Episode Transcripts

Episode 1 - 'The Hills Far Out By'

Michael Elliot: The top of the Windy Gyle, which is quite high up—but Dad once said you can see as far up into Aberdeenshire on a real clear morning, and there was power stations way down in England you could see. It was colossal. It's supposedly got the best view in Britain, on a clear morning like, one of these mornings where it’s just been a wee bit misty and it lifts early on, the viewing was beautiful, brilliant.

Gill Lowes (Narrator): Welcome to Hefted! Upland Farming Heritage in the Cheviots, Episode one: ‘The Hills Far Out By’.

This a podcast series about hill farming heritage in the Cheviot Hills – about how people have used and managed the land here in the past, as well as how they live and work in this landscape today. It is also about looking to the future of hill farming.

What sorts of tools and ways of working that were popular in the past might be useful as hill farming—and hill farmers—adapt to future changes? Changes like climate and environmental change, changes to the rules and regulations that affect farming practices, as well as changes to the economy, and to society’s expectations about how farming should work and what kinds of outcomes it should deliver. What new approaches and practices might be needed?

In this eight-episode series, we hear from historians and archaeologists, as well as many of those who live and work on farms in these hills.

The project is based on a series of oral histories recorded in the Cheviots in 2023 as part of a project on the farming heritage of European upland landscapes.

Over the course of the series, you’ll be hearing snippets from these histories, as well as from interviews conducted with younger farmers and land managers living in the area. Each of them, in different ways, can tell us something about how hill farming has changed, how it is changing now, and how it might change in the future.

All of them have different backgrounds. Some come from families that have shepherded and lived in the Cheviots for generations. Others moved here only a few years ago. But what they all have in common is a deep commitment to—some might even call it love—for these hills and the future of hill farming in them.

In this episode, we’ll learn a bit about the history of the Cheviot Hills and the people who live and farm here. How have people used the land at different times, and how has this changed the landscape over the ages?

Bill Elliot (1): My grandfather and my father were both shepherds before me, and I started when I left the school at 15. And I went—in those days, when you started off there was, you went to live quite often with another shepherd, you know, that had a—they looked after… Well, about 500 ewes was a full, shepherding contract in them days and there was maybe, say, 700 sheep on one farm, so they employed a young boy—well, not many girls in them days, it was all boys—and he went there maybe till he were 19 or 20. And then you left there and when you were old enough to take on a herding yourself. I went… I was up the keel for about a year when I left the school. And then I didn't get on that well up there, and there was a job came nearer home down here. And I came down here and I was there all my life after, 50 years in the same place, so…

Piers Holmesmith: I wasn't from a farming background or anything. I'd always wanted to farm and that's what I did. And at the time my father had a small farm. He was a doctor, had 20 acres. So I set off with 20 acres. and kept on acquiring more and more ground and finished up in ‘89 becoming tenants of the Duke of Roxburghe.

We took Cocklawfoot and Kelsocleuch, which were basically 3000 acres. Yeah. And the sheep flock that was there, which was what they call hefted.

Fiona Elliot: The farm’s been in the family since, I would think, 1660, but not directly farmed. There were tenants in it. And so my father wasn't in farming, but decided that he would—that's what he would do. So—which was quite radical when you think about—Well, you know, we didn't appreciate it at the time. He'd be, what, 30 or 32. Four children. My mother wasn't from a farming background… she liked animals. So he, as a mature student, went to agriculture college for a year and did a harvest on a friend's farm down there.

That was the extent of his agricultural knowledge. He'd been working in London up to that point and done a bit in the army. So, moved up here lock stock and barrel and still all here and happy days, actually. It was all—it was a really good move, but from their point of view it was really, you know really radical.

But it was—I mean I remember their first lambing and the fields are quite steep at Loughterra and they run down to the loch. But the nearest field to the steading was where they chose to do the first lambing. Well, you know what sheep do, don't they? I mean, you know, if you want to catch a sheep, it runs downhill. And you're only going to catch it at the bottom. But if you've got the loch at the bottom, that's where you caught them. So they didn't lamb in that field again [laughter].

And you know, they hadn't learned how to work a dog, you know, everything was in it’s infancy. Just complete chaos, I think, probably. Small children just to stir into the mix somewhere. We were feral, I mean, it was fine for us [laughter].

Scott Iley: I grew up in a valley on the other side of the Cheviot in the College Valley. So my dad was a shepherd there, so I spent my early childhood in this area and then moved away for quite a few years. And then the opportunity to rent the farm came up and we applied for it and got it and moved back here about eight years ago.

Alan Hutcheon: I moved to Attonburn when I was two year old. I'm sixty five now, so I suppose sixty three years ago. Father was a tractor driver, moved there, and I grew up there. Spent almost 50 years in the Bowmont Valley. On Attonburn, but during my stay there moved up to Blakedean which was just about a mile up the track road from Attonburn, but it was all part of Attonburn.

I don't know why, but machinery's never been my thing. As I say, probably inspired by Jock and George Blacklock to the sheep work. They took me as a small boy up to the sheep pens and I suppose it grew from there.

Gil Telfer: I was born up at Calroust. My father was shepherd there. He came there, and I was born after he came, and I went to the school, the local Mowhaugh school and did all my education there. And then when I left school, I started herding on the farm. And I worked there all my life—working life.

I was born in 1928 and I started working on the farm. I think one of my brothers was there, and he left, and I went into his place, and I stayed there until I retired when I was 65, and I got a house in Yetholm.

Mandy Smith: I’ve done it for a while. I won't be changing my occupation. Nor will Candice, and hopefully nor will Sarah. Because this is what we love doing and we'll keep chipping away at it, and we'll get there. It's a beautiful area to live north and England. I'll not be going anywhere. I love it here.

Gill Lowes (narrator): But what is this beautiful landscape? Where are we?

If you haven't been here before, let me describe it for you. The Cheviots are a range of rounded hills, formed from long-extinct volcanoes, the tallest of which is the Cheviot itself, standing at 815 metres high.

It will come as no surprise to those who have climbed the Cheviot to know that this is an eroded, long-extinct volcano, over 400 million years old. Over its long life, it has been smoothed by glaciers into gently undulating hills, cut through by dramatic, steep-sided valleys fed by small burns and sikes, as small streams are known in this region.

The Cheviots straddle the boundary between the English county of Northumberland to the south, and the Scottish Borders to the north. They are covered with semi-natural grasslands and heather moorland in the high places, with more heavily managed, 'improved' pastures on the lower ground.

There are very few trees, with the exception of some forestry plantations in places. On the English side of the border, the main town in the Cheviots is Wooler, to the east of the hills. In Scotland, the twin villages of Town Yetholm and Kirk Yetholm lie just to the north. It’s a place known best for hill farming—traditionally sheep farming—and for its extensive walking opportunities.

This is a challenging landscape in which to live. The absence of trees and high altitude make for changeable weather. Wind and storms can be severe here, and in the wintertime, snow and ice can descend, historically cutting off those who live deep in the hills for weeks at a time.

It’s a hard life for plants, too. The plants that thrive, like heather and, more rarely, juniper, are low, thorny and tough, while the trees that do survive often cling to the hillside, stunted and gnarled thanks to the frequent gales.

How did the landscape come to look like this? During the last Ice Age, the Cheviots were covered with ice. As the ice retreated, plants slowly came back and by about 5000 BC, the hills were completely covered with woodland of alder, hazel, oak and birch—even some of the highest peaks.

But the landscape wasn’t only shaped by natural forces. While the Cheviots are renowned for their peace and quiet, and their apparent remoteness and isolation, these open landscapes are far from simply ‘natural’ or ‘wild’.

People have lived here for a very, very long time. By living and farming on this land, the people of the Cheviots have been just as important as the work of nature in making the Cheviots what they are today. These people have developed deep-rooted, always-evolving local knowledge, making the Cheviots home to a distinctive farming tradition which is well-suited to the harsh climate and difficult terrain.

The earliest people living in the Cheviots would have been hunter-gatherers who came and went with the seasons to hunt and forage for wild foods. Over time, they became—or were replaced by—the more permanent farming communities.

These earliest farmers probably lived in small settlements in clearings made in the woodland. Later, much more of the woodland was cleared, and archaeological evidence suggests that Cheviot farmers built terraces into the hillsides, enabling them to grow cereals, like barley and wheat, high into the hills. The remains of some of these field systems are still well-preserved in the landscape today.

Then, between 200BC and 300AD, farming intensified, and almost all the remaining woodland was cleared, from the valley floors all the way up to the summit ridges. This was a very dramatic environmental change, and it created a landscape that would be—more or less—recognisable to us today. A landscape with few trees, mostly covered in pasture and moorland, and where farming is the main land use and the main activity of those who live there.

Echoes of these early inhabitants still mark the land, even today. For example, this area is home to the remains of characteristic ‘scooped’ settlements that were probably used around 2,000 years ago. These settlements were made up of small collections of low buildings, built into hillsides to create ‘scoops’ in the landscape. And, of course, the hillforts of the Cheviots are some of the county’s most dramatic and best loved monuments.

Over the centuries, people continued farming in the area, with evidence of expanded arable farming during the 6th and 7th centuries AD. Later on, during the Middle Ages, land in the Cheviots was held in estates known as baronies.

Each barony contained several townships, and forests. Forests, to be clear, were not what we understand today as a forest—a synonym for a woodland. In the Middle Ages, a forest was the name for a hunting reserve. Only nobles, royalty or bishops were allowed to hunt in the forests, but local communities could also use the land for other purposes—as long as they didn’t interfere with the hunting.

Walter Brown: This was part of Selby's forest. Forest is just, you know, is an area, it's not a forest, it's an area of land. And this was all classed as Selby's forest.

What was interesting, some of these things is, there's still there yet, there's some boundary stones. It's all fence now, but before there was fences there was boundary stones to mark the area, the extent of the land. And there's some of them still up there. There's one—there's two or three along there. I don't know whether there's any more, but there's certainly some along there. Like a sandstone block that's shaped, initials on either side to signify the owner of the land.

Gill Lowes (narrator): During this period, people lived and farmed, in townships. Townships included cultivated fields, areas known as 'waste' lands, and settlements. Waste lands included pastures and other natural resources which were used in common by the whole community. Settlements would usually include a small permanent village and 'shielings', seasonal upland settlements for grazing animals in the summer months, a practice known as ‘summering’ which may predate the Norman Conquest in 1066. The shielings in the high hills may have been accessed via a seasonal route up the College Valley, past Hethpool. 

Summering was an important and sophisticated adaptation by the people of the Cheviots to living and farming in the challenging upland landscape. It allowed farmers based on relatively small areas of land suitable for growing crops to make good use of the large tracts of rougher grazing land that surrounded them.  

It was in this period that the Cheviots became associated with the rearing of sheep, in particular. Major landowners, like monasteries, encouraged the people who lived and farmed on their land to keep sheep. Far from being marginal or unproductive, as the name ‘waste’ land might suggest, the animals reared on these landscapes were a vital part of making these farmers more resilient to changes and hard times. And, not only that, but sheep farming in this period became a lucrative industry, one that was highly valued by farmers and landowners alike.

Walter Brown: These areas were shieling areas where they brought stock in the summer and looked after them, and they went—you know, they'd come from Wooler area. So up on here, you can still see some of the ruins of the shieling huts up on the hill there. Little stone circles where they would—every year they'd have to renew the roof, I would think, because the roof would just be covered with either heather or sods or something, I don't know.

I think they would milk the sheep because there's a—it’s markd on here—that is an old set of… It’s just a pile of stones now, but I'm pretty sure, in my way of thinking, that's where they milked the sheep. Because it's—it was like a—it’s an area of pens like half the size of this room, and it must have been for putting sheep in of something, some way. And I think that's where they would milk them, because they milked the sheep to make the cheese. That's what they did with their sheep up here in the summer. But that would be in the 15, 16, 1700s, you know, a long time ago.

[Music]

Gill Lowes (narrator): But this way of life didn't last. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, a major process of land use change took place. The common rights of peasants to use and farm the land collectively were transformed into individual rights for single tenant farmers. At the same time, the townships were broken up into individual farms, and the hill ground came to be grazed all year round. Summering, and the seasonal migrations of people and animals to the shielings came to an end.  

