The selling of sheep at occasions such as fairs, and markets - and most often alongside the selling of other livestock - is long established. Livestock markets, as a distinct and more formal entity, were portrayed in a review of them in 2017, by AHDB Beef and Lamb for the Livestock Auctioneers Association [LAA], as having had existence for 200 years. Livestock markets coming into being and geographical place, the review says to be ‘as much a reflection of the development of the transport networks that service them as of the areas in which livestock are produced.’

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 Sheep Drive in London is to mark and display the historic right of the Freemen of the City of London to cross London Bridge with ‘their tools of the trade’ without paying a bridge toll. Sheep were brought to market over that bridge.

The first official Sheep Drive occasion was arranged in 2013 by the Worshipful Company of Woolmen ‘for Freemen of the City and their guests to “drive” sheep across the bridge’.

If you watch a sheep walking normally you will notice that it opts for quite a slow pace. The speed at which it will move will only quicken due to pressure of being driven, or due to fear of something. Left to themselves, sheep ‘flow’ without urgency across a landscape: they gradually follow, in a relatively scattered way, in the direction which the fore-runners of their group have chosen; or else they walk in line one-behind-the-other.

Sheep are not so ubiquitous in the UK as they once were. But signs of them, and references to them, are prevalent. These signs are in rural areas, but in urban areas also.

Rearing of sheep is on field, hill etc, but selling of sheep has traditionally needed to be in centres, places where humans gather and business occurs, and thus most often in towns and cities. And products emanating from sheep - wool and cloth - while in pre-industrial days were outcomes from cottage industries located in the countryside by sheep farms, in the industrial period - when scale of endeavour became large - tended to derive from town or nearby locations and possessing good supply of water-power for driving steam mills.

Shearing of sheep is necessary, for their welfare. But shearing has its risks, for the sheep.

Relevant government bodies, organisations concerned with sheep and sheep welfare, all know thoroughly that shearing of sheep has risks and they state what they are. And they offer information, guidance, and instruction on how matters should be for the full process and concerning how procedures should be in the shearing shed. So, sheep farmers and shepherds, those contracted to shear, cannot pronounce that they do not know how shearing should take place.