After the chicken, we passed a shed of cows who should have been in the fields. We passed fields of bullocks who wanted to play. We heard dogs howling in kennels as we ate our lunch in a thick wood. And as we went deeper through the wood, we saw pheasant cages. The dog send them flying upwards. We gathered up feathers. I remembered working on a pheasant farm in Brittany when I was 17.
We were back on a road we'd walked at the start of the week when a woman, possibly my age, flew out of a farm track on a quad bike, the sheepdog balancing on the back. Behind her was a flock of sheep. She asked us to stay back, not to alarm them. More walkers came down the road. The sheep filled the track turned right and through the gate we'd just left.
We hung back when the track emptied. The other walkers pushed on, led by a man in red knee high socks. It was hot, we were dawdling in the wake of such excitement, such a mass of creatures in a rush. The farmer had mentioned the green lane we needed to take and we were on it when we saw two men on quad bikes at another gate in the distance. The first sheep straggled through. We pulled ourselves up the bank, holding onto the dog, as this second flock rushed past, skittery, unnerved by us watching.
The hills were emptying of all the creamy dots that weren't rocks. Some of the second flock were lame, some very young, many had curled horns. This flock seemed endless, one after the other rushing past the stone wall opposite us, the dog whimpering, straining to be free and with them. There was one left that wouldn't be persuaded to follow. Neither the sheepdogs nor the men on quad bikes could shift it. We passed it squeezed up against the wall, its head into the stone. At the end of the fields we were on the road up to High Cup Nick, a box of drinks and crisps on the kerb with an honesty box. We sat and opened the flasks. Then noticed bikes up on one of the hillsides, rounding up more.
A woman came out of the house and we asked what was going on. They were separating the young rams from the flock. They'd be lamb chops, she joked, adding quickly that she wouldn't be eating them. Then the ewes would go back to the hills. So it wasn't the same as transhumance but it had the same power. The hill farmers had chosen the day of our walk because the weather was fine. They did this once a year. And I remembered helping with the same separating of mothers and sons when I was in Mallorca. That was when the ewes got away, left for the woods and called for two days. For now they were together, although small batches of rams were already being driven down the road in a trailer.
Who can think of that? The industrial scale of slaughter. The chickens kept in darkness. Pigs transported in lorries on crowded motorways. It used to be different. It doesn't match up, what we are doing.
We followed this last flock down the road with other walkers as they flowed into one field, carried on into the village, were guided into another. These flocks had given us something, shed an element of the hills as they ran past the walls into lush fields. But I'm still trying to work out what it was.
Photo from The Scottish Farmer by Wayne Hutchinson
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