Villages were abandoned. Some people spread out across the territories of former townships to occupy the new hill farms, while others re-settled in larger centres, like Wooler and Kirk Yetholm. Over three hundred years, peoples’ way of life in the Cheviots was fundamentally transformed.  

These weren’t just changes to where people lived: they also dramatically changed the nature of farming. While sheep had been an important part of farming in the Cheviots for hundreds of years, during this period farming became much more specialised, and sheep became almost the exclusive focus.

Not only that, but the purpose of farming changed, too. In earlier times, people had farmed partly to provide directly for themselves and their families. Yes, some of their produce was sold in markets, but they also fed and clothed themselves directly from the crops and animals they raised.  

After these changes, selling to markets became the primary purpose of hill farming, and while self-provisioning continued well into the twentieth century, it became much less important.  

This meant that farmers’ choices—things like what breeds they chose and how they managed their pastures—were increasingly influenced by the demands of the market. In other words, by what would make the most money. And, it meant that farmers themselves became much more vulnerable to changes in the market. 

Walter Brown: My family's been here since the 1930s, about ‘37 or ‘38 my father and uncle came here. They came originally as shepherds, and then they took the tenancy of the farm in, I think, the early 1940s, or certainly about 1940. And my uncle moved on to another farm, and we farmed here until 1995.

There was a family farmed here—I mean, I didn't know them. They farmed this farm for 300 years, a family called Henderson. They finished in 1891, when the last of the family died out.

But they farmed this farm for 300 years. Tenant farmers. They weren't the owners; they were tenant farmers. 300 years in one farming family is—it's a unique thing, that.

And they certainly made their money from the wool of the Cheviot sheep. You know, they obviously had to produce lambs as well, but the wool was the valuable thing in the 1800s. They’d be a different sort of sheep to what there is now. They were quite small, I think. They produced a lot of wool. And that was the main income from the farm in those days.

Gill Lowes (narrator): The main outline of the farming systems that were developed in that period of modernisation would be recognisable to farmers today. But more dramatic changes have also taken place since the 1950s.  Stocking densities—the number of sheep on a given bit of land—have fluctuated dramatically, first up, then down. The number of people available to work on farms in the area has fallen away, while the cost of hiring those who are available has risen significantly. This has had knock-on effects for how the flocks, and the land, can be managed.  

Technologies have changed—some have been introduced, and others have fallen out of use, further affecting farming practices. And competition from other land uses, like nature restoration and rewilding, and shooting, has increased. 

Piers Holmesmith: I wasn't a traditionalist. I was somebody who always wanted to push forward, and I looked at things in a different way, and I suppose I went for output. You know, some of the times it might not have been the best thing to do, but that was how it suited me.

Chris Dalglish: What was the size of the flock at that time?

Piers Holmesmith: When we were there, two and a half thousand, and then I moved that up to three and a half thousand by the time we left in 2002. And, what, a hundred suckler cows as well.

I kept the traditional flock of Scottish Blackface. Some bred pure, and then we used to breed Mule ewe lambs as well and sell those, because that gave you an extra income.

Well, you see I made a lot of fields as well [laughter]. We fenced it, and then sort of cut it and, well, bashed it all back and then we put rape in for feeding lambs and then put grass in after that. And then we could use them at lambing time, and it was better pasture for the sheep to come into, and things like that, you see. Just, you know, increased productivity in the place.

Well, when I first came here, we couldn't produce, I don't think, 200 round bales of silage. When I left in 2002, we produced nearly a thousand bales of silage. The amount of feed, what we used to feed and things was phenomenal. Well, it frightened some people. Through the winter fattening, what, 1,500, 2,000 lambs and the sheep and things we’d feed nearly 200 tonne of feed.

Gill Lowes (narrator): More recently, policymakers and many farmers have recognised that some of the practices that have become common in the past 50 years are no longer sustainable, if they ever were. Economically, some of these practices no longer make sense. And we are realising that there have also been significant environmental costs.  

This realisation is leading some farmers and land managers in the Cheviots to experiment with new practices – and with bringing back older practices. They are doing this as a way to make what they do - producing food, managing the land, earning a livelihood in these hills - sustainable over the long term. Sustainable for their own bottom lines, as well as for the landscape, the climate and the communities that are so fundamental to everything they do.  

Sarah Chapman is one such farmer. She and her husband work for the Fowberry Estate. In 2021 they took some of the tenanted farmland back in hand to manage themselves. 

Sarah Chapman: We took it back with a view to learning how to run it organically as the estate owners wanted to. And we thought, ‘oh, well, we'll give it a bash.’ And yeah, we're just learning and, and finding our feet. We’re just trying to get our head around learning how to manage the farm and then do it with Soil Association guidelines and then hopefully going on to Pasture for Life.

When we took over the farmland, we did it with a view to doing it in the best way for looking after this patch of land that we have to look after. And that's the best way is with grazing animals or else we'd have to cut everything with diesel flails and things like that.

We want to promote as much biodiversity and work in hand with nature as much as we can. But sometimes that's not the most profitable way to do it for the farm. But we’re just trying to kind of find that balance at the moment. Because as I say, we're really new to this industry, and we’re looking at ways to kind of do that with going on grazing courses with people who are promoting that way of farming. But it's just—it takes time to build up the resources that we need to get good fencing—we need to improve all our organic grassland fencing, get up to scratch with all our electric fencing to do the rotational regenerative grazing. It’s just, yeah, it takes money.

Candice Bell: It's a process as well.

Sarah Chapman: It is a process!

Candice Bell: It’s not gonna happen overnight.

Sarah Chapman: It’s definitely not going to happen overnight and it’s taken us ages to kind of get near to where we want to start doing that. So yeah,it's like going back to school. You have to relearn it all again. And it'll be a while before we make any profit, but [laughs] we'll get there eventually and we'll farm it in a way that puts the goodness back into the earth, which is what we're trying to do.

[Music]

Charles Armstrong: We moved from the Cumbrian border in 1956 to Earle Hill. At that point, we didn't have Middleton Hall, so we were just actually a hill sheep farm with no extra—just as it was, had been for, I don't know, 100 years, probably, many, many years. Basically, we've been hill farmers all our lives until we moved down here in 2000.

It's in our blood. Our family have been in sheep farming all our lives, you know. The history of the Armstrongs is sheep farming.

Gill Lowes (narrator): We'll be exploring these themes and ideas in a lot more detail over the course of the next seven episodes of this series. In the next episode, we’ll be taking a tour through the shepherd’s year. We’ll learn more about important shepherding practices in the Cheviots, and some of the key moments in a shepherd’s calendar. And we’ll be learning about how these have changed over time, and how they might continue to change going forward. 

[Theme music]

Thank you for listening to Hefted! Upland Farming Heritage in the Cheviots. In this episode, you heard contributions from Michael Elliot, Bill Elliot (formerly a shepherd at the Mains of Yetholm), Piers Holmesmith, Bill Elliot (formerly of College Valley), Scott Iley, Alan Hutcheon, Gil Telfer, Mandy Smith, Walter Brown, Charles Armstrong, and me Gill Lowes.  

The title of this episode is taken from an anonymous poem about the Cheviots, available at the Bellingham Heritage Centre. You can find a link to the full poem in the show notes.  

Episode 2 - The Shepherd's Calendar

[Theme music]

Charles Armstrong: When I was shepherding Broadstruther in my early days, which I was just in my 20s, I could walk from Earle Hill, and I could— Always had an orange in my pocket in lambing time, always carried an orange. And I could sit—there’s a cairn right around the top of Broadhope. I could sit there at 6 o'clock in the morning. That was the boundary of what we called Broadhope.

And also, down at Broadstruther, I had a frying pan—I wasn't a very good cook, but the main thing was beans [laughs]. And I used to walk right around about, and by about 10 o'clock, I'd come back down there and have my fried beans.

And there was a spring just outside there, beautiful cold water, where the original shepherd used to take a gallon of water or two gallon of water to the Black Bull in Wooler at the weekend because it was reckoned it was ideal water for mixing with whiskey.

And then, after I'd rested for an hour or so, I'd done the trip again, exactly what I did in the morning. We looked the sheep a second time.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Welcome to Hefted! Upland Farming Heritage in the Cheviots. Episode two, The Shepherd’s Calendar.

We see the sheep on the hills, but how are they managed? What does a shepherd in the Cheviot hills actually do? 

As we heard in episode one, medieval farming in the Cheviots was a communal affair. People living on the land in townships did most of their farming together as a community, rather than in individual farms. They raised sheep, but as part of a more mixed style of farming which also involved growing crops, like wheat. They sold some of what they grew at markets, but they also farmed in order to feed themselves. 

But farming practices were radically transformed in the 17th,18th and 19th centuries. Communal townships were broken up into individual farms managed by individual farmers. Farmers employed shepherds, whose whole job it was to care for the sheep. Each shepherd was given responsibility for between 400 and 450 ewes, which he (and it almost always was a ‘he’) would look after within a given area, called a hirsel.  

But what did it mean to look after a flock of sheep? 

Charles Armstrong: The traditional shepherd was: when you went round the hilltops, you turned the sheep in, you set your sheep away off the hilltops, down into the burnside. And at about three o'clock or two o'clock, you went the opposite way around about, but you didn't go onto the hilltop. You just went halfway up and you set the sheep out, and the sheep all went back to the hilltop again.

Gill Lowes (narrator): That’s Charles Armstrong, who used to farm at Earle Hill. What he’s describing is a practice called raking. Raking informed the daily rhythm of shepherding – collecting the sheep from the hilltops in the mornings and bringing them down to the valleys and then pushing them back up to the hilltops in the evenings.  It’s still practiced on some farms, though not as widely as it once was.  

George Blacklock, a former shepherd at Attonburn and Hethpool, explains that raking has a lot of benefits. 

George Blacklock: Sheep, they can get onto their backs, and they can't get up. And you ken the more wool they got on them, nearer the shearing time, the worse they were for that, because the wool was like a mattress for them. And if they lay there too long, especially if they had a lot of grass in them, they just choked with it. So you had to keep an eye open.

So that’s what you went around morning and night for, basically, and to keep them moving. It was just like you. You come down in here in the morning. you'll go upstairs at night. Your best food and everything’s down here, so they come down here for the better ground, which is in the bottom of the hills. They come down in there through the day, and then they go up top at night. But you didn't want them lying in the same place all the time, so that's why you keep this system, what we called raking them.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Raking also has other benefits. It helps the sheep avoid ingesting parasites, and makes sure they get a more varied diet. It also lets the shepherd keep an eye on the flock, and to look out for any injuries or ill health.  

But maybe most importantly…  

George Blacklock: This learned them, this was their heft. And they stayed on that heft for the rest of their life.

Gill Lowes (narrator): But what is a heft?

Chris Dalglish: When you move to year-round grazing of the hills, the sheep are there, or the flock is there, basically on the same patch of ground all year round. And that's what hefting is. It's when the sheep—through using the natural instincts of the sheep—they become attached to that particular area or that patch and they get to know it. So, they will stay more or less within their area.

And the hills are largely unenclosed, right, until fairly recently. So, you're not managing the sheep by fencing them in; they are staying where they should be because they're hefted to a particular hillside. They are attached to it through instinct. And that's quite important, actually, as part of the heritage is within the—it’s the living heritage within the sheep.

Gill Lowes (narrator): That’s Chris Dalglish. Chris is a historian and one of the original research team for the project these podcasts are based on.

Chris Dalglish: Previously, in the medieval system with that moving with the seasons up and down the hills, it was more a herding system. So you would take the animals up in the summer and you would stay with them. There would be herds—members of the community would stay up in the hills to keep the animals where they should be, and then bringing them back down in the winter. So, a shift really from a herding system to a hefting system. But of course, the shepherd has still got a crucial role in terms of managing the flocks.

Gill Lowes (narrator): The process of hefting—of teaching the sheep their heft—is a very labour-intensive process, Walter Brown—former farmer at Langleeford—explains.

