hire would rather do big flat fields with good road access . . . so small places like ours get queued last. Then, last year, our preferred mower's tractor blew a cylinder-head gasket and was out of commission for weeks. Eventually, he had to sub-contract the job to someone else, who was fully busy elsewhere etc. etc. Consequencely late mowing, over-grazed other fields, unexpected payments. But at least nobody, and no sheep, died.

With shearing, it's a welfare issue. The price of wool is rock-bottom for the 3rd or 4th year in a row (and perhaps from here on out) at ~20c / kg - less than a tenth what it has been during our tenure on the farrrm. It's barely worth the petrol to haul the bale of fleece into the co-op for sale. But the sheep must be shorn anyway lest they pass out from heat stroke or get fly-struck or roll over get backed and unable to rise the ground. As with getting grass knocked, everyone wants the shearer at the same time and it's the same work to set up the shearing platform and oil up the shears for 15 sheep as it is for 150. 

Last night at tea-time Paddy-the-Clip, our heroic and dependable shearer from just the other side of the hill, called to say he could come, like, Now.  With the sheep-welfare issue and small-return for appearance issue, the Shearer takes precedence over tea, Dowager Duchesses, family zoom-calls, Full Colonels, favorite TV shows, Minor Eastern Potentates and The Match. Accordingly we dropped everything and mustered a) the shepherd's marker-and-meds bucket b) the longest extension lead c) my blue-marker-stained combats and . . . d) the sheep. 90 minutes after the call, the sheep were all lighter by a fleece and we were lighter by a wodge of folding money. Somebody cracked open a bottle of fine red wine to mark the occasion of getting the fleeces off before the dreaded bot-fly got on. Win!

Taming the deluge

Did I tell you we have a polytunnel with a bigger foot-print than our house? I did! Did I ever boast about seeing the Petitcodiac Tidal Bore progressing relentlessly up stream? I did! And I've been on and on and on about collecting rainwater for the said polytunnel; or rather the plants which grow inside it. After a month of drought in May and June this year, we finally had a dump of rain on Father's Day w/e 18th June. We had drained all our water-collection devices - buckets, herring-barrels and 1 tonne IBCs before May was out and were watering >!shock!< the veggies from the tap. Apart from anything else, the tap-water, from the bore-hole in the yard, which serves the house, is a deal more acidic than rainwater and not everything delights in dilute HCl.

After the hottest June since records began, July has been much more unsettled = rainy and 'cold'. After the parched Summer of 2018 and the Great Drought of May 2023, I am inclined to catch as catch can whenever the opportunity presents . . . I am not afraid to run out in my undies through a night-time deluge to capture the water.  

It is all very well to water the veggies but they only occupy a faction of the inside area. After years without rain, the soil is as dry as the Atacama Desert and it can be dusty enough to darken the laundry. But I've covered that part of the floor with a layer of wood chips which lays the dust. The last two (of 8) bays of the tunnel [i.e. between the supporting hoops] has been allocated as sheep-quarter quartier des brebis and was fenced off neatly and securely by Young Bolivar in 2016. Wood chips wouldn't do there because the chips get hoovered up by fleece on the occasions when we have to shear in the tunnel.

That happens only if Paddy the Clip has to come when the weather has been all rainy. Under those circs, we run the sheep up to their part of the tunnel the night before the shear, so they can dry out their own fleece as 37°C convection heaters. That is advantageous because it also starves t'buggers which makes for easier shearing.

I thought we'd get caught thus by the wet June 2023 weather, so I spent a couple of days slopping water on the dirt at the sheep-end of the tunnel. There is a little grass growing by the door - where the rain blows in; and some tired wisps under a couple of small holes in the plastic above. Then [outdoor] shearing came and went without incident and the priority returned to saving water for veg. But I have since decided that greening the sheep-quarter is desirable for the long-term and did two things towards this outcome: 1) I cut several sheaves of gone-to-seed grass: mostly Agrostis spp.and Poa spp. and lurried them up to thresh in the tunnel. 2) I continued to water the soil. In order to enhance absorption, I also dug over the grassless, compacted regions  and raked them flattish. Well, to my surprise and delight, yesterday it was clear that a thin fuzz of green was springing up in several parts of my incipient indoor 'lawn' [R].

The least effort, max return watering device has been to extend the gutter which fills the [currently brimful] tunnel-interior 1 tonne IBC out into the top part of the tunnel with the help of a cross-trees [see this jimmy-up arrangement above L].  The water then runs down-hill - the whole footprint being on a 4% slope because of an inattention error when we 'levelled' it 15+ years ago. You can see L the trickle of water wringing out (at the rate of 15 lt/hr - I measured) the last bit of a rain-storm on 15th July. Later the same day, rain was fair drumming on the tunnel roof giving a rate of >500 lt/hr! Tricking about in the dirt, making water channels is absolutely my jam. I definitely won't mind mowing an extra 35 sq.m of lawn. If everything works out fine, we'll be able to have tea there.

