The Year of the Sheep

Unless someone’s pulled the wool over your eyes, you’ll know that we’ve recently celebrated the start of the Chinese Year of the Sheep (or Goat or Ram, depending on your interpretation). Just like the rest of the flock, I couldn’t resist the temptation to check my Chinese horoscope and it seems – surprise, surprise! – this year I will be happy to lie down in a field, blade of grass in my mouth, as I watch the clouds go by.

Of course, coming from a country where sheep outnumber people by 7 to 1 (and that ratio used to be much much higher, at 20:1) and where roast lamb with mint sauce is the national dish, I can’t help but relate to sheep. Not only have they featured in our national culture from the beginning of New Zealand’s European history, sheep have also figured highly in my personal history.

My Scottish ancestors were some of the first shepherds on the high country sheep stations of New Zealand’s South Island, and one of my English great-great-great-grandfathers, an early immigrant to the Antipodes, even wrote a small publication entitled New Zealand versus the World as a Long Wool Producing Country: Comprising a table of calculations, explanatory remarks and data. By a Practical Sheepbreeder of English and Colonial Experience.

Given this background, it should come as no surprise, then, to learn that not only do I love knitting, I also take a lot of photographs of sheep. And what better way to share some of those photographs than to accompany them with some quotes by famous people, involving – you guessed it! – sheep!

Though the folks quoted below are infinitely more eloquent than I am, I do have one piece of advice for you – bookmark this blog! You may not share my affection for my woolly friends but, when the stresses and strains of daily life are weighing you down and you find yourself unable to sleep, you can at least return here and lull yourself to sleep by counting my sheep!

‘It's better to be a lion for a day than a sheep all your life.’ ~ Elizabeth Kenny

‘Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.’ ~ Winston Churchill

‘Geographically, Ireland is a medium-sized rural island that is slowly but steadily being consumed by sheep.’ ~ Dave Barry

‘In order to be an immaculate member of a flock of sheep, one must above all be a sheep oneself.’ ~ Albert Einstein

‘To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being.’ ~ Mahatma Gandhi

‘To create man was a quaint and original idea, but to add the sheep was tautology.’ ~ Mark Twain

‘If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.’ ~ George Washington

‘Men are like sheep, of which a flock is more easily driven than a single one.’ ~ Richard Whately

‘Better to live one year as a tiger, than a hundred as a sheep.’ ~ Madonna

England: Hay Tor, Dartmoor National Park

Walking on Dartmoor – what a fabulous introduction to Devon!

We parked at the National Park Visitor Centre near Hay Tor and from there wandered wherever the notion took us. The moor was covered with bracken, which was just beginning to turn from the usual vibrant green to its orange, yellow and brown autumn colours, as well as two types of heather, flowering pink and purple, all interspersed with grassy areas and patches of soggy peat.

We headed off on a bit of a circuit of various tors, the huge piles of exposed granite that dot the landscape, particularly the tops of hills. At our first tor we discovered, purely by chance – well, actually I was trying to get close enough to a wee bird to get a good photo – a plastic box containing three rubber stamps, a stamp pad and a notebook – and this was my introduction to the ‘sport’ of letterboxing. It was invented on Dartmoor in the 1850s but has now spread throughout the world.

There are two aspects to letterboxing: if you want you can deposit your own letterbox, with a stamp in it – often something unique – plus a pad and a log book. You need to hide the box somewhere, not too obvious but in a place you can find again as you may need to maintain it. You can also be someone who goes letterboxing – following a set of clues, usually published in a leaflet by the local club, or simply by following your nose and checking all the rock piles you find as you walk. The idea is that you keep your own logbook into which you make an impression of the stamps you find, along with their location, and you ink your own stamp in the logbooks of other boxes you find, with a hello message for the owner.

We didn’t actually know how the system was supposed to work when we found our first box so just wrote a message in the logbook and took photos. Later, on Facebook, I tried unsuccessfully to get more clues for a further walk but the local club person was on holiday and no one else was prepared to scan a few pages of their leaflet and send them to us. A shame as we would’ve spent another day trying to find more – I do love a good treasure hunt!

Onwards … we followed the tracks of old tramways, used for hauling granite from quarries on the moor to local towns and cities. The moor is littered with tumbling piles of colossal granite boulders – the random shapes were caused by molten lava that was pushed up from the depths of the earth in plate movements millions of years ago. Over the centuries, smaller boulders have been used to build the dry-stone walls that divide the farmland in this part of the country. It looked like someone had been repairing the tumbled-down walls and we did our bit to help by placing our own boulders in a couple of gaps.

Viv repairs a dry-stone wall

Through a gate with a sign marked ‘Beware of Bull’ (luckily there was none), we discovered a Devon Wildlife Trust Nature Reserve that included a bog, Becka Brook Mire (luckily not too soggy), and Emsworthy, an old house and farm buildings, now mostly ruins though the barn has a new roof and nesting boxes for barn owls inside. We mooched around the ruins, taking photos of the magnificent old trees, the fascinating tiny lichens and sedums growing on the rocks, and a couple of rather spectacular big fungus growths on one of the trees.