Walter Brown: I've heard tales about—not my generation, my grandfather's generation, when they used to heft sheep on, sheep were put onto a certain area of hill. So what they had to do was, you had to—this would be in the autumn of the year—you put them onto the hill and you just stayed with them all day on the hill, watched them. You stayed with them till dark, and you either put them in a sheep stell, or you left them where it was when it was dark. You had to go back there at daylight the next morning to be with them, or they would have been off. So you just kept them on that bit of ground for I don't know how long, weeks or months maybe. So you just sat with them every day, with the dog, and kept them on that bit of area of ground until they—they just got used to that bit of ground.

But I mean, you know, they'd be paid—they'd be paid nothing—next to nothing. And they would just have to sit there with the sheep. I think they used to knit. [laughter]. I mean, that's for long, that's two generations from me. It could still be done again, but there isn't the people to do it. All the people that knew how to do it—you couldn't afford to pay anybody now to do that.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Once a flock is hefted, the heft is maintained generation to generation. Ewe lambs–female lambs–are put back onto the hills with their mothers after they’re born. As they grow up, they learn the boundaries of their heft from the flock. 

This means that if the flock is completely removed from the hill, then any future flock will have to be hefted again from scratch, a difficult task!  

Not only do hefted sheep stay on their own pieces of ground, they are also much easier to manage. 

Stuart Nelson, farmer at Low Bleakhope, explains... 

Stuart Nelson: When we were shearing or doing whatever jobs we were doing with the sheep, you know, I could go out in the middle of the place, take a heft out in there, gather them and bring them in. Next day, go and gather the next one next to it, and I'll have none of the ones I had the day before.

Chris Dalglish: They keep separate.

Stuart Nelson: They keep separate. You've got to—you know, you work hard at keeping them right. But 90 percent of the time—more than 90 percent of the time, they run true. Which is handy so you're not covering massive areas. That's the biggest thing. We're covering a lot of area for not many sheep now. That’s the hardest—that’s the biggest thing.

You come down the front of the house, there's two hefts come into the middle of the house here, they’re all mixed up together, whistling and shouting. And then they go that way, and they go that way. It's quite cool to see, actually, when you see them all mixed in, and then they just pick up their lambs and that, and then they just divide out and go away home.

It's easier for management for—you know, utilising your rams. Because, like, we use a ram for two years on one hill and then probably move them back to another hill and maybe get four or five years out of them. But so, you know, they're never going back on their own kind. And it’s trying to utilise that. But if you were running them in a bigger mob, you would have to, you know, probably be replacing a lot more tups quicker.

Gill Lowes (narrator): But this practice, which was the mainstay of shepherding in the Cheviots for hundreds of years, is much more rarely used these days. Flocks have gotten bigger, and the areas covered much larger, and there are much fewer shepherds. 

With less active management of the sheep, some shepherds argue that many farms in the area have turned to what they call 'ranching'. George Blacklock describes his experience of this in the College Valley.

George Blacklock: You see, College Valley was managed—we had a manager. Bill Elliott of Yetholm, he managed it. But then they decided to let the farms. And that changed everything. So, I was at Hethpool. And Bill that managed the farm got Hethpool and Fleehope, which was another further up the valley. He got those two places. So he was going to do it himself, so I was made redundant.

The top of the valley, up Southernknowe, Goldscleugh, Dunsdale, Mounthooly was all—and Elsdonburn, Trowupburn—were let to Ted Fox. So he had all that. And Bill had—well he had Fleehope and Hethpool. So I got a job with Ted Fox. Well you just had to ranch it then. You know you're talking about—about 8, 000 acres. You ken, with the whole of the Cheviot, and whatnot, so it changed completely that. The top end of the valley, like on Cheviot, I think you just saw the sheep when you needed them. Or if they needed you, like in snow and whatnot, you had to get up and feed them. But you were not seeing them every day, far from it. You just couldn't do it. Because there was only three of us.

So, but of course the quad bike was on the go then and it made a big difference, but it was still a different way of farming completely.

[Music]

Gill Lowes (narrator): For many shepherds, lambing represents the beginning of the farming year.  

In the past, lambing was mainly done out on the hills, whereas now more lambing is done in sheds.

Pam Brown: My name's Pam Brown. I am in partnership in a farming business with my husband and his parents. We've got a hill farm in North Northumberland. We also have a lowland farm as well, so it's about 2,500 acres all together.

We've got 900 to 1,000 ewes here, our lowland farm. Well, spread out a little bit, but they all come back to the sheds here to lamb inside, which is normally the 20th of March, for about four weeks. There's actually two lambings. There's some on the 20th of March and there's another 200 on the 1st of April. So that's why it stretches on for about four weeks.

Gill Lowes (narrator): But there's no neat story of change from hill lambing to shed lambing. On the Browns' farms, the lowland ewes lamb in the sheds, while the ones on the hill farm mostly lamb out on the hill or in enclosed fields.

Pam Brown: We've got 600 Scottish Blackfaces up on the hill farm. They're due the 20th of April. As lambing’s tailing off here, my father-in-law's going up there, normally six in the morning, just driving around the hills. We'll have been through them probably about two weeks before and shed off the twins. So up on the hill farm, what we really want is just singles, just one lamb. They're Scottish Blackfaces, that's what they're designed to have. So they lamb on the hill. The twins are brought into—we've got about four fields all just either side of the driveway, and the twins come to lamb there, just 'cause the pasture’s a wee bit better.

So they're in there from maybe two weeks before they're due, and they stay there until— Just last week we had a week of going through every lamb on the place up there, getting mineral injections and getting their purple mark on to show its ours. And they get pour-on for ticks as well.

So they've had, yeah, a month in those fields really. And then they're all back to the hill now. And those fields won't get used again. They'll be grown for hay now, we'll take hay off them in September or something.

Gill Lowes (narrator): These days, many more twin lambs are born than in the past, thanks to both targeted breeding strategies and better ewe nutrition. Twins—and especially triplets or quads—are usually smaller and more vulnerable to health issues in the early weeks of their lives than single lambs. As a result, they tend to get treated a bit more cautiously, and farmers have to take more care to make sure they are getting enough milk from their mothers.

Pam Brown: So all the sheep get gathered. We scan them. They're literally split into empties, one's, two and threes out the front of the scanning race. And the triplets, certainly we wouldn't put them anywhere else other than just around here. So this year it was mild weather, there was still a bit of grass around and they were in good body condition, so they went to a field just across the road and they were fed from the day of scanning. Some years, yeah, they would literally just not get let back out of the shed if it's muddy, cold, and wet—and if they're thin already, we just want to feed them up.

Twins normally go up on the bank here. Singles go to our other farm up towards Berwick, just because it's further away. And then they'll come in—the singles often just come in, like, pretty much the day they're due. We'd like to get them in a week before, but we're always disorganized. The twins come in about a week before, but they're fed from about six weeks before lambing or something like that.

And then we try to turn them out when the lambs are about 24 hours old. Again, it depends on the weather. This year was absolutely fantastic. Things were going out when they were, probably—like you had a single born in the morning and it's out by lunchtime because the weather was so good. And so someone drives around those every morning, every night once they're outside.

We want them to have two lambs. They don't all by any means, but we get quite a lot of triplets. Occasionally we get quads, which is always bad news. And yeah, they—if they've got a single inside them, they grow a big single, so it often needs pulling out.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Things are always changing. Pam has noticed a shift back towards outdoor lambing in her work as a vet.

Pam Brown: I don't know anyone that lambed outside apart from the real hill sheep, until maybe 10 years ago. And there's been a slow move towards outdoor lambing, even in the lowland ones here. And last year I was in our local agricultural store about a week before lambing, getting our lambing supplies. I bumped into two clients. I know them really well, one's actually a relative. And they've both gone to outdoor lambing in the last five years. And they made me feel like I was the only person that's doing indoor lambing. ‘Oh, old fashioned, absolute waste of time.’

So I thought, ‘Oh, maybe next year we should try doing a bit more outdoor lambing.’ And then last spring was horrendous. And both those guys I've seen separately since then and one lost a hundred lambs in one day and one lost 80 in one day. Both on the same day. It was a really horrendous day.

But they have actually, they just said, ‘that's gonna happen every 10 years.’ So actually they have carried on doing it, but I thought, ‘This is not the year to try and convince my in-laws that we should be laming outside.’

It’s probably—the cost of everything's gone up. So the cost of feeding has gone up, the cost of straw’s gone up. There's definitely more infection in the sheds, and there's a drug that everyone used to give every single lamb, an antibiotic, which is now banned. We can import it if we absolutely need to, but it's really frowned upon now to treat every lamb. And that's just in the last—not even 10 years, seven years or something like that, that's happened. And labor is hard to come by; it's expensive as well. So I think it's, yeah, it's a cost saving thing.

The annual welfare side of things, I think is dubious. I think both of those people I spoke to that day said, ‘you just have to accept that there will be more losses. You just, you know, you see a lamb, it hasn't sucked milk from its mother, and you just have to accept that it's probably not gonna make it.’ Whereas we would here, you know, every—like, that's what I spend all night doing. I actually pull very few lambs out at night. I just go round every single lamb in the shed, checking whether it's had milk and if not, it gets suckled from its mother or I strip milk off her and tube it, or I make up powdered colostrum or something. The outdoor lambing guys just forget all of that.

[Music]

Gill Lowes (narrator): Lambing comes to a close towards the end of spring, or beginning of summer. And summer, like spring, is a very busy time in the shepherd's calendar: marking the lambs, castrating them, dipping and treating the sheep to prevent diseases. 

Historically at least, once the lambs were all turned out back to the hills - if any had been lambed in the fields or sheds - the fields were ready to grow hay.

Shepherd Bill Elliot describes this. 

Bill Elliot: We had a shed on each end of the hill, and we used to fill the shed in the summertime because it was all little square bales then, you know, which was quite handy to handle. And just put hay racks up, you know, and just put the hay in, and used to gather them in every morning to the hay. Depending on the weather, not much before July.

Now they're on silage, you know, they start out about June, but hay was—you had to give it time to sort of mature and die, you know, a little bit on… If you made it in June it was very sappy, what we call—you know, and wet, and it was difficult to make. But if you waited until July it was a bit drier and once you cut it, if you got two or three days’ sunshine you could bale it, you know, quite quickly.

Once you'd cut the hay, you got what you called—what was left, what was called a fog, foggage. And that was always good because it was nice and sweet, you know—because they used to put the lambs onto that. So that was—they used to thrive quite well on that.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Not every farm could grow enough hay for its own sheep, though, and it was not uncommon to bring in hay from other farms.  

More recently, hay has often been replaced with bought in feed, or with silage, a form of fermented grass.

Chris Dalglish: Hay meadows used to be a fundamental part of the modern farms until relatively recent. So for winter fodder, more recently there's been a move towards buying in feed from, you know, from commercial suppliers and that might be produced all over the world, and brought in. But within living memory, that wasn't the case.

Those hay meadows, because of the way they were managed, they would be very good, for wildflowers. And those therefore create good habitats, for example, for pollinators and so on. Now, most of those hay meadows have gone because as the move to bought-in feed progressed there was no need to keep hay meadows and they were put over to other uses.

But they have survived in some places. In one case it was described to me that the hay meadows had survived through benign neglect. So, they'd survived because they weren't put to another use. But they survived. And what that means is you have the seed stock of the wildflowers there, and it’s possible to revive that.

So you have some farmers who are actively reviving the hay meadows because they are good habitats. And indeed taking the seed and then sharing that or selling it with other farmers and other landowners so that hay meadows can be revived.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Scott Iley is one such farmer. Scott is a tenant farmer in the upper Coquet Valley. 

Scott Iley: The hay meadows are managed in a fairly traditional way, so they shut up very early and we take one cut of hay very late. And depending on the weather, it can be very late. It's been—the last couple of summers, it's been quite tricky. So, I think that they're an incredible resource, the flowers and grasses that are in the meadows. Like I say, there are about a hundred different species growing in there.

So they're incredibly diverse and they offer, for me, a real sense of hope because they're a very man-made habitat, really. And they show that—how in a world where often we see human management of land having negative impacts and degrading landscapes, you look at these hay meadows and think, actually, we are creating and sustaining a little habitat here, which is actually incredibly biodiverse. And the human management of those meadows is a really positive thing.