Sheep shedder

We own the 20th part of the hill that gives the townland its name. That holding more than doubles the size of our farrrrm by adding 10 hectares to the 7ha which surround our home. The trouble with the 'commonage' is that it is owned in common and we cannot point to a single bush or rock or rich source of fraughans and claim exclusive rights to it. Two generations ago, the mountain was an essential part of the farming economy. In the Spring after lambing, the sheep would be driven up onto the mountain where they would eat whatever they could find. I gave some more exotic examples of transhumance this time last year. The in-bye fields would have a rest from herbivory and be allowed to grow into hay, which would, if everyone was lucky with the weather, be won as winter fodder. The ram-lambs would be sold to the local butcher after which salt, tea, butter, rashers and a new shovel would be bought on the other side of the street. An idyllic local circular economy: the local cinema would alternate between The Quiet Man and Darby O'Gill and the Little People

Globalisation put paid to all that. The butcher could buy cheaper, better quality lamb from New Zealand. The price of wool collapsed so that it cost as much to shear the sheep as the wool was worth. Teagasc, the government agricultural advisory service has, for the last 30 years, acknowledged that no small or medium-sized farm can survive without an external income. In parallel, the EU has determined that there is social utility in keeping farmers in place in the landscape, and funneled grants of money to off-set the losses of running uneconomic farms in the globalised present. Every 5 years, a new Cunning Plan will emanate from Brussels, with a different name and different rules. The rules often change to remediate the disastrous effects of the unintended consequences of the last set of rules. The latest fund is called GLAS [Green, Low-Carbon, Agri-Environment Scheme] and it looks grand on paper . . . laid out across an agronomist's desk in Dublin. Less so when laid out across real fields and operated by real farmers with real sheep.

Anyway we signed up for GLAS because it seemed that the benefits outweighed the deficits (the training has been a total waste of everybody's time and a lot of tax-dollars). One of the key changes in GLAS is that, if you are claiming commonage as part of your holding, then you now have to use the commonage by agreeing to run a specified number of sheep on the hill for a specified number of months . . . just like folks used to do in the 1940s. The trouble is that, of the 20 farmers who own a share of the common, only 2 of them have been using the hill in this century to graze sheep. At the beginning of April we pushed 8 of our most mountainy sheep through the 'mountain gate' to shift for themselves upstairs. We never saw them together again; partly because we were looking in the wrong place. The day after shearing in June:

acting on the advice and hill-savvy of Paddy the Shears [at work above]. I went round to the Far Side of the hill to see if I could find our sheep between there and the Mountain River. I found one which, spooked by my approach, rapidly disappeared out of frame:

It has been 25 days since we last had rain and the bogs on the hill are all dried up but there is still a lot more green up on the hill than there is, for example, in our yard which looks like the green tide is draining away as you watch:

On Saturday we rose before the sun, had a cup of tea and set out to find our sheep. The early start was required because running unshorn sheep about the landscape in the heat of the day is a cruel and unusual punishment. We were delighted, with the help of binoculars, to find six of our sheep [three foreground sheep shown below, the others are a pixel each in the middle distance]:

That was  a dry run really because we had asked to borrow our neighbour Martin and his dog to help bring those sheep down to the bone-dry yard for shearing and a few scoops of sheep-muesli [mmmm good]. On Sunday morning therefore we were again up before sparrow-fart to meet Martin at 0640hrs on the Far Side.

Shedding sheep is a one of the tasks that is required of shepherds and their collies in sheepdog trials. The idea is to separate out two sorts of sheep from a co-mingle flock. How it's done. It was brought home to  me why it is done as our sheep moved across the face of a hill that was already dotted with sheep from other places. It fell to me twice to separate our sheep from a bunch of strangers heading in the same direction - mainly because ours were following them . . . like sheep. Don't forget that there are 200ha of hill up there and at least 200 other sheep to get in the way. The rest of the time my task was to follow a path more or less parallel to that chosen by our girls to discourage them from breaking in that direction. You may call me Rrrrrrex <arf!> <arf!>.

E v e n t u a l l y our sheep were encouraged to start moving quietly in a more-or-less SSE direction until they departed back through the Mountain Gate and down the green lane to home [as L]. Martin left us at the second gate because he'd seen two of his sheep in a peculiar place and intended to bring them back to the fold before they edged out of the county. That was a pity because The Beloved had the makings of a massive fry-up in the kitchen and I had to eat Martin's share of the sausage and rashers. The key thing with moving sheep is to keep the pace measured: slow and steady works. Anything else results in everyone getting hot and bothered and making poor decisions. As for the utility or sense of running sheep on an unfenced hill for which neither they nor their shepherds have any 'heft' [defined prev], I have my doubts. I think it's probably true that many canny farmers who have signed up to GLAS for the cheque have no intention of actually leaving €100 worth of asset on the side a mountain which they cannot reach without getting their arse out of their €100K tractor.