Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
A Shepherd's Winter at Whinmoor
A hill farmer's wife keeps the lambing diary through a long winter at Whinmoor, and the ewe that keeps returning to the lower pen each night drops a lamb every year at the same date, and each lamb has a different face.
- dated: From the first snow to the last lamb of the season
- narrator: Ruth Pardoe, farmer's wife
- reliability: reliable
November 14. First snow on the tops. Counted the flock in the upper field: 212 ewes, all in good order. Twelve tups in the far pen, which Dan says is more than enough. The dogs are restless and keep barking at the wall above the spring.
November 27. Dan found a ewe in the lower pen this morning with a fleece as white as paper and eyes that looked older than the others. Marked her with a red spray on the left shoulder so we'd know her. She is not one of ours, but she stayed.
December 8. The white ewe is in the lower pen every night now. She goes back up to the moor at dawn with the flock and comes down again at dusk, always the same way, along the sheep track past the old lime kiln. She never bleats. She just stands at the gate and waits to be let in.
December 19. Snow thick on the moor. Dan says the lower pen is too cold for the ewes in lamb, but the white one won't go anywhere else. We have put a heat lamp in the corner for her. She sleeps under it, legs folded, watching the gate.
January 2. The white ewe lambed in the night, a single, a tiny thing with a black face and a curl of wool on its forehead. I was up with her. The lamb stood at once, shaky and bright-eyed, and looked straight at me. It had the face of a man I did not know, old and kind, with a small scar above the left eyebrow.
January 3. Dan says the face is only the scar on the lamb's forehead, that it is nothing, that the markings change in the first days. I don't think they do.
February 14. The lamb is strong. It follows the white ewe everywhere and keeps its head turned toward the gate. Sometimes at dusk it stands on the wall and looks down the moor road. Last night I saw the outline of a man on the road, walking slowly up toward the farm, a long coat and a stick. The lamb turned its head and bleated, once, low and happy.
March 1. The man on the road came to the gate this morning. He did not come in. He only stood there, looking at the lower pen. Dan went out to speak to him. When Dan came back he said the man had asked after his son, who went up the moor one winter thirty years ago and never came down. Dan said he did not know the family. I said nothing.
March 20. Last lamb of the season. Born in the lower pen, twin to the white ewe's first. Its face is young and fair, and a little frightened, and it has no scar at all. The white ewe has not come to the gate since. The man on the road has not come back.
April 1. Turned out the flock on the top pasture. Counted 213 ewes. Two of the lambs have been seen on the lime kiln wall in the evenings, looking down the road, waiting for the others to come home.