And they've become a kind of a resource for the whole landscape because the—genetically the plants that are growing here—sort of, you know—the ancestors of those plants have been on and with this land for, you know, thousands of years. And so they offer a sort of a sense of continuity in terms of the genetics, but also a kind of—in some ways a seed bank or an arc, where we can now take seed. I can harvest seed from the meadows and use that to restore grasses that are—or more degraded grasslands elsewhere on the farm. So, I see the meadows as a real resource for the future.

Gill Lowes (narrator): The biggest summer event in the shepherd’s year is the shearing of the sheep or – as it’s called in the Cheviots – the clipping. 

In Charles Armstrong’s time… 

Charles Armstrong: You never took them to the sheep pens if possible. You shed them out on the hill because it was still running—was where they were born.

And that was a tremendous achievement. I used to love it. If there was two of you, you used to do what you call fork shed. You'd gather your sheep up, and you had your big flock, and you'd let the ewes and lambs run that way quietly, one at a time, two at a time. And then if a hog came, you had a dog—or you hoped you had a dog that was a good one—would come in front of the hog and turn it away that direction. And there was another chap standing there holding them up, but you were letting the ewes and lambs away all the time. And now, they all end up in sheep pens.

Gill Lowes (narrator): In the past, the wool would have provided a large proportion of the farmer’s annual income.  These days, though, wool is no longer very valuable. But farmers have to shear the sheep nonetheless. 

Walter Brown: The fleece the sheep have on now is what they've grown from last year. When the weather warms, the wool starts to grow. So it just grows very slowly, the rate of your thumbnail growing or something. So they'll start growing the wool about April. So you have about that much new wool, and that was what you kept the sheep in, that new wool. So if it's warmer weather, it's better for the sheep. It's better for them once they're clipped as well.

So, I mean, you can get cold weather in the summer as well, and it's not—that's not good for—especially when they're newly clipped. Because if you get your fleece taken off on a cold—cold weather, it's not good for the ewe producing milk. And even there's been cases of sheep died of cold.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Clipping is not just an important part of a shepherd's annual work calendar, it also used to be a very important part of their annual social calendar. We'll talk more about the social side of clipping in episode five.

[Music]

Gill Lowes (narrator): Autumn comes, and with it, the sales. Today, lambs are sold at the Wooler Livestock Centre or ‘the mart’ on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, with buyers coming from as far afield as southern England and well up into the Scottish Borders. At the peak of the sale season, nearly 2,000 sheep are sold each week.

Bill Elliot: From the hill farm, well we used to keep what we needed for ourselves, you know. I’d say about—in them days it was about 150 ewe lambs. And we sold the rest just—the rest of the ewe lambs. We used to sell them private. Used to sell about 400 over and above the ones we kept to just the same man used to buy them. He used to keep them and sell them as what you call gimmers when they're a year old and ready to have their first lamb.

Charles Armstrong: And then it come around to the tup sale time when they went to the mart, whether it would be—probably Bellingham or Hawick here. They would be the two main places they would go to. And the shepherd and the farmer would usually select, maybe just one ram. Because that would be a stud ram, and that—he would father probably the next year's—the best tup lambs would be kept to be used on the farm, and that was— You'd only need buy one ram every year. And you'd probably swap—after you'd used them a couple of year or whatever, you'd maybe swap some of them with your neighbours, and you'd get one from your neighbour as well. Not changing any money.

Gill Lowes (narrator): At one time, animals from all over Scotland and the north of England were herded south to meet the demand for meat in big towns and cities like London. That meant that when a farmer wanted to sell their sheep, they had to drove them—literally walk them—to market. An important drove road ran through Wooler, which was used by local farmers and shepherds until surprisingly recently. It was only in the mid-19th century with the growth of the railways that the practice of droving began to decline. These days, sheep are mostly taken to marts in lorries.

Charles Armstrong: At one point before we moved away, we really were expanding. We were doing extremely well. I sold 1,000 mule ewe lambs in one day—of the ewe lambs—and I think they averaged 44 pound or something, which was quite a big thing. And they would be the last drove of sheep, big drove of sheep, ever to go through Wooler High Street. We drove them about half past six in the morning from Earl Hill down to the mart at Wooler. We done that twice, and it was quite a sight. But up to that point, mind, the neighbouring farm, Langleeford, they had ground elsewhere. They used to drive sheep. It was quite a common thing 50, 60, 70—well, how many year ago—56—it’s 70 year ago, you know, but it was still quite a common practice, people driving sheep to marts and things like that. But that was part of history.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Finally, winter comes - a time for resting, mending, tending... and tupping. A tup is a ram, or uncastrated male sheep. And tupping is the word used in the Cheviots—and many other parts of the UK—for mating a ram with a ewe. 

George Blacklock: We used to put the tups out 15th, 20th of November. And they were left out till about New Year's time. We brought them in then. And then it was a case of just tending the stock till lambing time. Depending on the weather, how easy it was. Because we had some winters—I think the worst winter of the lot was 1963. And that was—I was at Attonburn then. That started on Boxing Day, went right through to the middle of March.

Gill Lowes (narrator): On some farms, the sheep, or some of them, are sent away over winter to easier pastures on lowland farms.

Walter Brown: Not originally, but later on in time, we used to send the ewe—what we call ewe hogs, which are the younger ewe—away. And we just took land where we could, just paid a weekly rent for the time that we were on. We didn't have the land all the time. It was just—some farms, lowland farms, the stock are inside in the winter, and they have the land spare, and so it was extra money for them. And we just took it where we could get it. I mean, we used to—originally, we had some down in Durham… some of them were on Tweedside there or somewhere like that.

But they certainly—it was good for them because they grew better, and they were safer out of the snow, and they came back much stronger. And it improved the sheep.

Gill Lowes (narrator): But many others overwinter their sheep on the hills.

Bill Elliot: The hill ones just stayed on the hill. Till about January, they never got anything to eat, but—unless it snowed, you know, and they couldn't get—because there's—you know, the hill ground's rough. There's always a bit of roughness for them eating. And they never got anything unless it snowed till about January. And then they used to start hay—hay them then.

George Blacklock: Well, I used to get other things. You used to get these blocks that you could lay out on the hill. They were high protein. You’d supplement the hay with that when they were nearer lambing time. And then, later on, they came out with these little nuts you fed the sheep. You could never say, ‘Well, this is this, this, and this,’ because all winters was different. Your sheep would maybe come through the winter in different condition. You know, you just had to, play it by ear. You just had to do what you saw, what you thought they needed.

[Theme music]

Gill Lowes (narrator): Thank you for listening to Hefted! Upland Farming Heritage in the Cheviots. In this episode, you heard contributions from Charles Armstrong, George Blacklock, Walter Brown, Stuart Nelson, Pam Brown, Bill Elliot, Chris Dalglish, Scott Iley and me, Gill Lowes.

Episode 3 - Counting Sheep

Gil Telfer: I liked it. It was super. I liked to go up on the hill and—when the lambs are wee and the birds are whistling and the sky larks and the hawks and what not. It was just super in the morning to go up over the hill. And the wee blacky lambs playing about [laughter].

[Theme music]

Gill Lowes (narrator): Welcome to Hefted! Upland Farming Heritage in the Cheviots, Episode 3, Counting Sheep. 

We cannot talk about farming animals without talking about the animals themselves.  

Today, the most important animal in the Cheviots is, undeniably, the sheep. Sheep have probably been a part of the landscape of the Cheviots for a very, very long time.

Caroline Smith: My name is Caroline Smith. My background is as an archaeologist and I work across the Northeast.

The Neolithic is when you get the agricultural revolution in Britain, that kind of comes in from the Near East. And we know people are bringing sheep across into Britain at that time.

Gill Lowes (narrator): The neolithic is a period generally understood to range from 4000-2500BC.

Caroline Smith: So almost certainly people were farming sheep in a sense. They're not farming them probably in very, very big scale as we would imagine farming today. But definitely people had domestic sheep they were breeding for certain characteristics. And keeping primarily for meat, probably, although also wool and milk.

Gill Lowes (narrator): While the Cheviots are now known almost exclusively for sheep, this wasn’t always the case. As we learned in episode 1, sheep were important as far back as the Middle Ages.  

But people living and working in the Cheviots before the 17th and 18th centuries also raised cattle and other animals, and grew crops for their own consumption as well as for their animals. 

But despite this complexity, today, the sheep remain the most important animal in the hills.  

Before we jump in, a quick primer on some of the different terms for sheep we’ll be hearing in this episode and across the rest of the series. 

Skye: Stock is use, is that right?

Bill Elliot (2): Stock are ewes, yep. And then hoggets are teenagers which won't be—go to the tup until they're a year old.

Gill Lowes (narrator): A tup is an adult male sheep.

Skye: Okay, and drafts?

Bill Elliot (2): Drafts—They're the ones that are sold. So they'll produce a lamb that year.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Another term you might notice is wether lamb, which is a male lamb. 

The sheep most closely associated with the Cheviots is, naturally, the Cheviot. But, as Caroline explains, the idea of a 'breed' is a relatively modern invention.

Caroline Smith: Through most of time, I think the idea of a breed as we understand them, with really distinctive characters between animals, was not something that would have been fully understood necessarily by everybody across the country. So, for example, the big breed we have we have in the Cheviots today is obviously the Cheviot sheep, which has really distinctive characteristics. They’re quite sturdy, they're quite stocky. But the first reference we have to them at the moment is around 1370. And that's not necessarily to the breed of Cheviot sheep that we see today and that we understand, but that just describes a hardy and small sheep that happens to live in the Cheviots. Now, there would've been natural variation between them just because of the landscapes they grew up in, and they were certainly prized because they could survive so well.

Gill Lowes (narrator): The first description of Cheviot sheep we have comes from Sir John Sinclair, a Scottish economist and agriculturalist. In 1792, he wrote:  

“Perhaps there is no part of the whole island where, at first sight, a fine-wooled breed of sheep is less to be expected than among the Cheviot Hills.  Many parts of the sheep-walks consist of nothing but peat bogs and deep morasses.  During winter the hills are covered with snow for two, three, and sometimes four months, and they have an ample proportion of bad weather during the other seasons of the year, yet a sheep is to be found that will thrive even in the wildest part of it … They have a closer fleece … which keeps them warmer in the cold weather, and prevents either snow or rain from incommoding them.  They have never any other food, except when they are fattened, than the grass and natural hay produced on their own hills.”

Caroline Smith: We do know that the first time they're exhibited was around 1832, and the Cheviot Sheep Society was formed in 1891. And so that's probably the first time we can begin to put a timestamp on when the breed, as we would understand it to be, kind of came into existence.

Gill Lowes (narrator): But there's not just one kind of Cheviot.

Walter Brown: Originally, there was two sorts of Cheviots. There was the Cheviots from these hills were Cheviots, and they were called the Border Cheviots, and they were small, stocky sort of sheep. And that's why they were difficult to because they were too small, they had trouble having the lambs. And then there was what they called the North Country Cheviot, which was more of a lowland sheep. Not lowland but parkland.

And then what happened—when was it? About the1700s or the 1800s? The sheep, these Cheviot sheep went from here to Sutherland. And they crossed—I don't know whether they crossed them with a North Country Cheviot or—they made them bigger sheep.

So these Cheviots that are now at Hethpool and those places are called North Country Hill. They're still hill, but they're a bigger Cheviot, and they're much better. Oh, they're still a pure Cheviot, but they're bigger than the old Border Cheviots. I mean, there's some—the Cheviots that would be here originally would be Border Cheviots because they're small.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Other breeds, especially the Blackfaces, but also others, including Swaledales, have also been important at different times and in different contexts.

Walter Brown: The main interest in the Cheviot sheep was the wool. That was what they made the money from, the wool more than the lambs. And when the wool became less valuable, they moved onto the Blackface sheep because they’re more prolific and they could, you know, produce more lambs. And as I say the wool price dropped in—well not in the 1950s, but in about the 1960s or 1970s—the wool price. And now it's virtually worthless, wool.

Gill Lowes (narrator): People prefer different breeds for many different reasons. And this changes over time in response to all kinds of different factors, like market demand, or government policy. For example, Cheviot sheep produce soft, fine wool, whereas Blackfaces produce coarser wool better suited for carpets. And wool in general is much less in demand these days, given the rise of synthetic fabrics, among other factors.

