The head of a mountain valley in western Cumbria has - for over a century - been the place for an occasion for meeting of shepherds. Initially a ‘Shepherd’s Meet’ it became over time a Show and Shepherd’s Meet. This year it became again just a Shepherd’s Meet.
The location of the event, Wasdale Head, is remote - for England. The original reason for the meeting to come into being was for there to be a meet produced between local Wasdale farmers and their counterparts from nearby valleys. The neighbours walked rams over to Wasdale Head ‘to trade them, swap them or hire them’. The timing in the autumn was set for being near to November - when rams would be, and are, ‘put’ to ewes. After the Second World War, and with the arrival of motor transport, came an expansion in kinds of activity, increase of access, and general growth. And trade stands arrived. The Meet had become a Show.
The reversal in 2021 from a Show and Meet to be a more honed occasion, and hence only a Meet, was due to ‘the ongoing uncertainty around COVID-19’. The always core of the event, the sheep classes, were reduced a little in number.
The Meet was held in the open. The catering van apart, there were no trade stands. Attendees, other than sheep, seemed largely to be the sheep farming community and families and friends, plus general public from the vicinity.
For a Meet, of small size, an attitude and air of gentleness might be expected. But it was clear that the occasion was ‘serious’. Vehicles pulling trailers lined up to enter ‘the showground’ - a farm field, and to debouch their ‘precious cargo’. Participants and public clearly ‘knew the ropes’. In quite informal, and quite crude and determined, way, sheep - without first being allowed to get their bearings - were steered from their trailers into small pens. Some sheep were pretty closely jammed in their pens.
Sheep pens were in two lines, with a ‘driving’ area and the showing area situated in between. Pens were composed on three sides of wooden hurdles, held together with ties of twine; the remaining, outer, side of a pen was formed by a continuous length of wire fencing. One side of the complex was wired off at each end - by means of wire connecting right to a drystone field-wall. At the opposite side of the complex, outside the wire fencing along the length, were the non-participants, the public, dogs (on leads). The sheep in pens on the wall-side had the benefit that non-participating people and dogs could not get near them. But those sheep in pens on the other side, mid-field, had to undergo the experience of being in close proximity to strangers and dogs.
As befitted an area known for Herdwicks - due in no small part to the efforts last century to conserve and promote the breed by the famous author Beatrix Potter - sheep in the various classes were Herdwicks. Despite that Herdwicks are blessed with most beautiful natural colouring, many of the Herdwick sheep being shown - following the traditional practice for showing Herdwicks - had had red applied to the fleece on their backs. This is seen as helping to display Herdwick sheep to their best advantage.
Classes occurred in an area which formed part of the overall hurdled complex. Those showing the sheep took them from their pens to where they were needed to be. The essential format of a class was lining up for the judge’s inspection, then letting the sheep loose for the judge to watch them moving, then to collect them from the group and bring them back into line for the judge to inspect the sheep further and then choose whom should be taken out of the running and back to their pen at that stage, and then for the judge to consider and look some more before making his decision and for the rosettes to be awarded and all sheep still in line to be taken back to their respective pens. The entire process required quite a lot of moving and maneuvering of sheep by those in charge of them. Understandably, the sheep were somewhat reluctant to much cooperate. Quite often, the sheep-showers resorted to rather rough handling of the sheep, particularly at the stage when they were gathering up their animal after it had been let loose with all the others.
An important element to a Meet, as the name indicates, is the social one. The Wasdale Head Shepherd’s Meet provides an arena and opportunity for a rural and quite scattered community to come together around a matter of considerable general interest within the area, sheep farming. The feature sits with and alongside the Meet’s professional dimension. For the professional, the Shepherd’s Meet, in providing an arena for their sheep to be being judged and looked at in comparison with those of the professional’s peers, can, if the sheep do well in a class, render status to the sheep farmer and deliver their sheep to be worth more financially. And working and aiming to do well in a class will ‘raise the game’ to encourage higher-standards of sheep husbandry - a benefit to all sheep farmers.
A Shepherd’s Meet, small, quite isolated, and set within a quite close-knit community, is likely to have its traditions. There will be an intimacy and familiarity to proceedings. The risk, however, is of usual procedures and fellow-attitudes becoming so instilled and accepted that they go unquestioned, and so no new ways of thought and doing things are considered. The ‘that is how it has always been done’ can prevail when it should not.
As one example, it might be asked if, actually, a Herdwick looks better left with its back fleece uncoloured, and whether it is more respectful and keeping of the Herdwick sheep’s dignity, and true to its nature, to let it be ‘as it is’.
Has this vital and important question ever been asked and considered: ‘How is the Shepherd’s Meet for the sheep? Has it been recognised that a Meet (or a Show) represents an atypical, stressful entity to sheep and which does not serve sheep’s needs or preferences? Can it be right to allow spectators’ dogs at a Meet (or Show) and, moreover, to permit them to go ‘right up’ against a pen of sheep? And is it acceptable treatment by a human, to push, pull, lift up a sheep to get it where that human wants the sheep to be, for example in right position at a stage of a sheep class. Is an event of a type that use of halters - they were not used at the Wasdale Head Shepherd’s Meet - would be wise and best? Is a pen, into which sheep are being herded and forced, of size enough for the sheep not suffer overcrowding? The overall enquiry is: whether in the activity of a Meet (or Show) the human is being unthinkingly uncaring, and is not showing compassion to the sheep; and if the human is simply seeing sheep as an object for use - for that human’s ends.
It can be imagined that those many sheep outside the Meet, on open fell or mountain, would have felt lucky - relatively - that they were beyond the event and merely had walkers and their dogs to watch out for and contend with.
18th October 2021