1.        All thoughts through the spring and summer lead to the autumn, when everything the shepherds know is tested in the shows and sales, in the full glare of scrutiny and the judgement of their peers. This isn’t just vanity, though there is vanity in it, and it isn’t just pride, though you will never meet prouder folk. This is the coming together of everything, the ending of old stories and the beginning of new ones. The great flocks of sheep represent the accumulation of countless achievements at these shows and sales over many years. Each year’s successes or failures layer up like chapters in an epic novel. The story of these flocks is known and created in the retelling by everyone else. Sheep are not just bought, they are judged and stored away in memories, pieces of a jigsaw of breeding that will come good or go bad over time. Our standing, our status, and our worth as men and women, is decided to a large extent by our ability to turn out our sheep in their prime, as great examples of the breed.

2.        I once bought a little Herdwick shearling tup (in his second autumn) from Willie Richardson from Gatesgarth at the sale at Cockermouth. He was by popular consent agreed to be a beautiful, stylish little sheep, perfect white in his head and legs and where his legs met his body. He had only one fault, that he was probably a bit too small. So he cost me just £700; if he had stood a few inches taller he might have cost me another thousand pounds or so. I shared him with a young shepherd, but three weeks after the sale he decided we had made a mistake, that the tup was too small, so he never put any ewes to him. Before long I was being teased about this little tup, the consensus being that I was wrong, he would breed too small. I nearly listened to everyone pulling him apart, but something told me not to, so I gave him the best of my ewes the first autumn. A gamble. That was six or seven years ago, and now his daughters are, I believe, some of the best-looking and breeding ewes in the Lake District. That little sheep was one of the best we have ever had. He mated with just ten ewes last autumn, and then was found lying, old, worn out and dead, in the middle of the field. Some of the best shepherds, who once dismissed him, now admit, when I remind them, that they were wrong about him.

3.        Sometimes these things work, sometimes they don’t.

Bea climbs over the pens and quietly but determinedly takes my show lamb from my hands. We are at one of the shows we try to win each year. The judge, Stanley Jackson, comes along the line and smiles when he sees she is holding it tight around its neck. She is cute, so the other shepherds tease me and say it is just a way to sway the judge. I tell them to bugger off, that there is a new shepherd on the block and they’d better watch out. Away in the next set of pens, my father is showing his Swaledale sheep. My other daughter, Molly, is holding one of his and it wins its class. Three generations of us doing what we do. Other families are spread out like this around us. The lamb Molly is holding was sired by the tup that my father and I bought the year before, the one that he had admired on Christmas Day from the window, when I thought he was going to die. He has seen this little dream come true. He looks suntanned and happy. The cancer may still be inside him, and may someday have the final say, but for now he is alive, living a life he would not swap for all the riches in the world.

4.        Summer starts when the last of the sheep have lambed, and the marked and vaccinated flock is driven up the valley sides, either to the allotments or intakes if they have twin lambs, or to the fells if they have single lambs.

Many fell farms are located at the bottom of the fell that they have grazing rights on, so it can be as simple as opening a gate and letting the ewes take their lambs on to the fell that starts the other side of the fence or wall. Other flocks like mine need to be walked miles to their head. A trickle of ewes and lambs will make their way up the sheep trods, paths worn by the sheep over the centuries, and slowly spread out across the mountain until they find the place where they belong. Their sense of belonging is so strong that some have been known to go straight back to where they were heafed with their mothers, an irresistible urge within them to head home to their ‘stint’, even if they haven’t been to the mountain for three or four years.