Bill Elliot (1): They all looked the same to me, you know, white faces. The Blackies, they had a bit of character about them, they were different. And so were the Mules, you know, you hardly got two that looked the same.

Gill Lowes (narrator): That's Bill Elliot of Yetholm Mains. He’s less keen on Cheviot sheep.

Bill Elliot (1): I mean, they're okay, they're okay as well. They're kind mothers and things as well. It's just, your preference, I think, like anything, how you might prefer one car to another one, or.

Gill Lowes (narrator): For Michael Elliot, a farmer in the Bowmont Valley, it's more of a financial question. 

Michael Elliot: I think just the returns from the Cheviot are slightly better. And I think just a snowballing effect. You get 20 pound more for your draft ewe or 20 pound more for your fat ewe and 10 pound more for your lamb. It just slowly added up. I think just people—there's a combination of things and it's just— To be perfectly honest, I like the Blackies, I really like them.

Gill Lowes (narrator): On the other hand, Alan Hutcheon, farmer at Hartside Hill, points out that Cheviots require much more intensive care, especially at lambing time. 

Alan Hutcheon: Cheviot sheep take more shepherding. Anybody that was asking me, you know, if they should go into Cheviots: ‘Yes, if you're prepared to put the work into it.’

I have been—worked among Cheviot sheep all my life and I'm a Cheviot man through and through, but lambing time is the most difficult time for a Cheviot ewe. She is very small of pelvis and you get a broad-shouldered lamb coming out of her. And once you get that lamb on the ground, you probably have one of the best lambs you're going to get because she's a good mum. And you've a tremendous carcass lamb. But lambing time is a difficult time.

And when we were lambing out on the hills, it was never—to have two or three dead lambs in the morning. Hung lambs that just couldn't get out and were dead. So you were, you probably didn't realise just how many twin lambs you were—because we had no scanning or anything in those days, you were just lambing sheep.

There's an argument always about better returns and whatever, but I still say your Cheviot lamb, if you want to sell it as a store product from the farm to somebody who's going to go take on fattening, you'll certainly get 10 pounds to 12 pounds more than a Blackie lamb. Most people will agree with that.

Now if you take it through—if you're able to take them through on your farm yourself to fatten them, the difference is not so much. Because when it's actually hung up as meat you might make two or three pounds. But whether people just don't want to work on with the Blackies or, you know, as a fattening—with the horns there's slightly more problems and bits and pieces.

So, your end product, both on your cast ewe or your draft—well, not so much the draft ewe, because draft Blackies can make quite a bit of money as well. But if you're, you know, casting them, there are certainly 10 to 15 pounds difference in the Cheviot ewe to a Blackie cast ewe.

But they tell me now the Blackies with the strong horn buds, they're getting a fair bit of problems with that. But I remember when I started out, Scott at Blake Dean, he said that he would be lucky if he would set on—set on by I mean have a dead lamb and have to set one on—if he had three or four to set on in a year. And as I say with the Cheviots, I’ve sometimes—you do that every day. And then when I started on the Blackies, yes, that, you know, that was right. They did lamb at that time a lot easier.

Gill Lowes (narrator): But it can also depend on the type of land. Different breeds are better suited to different environments. For example, it's said that Blackfaces are better suited to heather land. 

Breeds aren't static, though. They change over time because farmers and shepherds actively breed them to suit their changing needs and preferences.  

Bill Elliot of College Valley describes this process. 

Bill Elliot (2): Dad said that the Blackies weren't doing very well, so he put Swales onto them. And I bred them pure Swales until probably about 1990. And I had such trouble selling fat lambs. I used to sell everything deadweight, straight to an abattoir. They were going down to North Wales to St. Asaph in those days. And a wonderful guy who owned a slaughterhouse, Dewi Jones, said, ‘I don't want any of these lanterns. For every lantern, I want a pure Cheviot.’ I said, ‘What do you mean by lantern?’ ‘Well, if you put a lightbulb through it, you can see all the ribs and everything, you can see through them!’

They’re big, long, rangy things, but not the meat cover on them. So I actually changed then back to Blackies.

Gill Lowes (narrator): There are other approaches too.

Bill Elliot (1): They were all Blackfaces, Scottish Blackfaces, on Halterburn.

And we used to cross them with a blue-headed Leicester tup, and that gave you what you called a Mule ewe. And we took all the ewe lambs down to Yetholm Mains and crossed them with a Suffolk tup. Because you got fat lambs from the better ground down by.

The hill ones that you're—the wether lambs, the boy lambs—we used to take them down as well and try and fatten them. But they were—the Suffolk lambs did better, you know, and were heavier. You got better weights with them than you did with the mule lambs, wether lambs.

Piers Holmesmith: I sort of tried all sorts of things [laughter]. I tried a Dalesbred tup. That was from Lancashire which, well, they're well known down there. Then we used Bluefaced Leicester tups and bred Mules.

Gill Lowes (narrator): That’s Piers Holmesmith, former farmer at Cocklawfoot.

Piers Holmesmith: Well, with breeding the Mules and that, that was giving me extra pennies in the bank. With the different breeds, I was increasing the size of the sheep a lot of the time and just making things generally better, or hopefully.

Because the sheep were fairly small when we first came, and we wanted to get something bigger. So, you know, you hunt around, because every rib's worth another chop. [laughs]

[Music]

Gill Lowes (narrator): As we suggested earlier in the episode, even though the sheep are very important to hill farming in the Cheviots, they’re not the only animal farmed in these hills. Throughout history, cattle would have been a familiar sight in the Cheviots. In the Middle Ages, there were probably dedicated cattle farms in the area, called vaccaries, although we don’t know much about them.  

As sheep farming became more intensive and central to the economy of the Cheviots, cattle became less important. Even through the peak of the era of sheep, though, many farms would still have kept a small herd of cattle for milk. 

Alan Hutcheon: There was only a small herd of cows at that time, maybe 30 cows. Then all of a sudden I would say, in the sort of early ‘80s, numbers started to go up because there was more demand.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Cattle used to be kept for commercial reasons during this period.

Alan Hutcheon: One of the farms was tenanted out and the tenant farmer didn't want the cows and they were moved up the valley. Cattle sheds were built. Old sheds was made into bigger sheds for cattle wintering. So that was the start of the change, I would say.

The cattle came on and yes, were housed and wintered in, in the sheds that was adapted at Attonburn for them. But in the summertime, they were grazed right up the valley, right up as far as Cocklawfoot where—you’re going to speak to Piers.

So there would be—a rodeo would go up the road with a lot of cattle in springtime, I suppose May-time. After—when you got the grass growing. So the cattle would go up the valley and then they would come back in late October, probably mid-November. And these cattle would be—some of them would go up not on the Cheviot itself, but on the low ground of Cheviot.

We did take some summer grazing on Currburn over the back of the Curr, so there was about 20 or 30 cows would go over there in the summer. And we used the Curr itself more. So I suppose we used more areas of the land that we weren't using before.

But certainly when it came to winter time, it was a lot more intensive in the way they were fed around feeders, because they were having to be fed silage, probably from—certainly beginning of December right through until certainly I would say end of April.

Bill Elliot (2): Initially, they were all pure Greck Galloways. And there were about—when I took over in 1980, there were 90 Galloway cows. And I had three bulls, one Galloway bull to breed replacements, and two white bred Shorthorn bulls to breed Blue Greys. The Blue Grey calves were sold at Hawick—well, Hawick and Bellingham for other people to breed from.

And then, I wanted to up the number of cattle, so I started keeping some of the Blue Greys. And, Galloways were just—yes, they weren't growing fast enough, they weren't leaving enough money, so I bought a Simmental bull. And I started breeding—keeping the Blue Greys, putting the Simmental onto them and also keeping some of the Simmental cross Blue Grey cows, and bulling them with the Charolais. So yes, went very much more commercial.

Nowadays there is a move back to more traditional breeds. And people, people are going the other direction. Rightly or wrongly, I don't know. So yes, I got up to just about 200 cows when I handed over.

Gill Lowes (narrator): The College Valley Estate, a major landowner in the Cheviots, has now completely removed sheep from the Cheviot itself, and only grazes it with cattle in the summer.  

But the rationale for keeping cows has completely changed. Now, those responsible for the College Valley are keeping cattle as a means of improving the ecological health of the valley and the hills.

John Cresswell: My name is John Cresswell. I live and farm about half an hour away from here on the coast and I'm also a director of College Valley Estates Limited here, which is the company that owns and manages this place. And I'm also a director of the parent organization.

Stephen Crees: I'm Stephen Crees and I've worked on the estate for 22 years and I'm an estate manager. I was born and bred in Berwick upon Tweed, which is about 25, 30 minutes from here, and worked locally all of my days.

John Cresswell: The instruction from our parent is that we're to manage this place in a way that balances ecology, visitors and education, while making a little bit of money hopefully for them.

Stephen Crees: The stock they've got to fit our environmental objectives. So, more cattle possibly and less sheep going forward. We destocked the Cheviot—the hill—in 2012. That was predominantly sheep. That was 3,100 Scottish Blackfaced sheep. And we graze it with a few cattle in the summer, still. But they don't tend to go across the whole of the Cheviot because it's 3000 acre. But they tend to stay at the southwest corner and then the southeast corner. The bit in the middle's virtually untouched.

I think there'll be a time when we will bring back more cattle. That'll just follow on suit from the monitoring that we're gonna be putting in place and have already put in place. So it depends on what the results and what the data says.

John Cresswell: It's a big piece of ground here. It's 13,000 acres, and it varies quite a lot, both in altitude and steepness, depth of soil, many different things. So we will be trying to achieve different things in different places. But essentially one of our big goals at the moment is to transform molinia grassland, which is a big percentage of our ground—which is this habitat which exists between the riverine and the upland heath. It’s on the slopes. You can see a bit of it here. And that effect that you can see out of Stephen's window is very much what we would like to see on much of these grassy banks, which are not terribly valuable for ecology. They have their uses, of course, there's always winners and losers, but essentially they're not ecologically rich in many cases. And we believe that the native, multi-age, multi-species woodland: sparse, open canopy, under grazed by cattle is a much more rich ecological habitat, and that's really what's driving this.

Gill Lowes (narrator): The College Valley isn’t the only place that’s turning to cattle as a way to achieve environmental goals. We'll hear more about this trend in future episodes. 

No image of a shepherd would be complete without their dogs. But, like many things we take for granted, herding dogs are a relatively modern phenomenon. 

Caroline Smith: Sheepdogs, as in herding dogs were something that's actually really quite modern. Certainly modern in archaeological terms. We do have from the Doomsday Book—and also there's kind of more northern, a bit like the Deans Day book called The Boldon Book, which was created for the Bishops of Durham in 1183, which I did a lot of work on for my PhD—we do have lists of kind of who supplies dogs to who, particularly to the Bishops for different reasons. But they're never sheepdogs. They're almost always to do with hunting. So they're probably breeds that are closer today to kind of greyhounds or lurchers. We do know that people used terriers or terrier-like dogs for pest control and for certain types of hunting.

But there’s kind of—if you have a lot of shepherds in a landscape, there’s almost no great reason to have a herding sheepdog. And in many bits of the world you don’t have herding sheepdogs. You have dogs that are used for security, especially in places where you have things like wolves or bears. I’m thinking like the Spanish Pyrenees, you have dogs that protect the animals. But they’re not used so much in the way we imagine a Collie—Border Collie—sheepdog today to round up the sheep and move across the landscape and pen them in areas.

And certainly there was no great reason through most of history to have protective sheepdogs. I think bears and lynx went extinct in England shortly after the Romans left and certainly wolves went extinct in the Medieval period.

So sheepdogs for herding were something that were only really recorded with the first sheep dog trials in England—or in Wales, I should say, in the 19th century, 1873, I think was the first one. And I don't think the Sheep Dog Association, the International Sheep Dog Society, was formed until 1906.

So that long heritage of these sheep dogs being used in the landscape is probably something that did happen, maybe on an individual or local scale. People keep dogs for companionship and they would've trained them for certain purposes, but certainly in the scale and the homogeneity that we see it today I think is something more recent. It's something 19th century.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Even though they haven’t been a part of farming for as long as we might think, sheep dogs have become an important part of shepherding practice in the Cheviots.  