As well as the flora we discovered growing all over the moorland, there was also an abundance of fauna. The local not-so-wild life included the rather comically coloured Belted Galloway cattle, Scottish Black-face sheep and, of course, the ponies Dartmoor is famous for. These ponies are no longer wild, but are allowed to roam and graze on the common lands of the moor during the summer months before being taken down in the winter to their owners’ farms. They are gorgeous (and I couldn’t help including lots of photos of them here).

We saw lots of little birds, flitting from one bracken top to another but most were too distant and quick for good photos. We chased pretty butterflies, laughed at bonking bumblebees, and admired purple-skinned beetles.

Hay Tor was our last stop of the day. At an altitude of 457 metres (1499 feet), it’s the highest local viewpoint and provides stunning panoramas of the surrounding countryside, as well as the Devon coastline and the English Channel beyond.

From there we drove the dramatic road down and uphill to Widecombe-in-the-Moor for an early dinner – we’d got so carried away with our wandering that we’d had no lunch, not even a drink, all day. Widecombe is a charming little village and the pub, the Old Inn, served us a scrumptious meal, with some delicious and rather potent local cider to wash it down. It was the perfect end to a most excellent day.

'Old Uncle Tom Cobley and All'

England: Formby Sands and Southport

This was a truly wonderful day that included a visit to an artisans’ market at a lavender farm, rare red squirrel spotting in the forests behind Formby Sands followed by a long walk along that glorious long sandy beach, topped off by a walk along lovely Lord Street, the esplanade and England’s second longest pier at Southport.

Sarah drove, I navigated – most of the time successfully! Up the M6, along the A580, for a visit to Inglenook Lavender Farm. By chance there was an artisan’s market on so we checked out the stalls – there was nothing of great interest, though I was very impressed with the chainsaw sculptures and and we did get ourselves some yummy lunch for a picnic later.

There was only one small field of lavender, which was a little disappointing – I was expecting fields and fields, great expanses of the stuff. Sarah thought it was because they’d already harvested the lavender but there didn’t seem to be anything in the surrounding fields. Still, there were some guinea fowl and some very cute black-faced sheep mooching around in that one lavender field, which made for a few good photos. I actually took lots of photos but failed to get a single one in really sharp focus, so I was annoyed at myself for that. I think my eyes are the problem – wearing distance lenses and trying to focus on a close subject. That’s my excuse anyway!

Onwards, along more country lanes lined with fertile fields planted with various crops and edged and dotted with interesting-looking old farmhouses and barns. We picked up drinks and chocolate muffins at a Tesco supermarket, then eventually found ourselves at Formby, home to the wealthy footballers who play for Manchester United and Liverpool. I’m sure a few of them sped impatiently past us in their flash cars as we drove more sedately through the streets full of their large, expensive houses.

Head past those streets and you’ll come to an area of extensive pine woodlands, towering sand dunes and the Formby Sands, a long and exceedingly beautiful stretch of coastline that borders the Irish Sea. We ate our picnic lunch, then strolled through the woodlands, hoping to spot one of the small population of red squirrels that lives amongst the trees. The reds used to be the only squirrel species in the UK, until the brash American greys were introduced in the late 1800s – not only do they digest acorns better, they also brought the pox virus with them, which decimated the local red population. Luckily, the reds are making a comeback in this haven at Formby and, even more luckily, we managed to spot a couple. They move fast though, so my photos aren’t very sharp.

We then headed across the dunes and down to the beach for a bracing walk in the stiff breeze. It is a popular place for family picnics, long beach strolls, walking the dog or riding a horse, flying kites and wakeboarding, or trying to locate the prehistoric animal and human footprints that can sometimes be found in the silt beds along the shoreline. We didn’t find any of those, but did spot plenty of black-headed gulls and washed-up jellyfish, marvelled at the large array of wind turbines sited out to sea, and could just make out the tower and the huge rollercoaster across the shimmering water at Blackpool.

Our last stop of the day was Southport, a seaside town that was particularly popular around the turn of the 19th century. Its architecture reflects those halcyon days, with several interesting buildings dotting the Esplanade and even more along the main road, Lord Street. There are some grand sculptural features, including carved heads and classical columns, wrought iron verandahs cover the footpaths, and, in the summer months, gorgeous flowering baskets beautify the streets. Lord Street has a wide central strip with an impressive war memorial, bandstand, cafés and gardens – it’s all very grandiose for a relatively small city.

As well as being by the seaside, Stockport has a large seawater lake / lagoon that we walked around – seagulls and Canada geese competed for my camera’s attention, as did the big suspension bridge over the water. Southport also has the second-longest pier in England but we only got halfway along its 1112 metres as it closes at night – we had left that part of our wander till last, thinking to watch the sun set over the water.

Dinner that evening was fish and chips – so appropriate after a day at the seaside, and rather delicious it was too! And then we had a 45-minute drive home, an extremely quiet trip along the M6 as most people were glued to their televisions, watching the World Cup final.