For many shepherds, managing a farm without sheepdogs is completely unimaginable. Bill Elliot always had two or three dogs…

Bill Elliot (1): Well, especially if you were gathering, you needed three. But when I was working, I used to keep a lot of dogs. Like, I used to keep about ten. And you could go out in the morning, maybe with two or three, and then you'd put them in, and you'd take another couple out. You know, fresh ones, it was the beauty of it. Because on the hills it was quite hard. Especially in the summertime, if you've got warm days, like, it was really hard on the dogs.

It was a good hobby to have, because it was part of your work. When I went to Yetholm Mains to start with, the shepherd that was there—he used to go dog-trialling and that’s how I got interested in it. He was a good handler and I used to go with him on the Saturdays and I got interested—my first puppy that I ever—like a really well-bred one I got from him and trained it myself and just, you know— You had to have them for your work. And so you just got interested in them and tried to get a good one to trial with. And as I got older, I kept more and more. So the more you kept, the more chance you had of getting a good one like, so.

And there was also—you could make a bit of money on the side, because there was always farmers wanting dogs. And if you had one that maybe wasn't good enough for trialling, then you could sell onto a farmer, so you got a bit of pocket money that way as well.

I've got a young one that I'm training at the moment, but I don't know whether he's going to be good enough or not to trial. He's just a year old, so, I mean, he's got time yet to—it’ll be another six months whether he'll be good enough or not.

Gill Lowes (narrator): But what makes a good sheepdog?

Bill Elliot (1): You, you want one that's very willing, obviously, but you need—you don't want one that's too keen and, you know, shoving on. You want one that will be sort of gentle with the sheep, but do what's told. One that's got enough to move the sheep, because if they're too quiet, the sheep will—they're not long realizing and they'll turn around and face the dog. But one that's not too stubborn and things like that. It's getting that sort of balance in between. There's an awful lot of things they need to be doing right ]to be a good trial dog like.

When they go to gather sheep, you want them to put a nice pear-shaped outrun. Some of them, they just go straight up the field and they—well, if they frighten the sheep, you know, if they’re too close the sheep, the sheep will run away and we'll, that's the sheep frightened for the rest of your trial.

You want one that's obedient. They've got to be obedient. Stop when they're told, like right when you tell them, not a foot after or a yard after, otherwise they'll go past the gates, the sheep, and you miss the gates and things like that, like it's quite complicated.

They’ve got to have a nice nature for going out amongst other dogs, you don't want them fighting with dogs or people or anything. But most of the Collies have got a good nature, you know, they don't bite people or anything.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Not all shepherds use dogs anymore, though.

Bill Elliot (1): Some of them haven't got any dogs at all. Now you see them charging about on their bikes and, you know, flapping bags and trying to get the sheep in. Whereas one decent dog would have done the job and less hassle on sheep on man like.

The lambing man that came to Halterburn this year, he didn't even have a dog. Came without a dog. You know, years ago, he'd have been—never would have been hired. You know, if he hadn't had a dog, it would have been crazy like.

So it shows you how much things have changed. But it's not good for the stock, because if you look to catch something at lambing time, which you frequently do—every day you have catch one or two—they run them down with a bike, you know, they chase them to the fence, and then jump off the bike and dive on them. Well, that's, you know, doing the sheep or anybody any good, I wouldn't think. But, just the way things go nowadays.

[Theme music]

Gill Lowes (narrator): Thank you for listening to Hefted! Upland Farming Heritage in the Cheviots.

In this episode, you heard contributions from Gil Telfer , Bill Elliot (formerly of College Valley), Walter Brown, Bill Elliot (formerly a shepherd at the Mains of Yetholm), Michael Elliot, Alan Hutcheon, Piers Holmesmith, John Cresswell, Stephen Crees, Caroline Smith, and me Gill Lowes.

Episode 4 - Technology

Charles Armstrong: I remember in 1947, we were feeding sheep by horse and sledge, and it was a young horse, and we just—father and I had just fed the sheep. And I was just 12 or 13 then. And we were just finishing and the pair of us were standing looking at the condition of the sheep. Looked around. If it had been an old horse, it would never have moved. But being a young horse, she just cleared off away with the sledge, you see, left us. Well it travelled a few hundred yards, and it headed for where the gate used to be. Well, you cannot believe this, but the gate post was sticking up about 18 inches above the height of the stone wall. It hung the sledge on the gate post. As it went over, it caught the gate post, held the horse, meaning that we didn't need to walk home.

[Theme music]

Gill Lowes (narrator): Welcome to Hefted! Upland Farming Heritage in the Cheviots. Episode four: By hook or by crook.

The technologies that are available strongly influence how farming is done. And technology is always changing.

Technology isn’t just computers and phones. It also includes tools, like shepherds’ crooks, or drones.

Technology isn't just something modern, either. People have always been inventing new tools and techniques that allow them to achieve different goals. For Caroline, the introduction of the scythe is a particularly interesting moment in the deeper history of farming in the Cheviots.

Caroline Smith: We don't have them through a lot of the archaeological past, which would then suggest that hay isn't being created, which in turn tells you something about the way that people are using the landscape and keeping animals.

So in the Bronze Age, we begin to get sickles, which are quite small. There aren't very many of them. They're really small and they're actually sharpened on both sides, so people don't even think they were really used in the way that you might imagine a sickle. But we don't actually get scythes until the Iron Age, when iron is produced. And even then, the Romans appear to be the ones that are really introducing this culture into the UK of creating hay.

Gill Lowes (narrator): The Bronze Age and Iron Age are archaeological periods that together lasted, more or less, from around 2500 BC to around the first century AD.

Caroline Smith: So from that we can begin to infer that people are not—or the way that they're overwintering animals is slightly different. Perhaps they're using the landscape in a bigger way. They're moving, there's more transhumansce in the landscape. And if you can create hay, you can move your animals around a different way. You can begin to store them in different places. You can begin to use the landscape in different ways. You can make it more or less kind of intensive in terms of man hours. And also that impacts how we understand land ownership as well.

Gill Lowes (narrator): In recent decades, technology has changed significantly, with huge impacts on the work of hill farming.

New technologies, like quad bikes and tractors, have been introduced, while others have fallen out of favour.

Shepherds used to do much of their work on horseback, or on foot. But in the 1980s and 1990s, nearly everybody switched to using a quad bike.

Many shepherds will argue that quad bikes make it easier to feed the sheep in the winter, and make it easier and faster to get around the farm. But sometimes the advantage is marginal.

Stuart Nelson: It was all on foot until about twenty-seven years ago, twenty-eight years ago, something like that. And still, we didn't use them a lot. When Dad and I was here, we used them most of the time, but not all the time. But prior to then, it was, everything was on foot. It was funny, like, then I did was, like more of the Hope, and Cushat Law, this side. And I think it was ten minutes quicker. Five minutes quicker. Between five and ten minutes quicker shepherding them at night. On foot between bike. Slightly quicker on bike. Because, when you're pushing the sheep out, you know, you're pushing them right out the bottoms and pushing them around. They only go so fast. You can't push—you can't make them go any faster. You know, you've got to have—give that time. And that—but it was like, just like traveling between bits when that was where you made your time.

And so really there was no—there was no, like, from a time perspective. But the thing really about it, like I find about a bike now, when you do everything myself, or a lot of it myself, is once you've gathered, you'll be sitting on your backside all morning,. And then you come into the pens to work with the sheep, you are pretty fresh. Where prior to that, if you weren't that fit, you were knackered. But you had to be pretty—but you ended up fitter. You know, you were fitter than what you would normally be.

Physically fitter, probably. But that was a benefit, because, you know, in—I remember in the summer, when we were gathering for the shearing, we would probably leave here at half four in the morning to go out and gather a heft and get it in. Because you'd have to have them in by 7—7:30 in the morning. Or unless they were knackered. It was just too hot. It was a nightmare.

Gill Lowes (narrator): The quadbikes weren't just a big adjustment for the shepherds – they were also an adjustment for the sheep dogs.

Bill Elliot (1): It was strange to start with for the dogs, because they were, you know, you went with the quad bike and they were looking, wondering where on earth you went and things. But, I learned them to—you know, they had boxes in the back of the bikes and I learned them to sit on the bike just as if they were going in the back of your car.

So they learned quite quickly to go on the bikes, like, it was—well it would save them, like you see, when I went from Halterburn down to Yethom Mains, I could put them on the back of the bike and just nip down in ten minutes. Whereas if they had to run down, you know, by the time we got down there they would have been quite tired, like, so it was saving them as well.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Technological changes have also dramatically changed the way lambing is done, particularly the ability to scan pregnant ewes. Scanning makes a difference because, like we learned in episode two, it matters whether an ewe will have a single lamb or twins. The ability to scan the ewes for twins lets farmers plan accordingly.

Stuart Nelson: It's just, you know, moved on so much. It's like, you know, you could tell my grandfather—not that long ago, in my living memory, that you could do that… He would just think you'd lost the plot. I could tell him then, “You know, I can tell you how many lambs a ewe’s going to have.” “Get out.” You know, they wouldn't believe you. But now, you know, they're all scammed. I would think it'd be quite cool to go back and have a look and see, you know, but I would like to come back again.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Technology also includes much more everyday sort of. Tools like fences. Without fences, making sure the sheep know and stay on their hefts, is crucial. But with fences, this becomes less necessary. Management becomes easier, and different flocks are less able to mingle with one another.

Walter Brown: Most of the top of Cheviot belongs to College Valley. And they fenced that—this is 30, 40 years ago now. And the top of the valley, most of my youth, it wasn't fenced, it was open march. But when Duncan Davidson bought the farm, Lilburn Estates, they fenced the top of the valley. So it's all enclosed now, the whole farm. But it—that was an open march originally.

When there was no fence across the top, there was seven different farms. Sheep went onto the top of College Valley, and most of the top of the Cheviot is a plateau, it's a flat area. You know, the sheep tended to stray, and it was more difficult to get them back, so when it was all fenced, it was the management of the sheep was easier.

Gill Lowes (narrator): On the other hand, some people have actually decided to start removing fences.

Walter Riddell: My name's Walter Riddle. We are currently sitting at Hepple, which is about 15 miles south of the Cheviots. But it's a similar sort of landscape. It's an upland hill farm, which we're changing to a much wilder sort of place. And I'm a director of the College Valley and have been for about eight years.

Gill Lowes (narrator): At Hepple, the Riddells are undergoing a transition to what they call 'managed wilding'. Managed wilding is a land management strategy which aims to ecologically restore the landscape. It does this by enabling natural processes to come to the fore. This process is ‘managed’ because it also includes “subtle, gentle intervention” where necessary.

The Riddells are driven, like many farmers and landowners in the area, by prioritising ecological health. One of the things they have done to achieve this is reduced grazing on their land.

Walter Riddell: And have really tried to release the animals to express themselves and express the underlying geology and water by taking out fences.

It's been a really tricky thing because animal husbandry and the whole farming system relies on you moving your animals around in a certain sort of way. I mean, there's basic things like making sure that the bull doesn't cover his daughters in the first year and a half of their life. And so you have to separate—well, it's thought you have to separate those two groups out. Therefore, at least you have to have at least one fence. And then there's various other—you know, when you are calving, you need to get the tags on the calves within the first 48 hours. You need to have them in a small area, so you need to have a separate field. So you start being dragged back into the conventional farming world because of very good animal husbandry reasons. But we've tried to resist that as much as possible.

The other thing is, without a sort of alpha predator these animals just don't move, so you need to have a degree of human management. That's why we call it a managed wilding, because in the absence of a properly functional ecosystem, you have to—as much as a human is capable of—try to direct all these other parts of the trophic cascade in the right direction. And we don't like doing it, but we understand we have to.

Gill Lowes (narrator): One thing that is helping the Riddells to manage their animals without fences is no-fence collars. No-fence collars create a virtual fence, so that animals can be kept to certain areas without the physical infrastructure of a fence-line.

Walter Riddell: They really revolutionize the ability to say, hit a bracken bed, or keep your rather badly behaved Longhorn off my dear beloved juniper bushes. They have—they've built over the last few years a deep love for a sort of juniper scratch, and they've, as a result, hit some of our juniper bushes rather hard. So it allows you to just manage a little bit carefully over some hotspots.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Many other technological advances have made the work of shepherding easier, like electric clippers for shearing, replacing sheep dips with pour-on treatments, and tractors. These kinds of changes reduce the amount of labour needed to do a particular task. They also make farmers less dependent on good weather to be able to complete a certain task.

Tractors have changed the way some shepherds work, especially when it comes to making hay. Gil Telfer, a former shepherd at Calroust in the Bowmont Valley, explains how hay was made before the introduction of tractors.

Gil Telfer: When I started working, we didn't even have a tractor. It was just all horse work and we had the hay to make with the horses and hand rakes and forks. We had a horse reaper, a single horse reaper. and a rake for raking it up with it and other things.

We used to gather it up and build it into rucks, you know, in the field and tie them on. Then we had a flat bogey for the horse, and we could get it in below the rick and pull it up into the bogey, and then we took it back down into the farm. And there were stacks. There wasn't a hay shed. We had to build stocks out of hay.

And then we went in the wet bits of the valley and we cut the rushes, you see, and made them into that. And we thatched the stacks with the rushes, that kept the hay dry. Oh, it was good. The rushes were. But then we got tractors and balers, which was a lot better for, easier.

Gill Lowes (narrator): It's not as simple as saying that these tools saved labour. It’s true that it’s easier to do jobs like haymaking with machinery than by hand and with horses, or to treat sheep with pour-ons rather than dipping their whole bodies in treated water. But, increased mechanisation can also be a response to a reduction in available labour, rather than the other way around.

Bill Elliot (1): It saved a lot of handling when you've got them big bales. You could do it all with your tractors. There was not much manual labour involved. So, as the labour was cut down, you know, these tractor things came in, machinery and things for handling them, and took over.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Similarly, changing technology and increasing mechanisation can be a response to changes in what is farmed, or how. For example, an increase in the number of cattle might require an increase in machinery, particularly tractors.

[Music]

Another big change has been the transition from dipping to pour-ons, and back again.

Bill Elliot (1): You know, we used to dip all the sheep. Well, that was a big, big job, like, and—but they brought out these pour-ons you can do them with now, and they're really good because they last longer, and they're—you can do it yourself. You know, when you was dipping, you had to have three or four men, and they relied—you had to try and get a good day, because— You had to stay a day for getting—because you got help from other farms round about. And, well, if it rained, it was, you know, it was a waste of time. Whereas now, when you can—when you're doing it, if you're like worming the sheep, you can just do them with these pour-ons at the same time and it's, you know, it saves a lot of work there as well. And as I say, they'll last far, far longer than the dip ever did.

Gill Lowes (narrator): But, as with so many things, nothing ever stays the same for long.

Pam Brown: In the past, everyone dipped because they had their own dipper. And then there was this whole organophosphate poisoning thing, it went totally out of fashion. And the pour-ons don't treat scab. Well, pour-ons, they certainly don't eliminate it. Because the thing is that you need—a lot of the sheep scab actually live inside the sheep's ear. So people will—like my clients, ‘Oh, they're a bit itchy. We'll do a pour-on.’ And it dampens down the sheep scab numbers, but then I can't actually find the scab to prove it's that. But they're still itching and they’ve had pour-on, so it probably is scab.

Gill Lowes (narrator): To deal with this problem, a long-acting wormer was developed which killed intestinal worms, as well as scab. It became very popular, but now, resistance to it has developed, leading many people to go back to dipping.

But dipping is not the same as it used to be. It's been mechanised, and is carried out by contractors who travel around with mobile mechanical dippers. The sheep are herded 20 at a time into a cage, which is then lowered into the dip. This is not only faster, but is also safer - the dip is highly toxic, and the mechanised dip removes the need for anyone to handle the sheep after they've been dipped.

But for some, especially those like the Riddells whose goals are primarily ecological, the use of chemical dips, pour-ons and other treatments that are used to maintain sheep health are increasingly difficult to stomach.

Walter Riddell: When my wife and I moved up here in 2012, I was encouraging the use of anti-parasitics because we had a grouse farm, and you can’t get grouse if you have ticks. And so, you know, I was saying, ‘We need to put, Dysect—this horrible alpha-cypermethrin—we need to put it on five times a year.’ And that's—I had no idea what I was asking. And you read on the back of the tin, is this possible? Is this doable? It's only just doable, but yes, it's fine. You know, the vets say it's fine, but actually it's causing—it’s like having 300, 400 little mini nuclear power stations wandering around on the hills, killing everything that they touch.

Gill Lowes (narrator): After deciding they wanted to manage the land in a more ecological way, though, things started to change.

Walter Riddell: In a large-ish place like this—it’s 4,000 acres—you could fall on any of the interesting species or habitats and say, ‘let's try and preserve that and do better by that.’ We wanted to sort of look at the whole trophic pyramid and say, ‘we want to build things from the bottom up.’ And for that you need to have fantastic water, you have to have undisturbed soils and you have to have strong insect life which emerges from those soils and water. And you only get that if you stop all chemical inputs. So we stopped the one thing that is really hard to stop in the uplands, which is using anti-parasitics.

Gill Lowes (narrator): And what that ultimately meant was removing the sheep and introducing a small number of cows, ponies and pigs. This is an important point, because it suggests that, actually, the sheep - and animals in general – could themselves be understood as a 'technology' for managing the landscape.

For example, the College Valley Estate hopes to regenerate a more mixed landscape, including far more trees. Their main technology for achieving this? Animals, or more specifically changing grazing patterns and reducing grazing pressure.

Stephen Crees: We are reducing the grazing pressure, and that's by sheep and deer and then cattle to a certain extent. Goats as well. We've got a population of feral goats on the estate probably somewhere up to about a hundred. And so the pressure of all grazing animals just down a wee bit. And then we'll see what the regeneration is that comes, with a bit of help from planting trees as well to try and get—up the slopes and up the gills, things like that—to then enable eventually a seed source to help populate the land with trees itself.

Gill Lowes (narrator): But, if regeneration doesn't occur naturally, they have other ideas.

John Cresswell: So, we suspect big areas of these molinia have been grazed hard since the middle of the 18th century. So we think the seed source might be quite limited on some of those. So one of the things that Stephen is thinking about is using drones to spread tree seed. Because there hasn't been—the trees went at that time or before that time, there hasn't been seed since then. It's a long time to rely on the natural seed source.

Stephen Crees: I think the drone will have a use, definitely. But I think we need to disturb the ground first in some way, shape or form. If you dropped it on some of that vegetation, I don't think anything—absolutely nowt will happen. Yeah. I think you need to get that bust up.

[Music]

Gill Lowes (narrator): Another big change is with the burning of the heather. While these days, heather burning is known for its role in maintaining shooting estates, it has also long been used as a tool for managing upland moorland landscapes for grazing.

Walter Brown: Before there was shooting interest, we used to burn the heather for the sheep as well. So it does for both.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Burning encourages the growth of new shoots, which are more palatable both to grazing animals and to grouse. On the other hand, it may also reduce the diversity of upland plant species, creating conditions that are especially favourable for heather.

When managing the land for sheep, it’s important that the heather doesn’t get too long. That’s because it can become unpalatable and make it too difficult for sheep to pass by.

Walter Brown: Ideally, you would do the same bit every six or seven years, maybe. But in practice, it rarely happens like that, because you—you got, you know, then—the weather, the climate was wetter then, really, than it is now. Well, it depends on the ground as well. Some ground grows that quicker than others. But, six or seven years I would say is probably about the height you'd want to burn it, in an ideal world.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Heather burning – especially burning heather that sits on peat – is the subject of an active debate about its effects on vegetation diversity, water quality, flood risks, and carbon storage.

Walter Brown: You can, you can burn some, and you can get a license to burn some, and you can cut some, but all the time, they're restricting what they'll be able to do.

Valerie Brown: Do they not have to notify the fire brigade when they do it?

Walter Brown: Oh yes they have to. It all has to be notified.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Heather burning has been restricted in many places because it grows on peat. And peat—especially blanket bog—is a very significant and important reserve of carbon. Burning peat causes severe damage, releasing that carbon into the atmosphere, contributing to climate change.

Land managers never set out to burn peat. The idea is to burn the plant canopy, with little impact on the ground layer and underlying peat.

Walter Brown: I mean, the keepers are really well equipped to burn it. They cut out an area, not very big, probably quarter of an acre or something, and they cut it with a swipe square around, and they burn that in, and they have with them firefighting equipment.

They have a jet spray, if it gets away, they can put it out quickly. So it's very well controlled now, more controlled than when we used to burn in the old days. You lit a bit, and sometimes it got away on you and burned a much bigger area because there wasn't equipment to do it.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Some people have concerns that without regular burning, the longer heather will provide more fuel for possible wildfires, which could burn even hotter, risking more peat and carbon emissions in the process. The problem is, though, evidence has shown that managed burns themselves often trigger wildfires when they get out of control, particularly in the uplands.

Clearly, this is a difficult, contentious topic that is close to the hearts of many. In early 2025, Natural England conducted a review of all the evidence on managed burning on peatlands, and concluded: “burning impacts peatlands, and the ecosystem services they provide... [R]epeated burning risks a sustained departure from the characteristic structure and function of these habitats.”

[Theme music]

Gill Lowes (narrator): Thank you for listening to Hefted! Upland Farming Heritage in the Cheviots.

In this episode, you heard contributions from Gil Telfer , Bill Elliot (formerly of College Valley), Walter Walter Brown, Bill Elliot (formerly a shepherd at the Mains of Yetholm), Michael Elliot, Alan Alan Hutcheon, Piers Holmesmith, John Cresswell, Stephen Crees, Caroline Smith Smith, and me Gill Lowes.

If you want to learn more about the effects of heather burning, we’ve linked to some helpful resources in the show notes.

Episode 5 - Working the Land

[Theme]

Stuart Nelson: Everybody used to meet out in the—in around here in the Cheviot Meadows area, pretty much in this area-ish, I think. I'm not quite sure where it was. But like if you had stray sheep belonging to everybody else, once you'd done the handlings and that, everybody—there was like a set date, you'd gather out there with the ones belonging to everybody else, and everybody would land and then they'd keep them together and have a bit of crack and blather and carry on. And then they would shed out whose was what and what, and then everybody would go home with their sheep. But Bob was the last one he went out, and he sat there and sat there, and nobody come.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Welcome to Hefted! Upland Farming Heritage in the Cheviots. Episode 5: Working the land.

Shepherds are often imagined as solitary men, in the midst of a vast and empty landscape, alone but for their sheep. But this isn’t necessarily accurate. While shepherds have often been men, especially in recent history, that doesn’t mean that farming in the Cheviots is or has always been a man’s game. Instead, women have always played an important role in the farming systems and practices of the area. During the Middle Ages, women would likely have played a crucial role in milking the cattle and producing butter and cheese for their families in the summers.

With the development of the more modern farming system in the 17th century, women’s roles would have been to manage household and farm labour, including gardening, animal husbandry and textiles. These days, men still outnumber women in terms of formal farming employment. Women make up only 16% of farmers or farm-holders, and 28% of agricultural workers. But nonetheless there is a growing number of women, especially young women, who are choosing to take up a career in farming. We’ll hear from some of them later in this episode.

Shepherds haven’t always worked alone, either. As we learned in previous episodes, hill farming in the Cheviots used to be a much more collective affair.

Chris Dalglish explains how this sort of collective land management would have worked in the medieval period, when people lived as tenants in village communities known as townships.

Chris Dalglish: Each tenant or each family would have their individual allocation of resources, if you like, they'd have their own crops. They'd have some of their own animals. But a lot of the activity was done in common. So, the cropped fields around the village, they weren’t enclosed with fences, walls, hedges, they were left open. So, the crops of the different tenants were side by side. So that required a lot of common activity to ensure that, you know, that all worked. So, it might be that plowing is done in common. Then you have to have collective decision making about when the livestock are allowed to graze the stubble after harvest, because obviously you can't have one tenant letting their animals in before the crops have been harvested, and causing a lot of damage. So there's a lot of collective decision making and a lot of collective practice as well.

Gill Lowes (narrator): During the Middle Ages, these townships had what Chris calls a mixed farming economy. That means they grew both crops in the valleys, and raised animals. In the summers, the villagers would move the animals from the valleys out onto the hills, and back in the winters.

Chris Dalglish: With the seasonal movement on the hills, again, there's a, a large collective element to that. So that would be done at an agreed time of year, at an agreed date. Animals might be taken up at the same time by the community as a whole. And then you've got settlements on the hills, in effect, seasonal settlements where members of the community, some of the community are staying to herd, and look after the animals, milk them, make cheese, and so on.

Gill Lowes (narrator): These communal summer settlements in the hills are often referred to as shielings. This collective way of life changed with the transition from the feudal township model to the more modern farming system.

Chris Dalglish: One of the other things that happens that we see really clearly in the area, in the Cheviot Hills, is the medieval villages are cleared, they're emptied. In fact, you can still see the remains of some of them on the ground today. Some of those people are dispersed from those villages into the new farms, which are, you know, individual farmsteads and cottages dotted across the landscape, rather than people concentrated in the village. But many of the people are moved into towns and larger villages. So, in our area be places like Wooler and Yetholm, Kirk Yetholm. And they become agricultural labouring populations living in large towns and villages—relatively large for the area, or some of them would be going into crafts and so on. But for a lot of them, they're making their money by doing wage labour on neighbouring farms, often seasonally as the labour is required. They might have a cow themselves if they have access to a common piece of land in the village, but you get the creation of a large labour pool in the larger villages as a result of these big changes.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Even after the end of the feudal township system and the establishment of recognisably modern farms and farming, hill farming still involved quite a lot of people. Many more people than just the farmer and their family would live on the farm. Other workers—shepherds, tractor drivers, and others—would often live alongside them. Not only that, but many important tasks in the hill farming calendar were also carried out collectively. People from many different farms would come together to get the job done.

Alan Hutcheon: You know, whatever you were doing, with any numbers at all, you would all come together. Marking times, clipping times, dosing times, dipping times. And I think time passed quickly as well because, you know, when you—it was good times. Hard times, but good times. Compared to now, where I say you just get on yourself most of time..A lot of the time it is a—very isolated now to what it was then. And much more of a rat race than it was then as well.

I've seen, because there used to be lambing men came, I've seen when we were marking and cutting lambs, probably seven or eight people altogether working. And now there's one, maybe two.

Alan Hutcheon: And a wife. [laughter]

Alan Hutcheon: But they were good days because a lot of fun went on at those days because there was, you know, there was big gatherings of people and there was always a bit of mischief going on.

We used to clip the hogs ourselves in that little group but when it came to the hill ewes, the guys from the top would come down to us and we would go up to them. So we'd be—we’d start shearing early July, and it would go right through most of July, shearing. Because all the shepherds. And they weren't big days, not like, you know, your contract days at the minute. They'd be—you'd do one hill, it might be 400. And there'd certainly be—I've been in the shed and there's been 8 shearing away.

But you would be dosing the lambs in the morning before you got on and, yeah. But again, they were good times. You know, it wasn't as intense. Now it's just bang, bang, bang.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Stuart Nelson also remembers the days of more communal clipping.

Stuart Nelson: You know, the clipping days were big days. You know, there'd be a big lunch or dinner at lunchtime. And they'd spend half the afternoon sleeping it off. And then away they would go, and then there'd be hell, you know, hell raised till whatever time it all finished, and then the bottles would come out, and then—with the crack and the fiddle and, you know, and all that, the stuff you hear, which is great, you know. Where now it's just, you know, one or two men and a lot of sweat.

Gill Lowes (narrator): these days, this more collective working model has fallen away. Today, farmers and shepherds tend to work alone much more often. There are very few occasions, if any, to work together in large groups as they did in the past.

Why has this changed? There are many possible explanations, but one big reason is probably that there are just much fewer people living and working in the hills now than there used to be.

Chris Dalglish: Now, if you go into these hills and these valleys, um, it feels quite depopulated compared to how it was maybe in the, the 1960s, let's say. Different reasons for that. I mean, nature of farming has changed. Technology is one reason for that—I mean, things like quad bikes coming in, particularly from the 1980s, other technologies to do with managing the sheep and the productivity around the sheep change the way farming is done.

So technology changes the labour that you need. The way the economy is running and the way the land—the objectives of the landowners for the estates will change things as well, in that perhaps fewer farmers needed because perhaps that land has been given over to forestry, to game hunting and so on.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Many older shepherds have memories of a time when farms employed far more people than they do today. George Blacklock used to farm at Attonburn and Hethpool, and he remembers that...

George Blacklock: There was two shepherds, which was my father and me. And there would be a tractor man, and another man who'd just helped on the farm. There would be four to five, five in busy times in the summer maybe, four in the winter.

Gill Lowes (narrator): In the later years of his shepherding career...

George Blacklock: There was twelve shepherds at the College Valley when I went there. That's including Elsdonburn and Trowupburn, which, you know, they branch off the valley a wee bit, but it’s part of the College Valley.

Gill Lowes (narrator): But times were changing. Former estate manager at College Valley, Colin Matheson explains how, in the 1990s, he had to significantly reduce the number of shepherds in the Valley.

Colin Matheson: Well, up till whenever the big change was, 1991 or whenever, each little farm had its shepherd, traditional, so they looked after whatever the hefts were. They maybe each looked after 500 ewes or 400 ewes, you know, whatever it was.

Gill Lowes (narrator): At this time a shift in national policy pushed landowners and farmers to reduce the numbers of sheep on the hills for environmental reasons. Together with other factors, this meant that farms and estates often had to reduce the number of shepherds working on the land.

Colin Matheson: What we agreed is that there would be no redundancies, but as shepherds retired or left, they wouldn't be replaced. So, we had to then think how we were going to deal with, you know, say the shepherd from Southernknowe retired, we would have 500 ewes belonging to Southernknowe and we would have to sort of integrate them to the adjoining hefts. They wouldn't sort of leave their ground, but they would be shepherded by the two shepherds on either side. So that was the thought process.

At the same time, reduction in sheep, and there was a slight readjustment of boundaries too, went along with it. So from—I can't remember the numbers—but from 6, 000 they were reduced down to 4, 900 or 5, 000. And as the shepherds retired, right up until 1999, which is when we stopped farming. So, the sheep weren't farmed and grazed in the same traditional way. So maybe, you know, it was a more ranching type of farming. You couldn't afford to. I mean, you couldn't afford eight shepherds.

Gill Lowes (narrator): As the number of shepherds in the hills went down, and as each shepherd became responsible for looking after more and more sheep, the practice of shepherding had to change, too.

Walter Brown: In those days, the sheep were lambed on the hill where they lived. There was extra help got in, so it would be—instead of being six here, there would be nine people here, probably, doing the lambing.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Now, most lambing is done in enclosures.

Walter Brown: There's only one shepherd comes here now. There's a lot less sheep, but I mean, obviously, you can't cover the area.

Gill Lowes (narrator): On the other hand, as we heard in episode 2, some people are returning to lambing outside on the hill. Part of the reason for that is that they are finding it actually requires less labour, as well as fewer other expensive inputs and interventions.

The changes in the number of sheep and shepherds also made it more difficult for some farms to maintain the hefts. The practice of raking the sheep in and out that we learned about in episode 2 is relatively labour intensive. For many farmers and shepherds, it has been hard to keep this practice up with a much smaller workforce. Instead, many people have had to adopt what’s known as a ‘ranching’ approach to farming.

Ranching is how some shepherds in the area describe a style of farming where the sheep are more or less left to their own devices, rather than being moved about the hills and valleys each day. The shepherd or farmer only gathers them or moves them when she needs to do something with them.

Stuart Nelson: I do feel in a lot of cases that there's a lot of—the hefting and things like that is disappearing with the lack of numbers, lack of staff or labour units. Because, you know to pay somebody to go and herd the sheep—you're not making any money, you know, you're not—there's no value to it. In one sense there’s no value to it.

Gill Lowes (narrator): But it’s not quite that simple.

Stuart Nelson: But I find there's a value to me here to do it—is so I can gather them and they’re easier to handle, the more you're at them and the more you're with them. Because it would be easy just to go and get two lads to come and give us a hand to gather. Well, that's two men I've got to pay whatever just to get them into pens, let alone do anything with them, you know. So, yeah, I quite believe in that, the hefting thing, because it's—and the herding of them, to keep them right. It's not that labour intensive, to be fair, because we've nothing else to do.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Some people argue that with fewer people working, the sheep are less well looked after. That’s because the daily practice of raking—of going to the hill and looking over the sheep as you moved them—that was considered an important way for shepherds to maintain an up-to-date understanding of the animals’ wellbeing. Without this regular contact, some think it’s more difficult to make sure the sheep are properly cared for.

Bill Elliot (1): I mean, you can look after thousands and thousands of sheep badly, but you can't look after them like, you know, properly. It’s the stock that suffers, like, but they don't seem to care a lot of them, like, if they're making money out of it, that seems to be all that matters, like.

Walter Brown: I mean, now the sheep are more or less left to get their own devices because there isn't people to—It's just a completely different situation. You know, I'm talking about 50 years ago, there was six shepherds here. You were doing things every day. Now, the guy that comes here, I mean, it's not his fault, he has dozens of other jobs to do. But the sheep, but the sheep, because they're running at such a low stocking rate, they do fine on the hill, but then they, at certain times of year, they shut them in the field because they want to regenerate the heather, and that's what spoils the sheep. Hill sheep do not thrive being shut in the field. This is a changing system.

[Music]

Gill Lowes (narrator): Even though the number of shepherds has dramatically decreased over the past 50 years, there is still a need for people to work in the hills and tend the sheep. But some people are finding it increasingly difficult to get into shepherding and hill farming as a career and a way of life.

Chris Dalglish: Already in the 1950s you can read about in some of the records about problems with recruiting labour to some of the farms. It’s clear that there's a bit of a difficulty getting young people to stay in the area and stay on the farms. And that's been described in the 1950s already. So there's a kind of a depopulation and a pull away from the area as people are looking for opportunities elsewhere.

Gill Lowes (narrator): These challenges have become increasingly significant as time has gone on. Shepherding and hill farming have never been a hugely well-paid professions. But today, the draw of other opportunities, the decline in hands-on training opportunities, along with the very real financial challenge of getting started in farming – all of these factors are making it even harder for younger people who might see a future for themselves in hill farming.

Bill Elliot (1): I think the seven day a week job, you know, a lot of the young ones are not keen on that nowadays. When we were growing up it was just, you just did it naturally, like, and thought nothing about it. But I think now when their mates are, you know, playing football or rugby or something on a Saturday and they're having to, you know, work Saturday and Sunday. I think that puts a lot of them off as well. It's never been, like, a hugely well-paid job, like. you do it more, like, because you, you know, you like doing it than for the money. So, I think there'll be better paid jobs and doing other things as well. I think that'll be another one of the reasons why you don't get as many.

Mandy Smith: The young people don't want to work the hours any longer. Why would they? Who wants to work seven days a week, 12, 14 hours a day? We're dying breed. And as long as we accept that and realize that these kids are capable, but they don't want to do it all the time.

Gill Lowes (narrator): That's Mandy Smith. She was a shepherd for over 25 years, and now milks cows for Doddington Dairy, near Wooler.

Mandy Smith: So again, the more you can rota people if you like. So nobody's getting fed up. Everybody's enjoying what they're doing. It's a beautiful area to live north and England. I'm not be going anywhere. I love it here.

Gill Lowes (narrator): It’s true that in the past, there were more job opportunities. But it may also have been easier for young shepherds to start farming on their own account. Although the actual wages were low, shepherds were also given what was called a 'pack wage.' That meant that they were allowed to raise a certain number of sheep of their own alongside the farmer's ewes. Depending on how well they did with their flock, this meant they could earn a kind of bonus each year to supplement their wages.

They also grew and raised much more of their own food. Along with lower property prices, all these factors meant that many more shepherds could eventually save up enough to take on their own farm. Today, this possibility is much more limited.

The way people train to become shepherds has also changed in recent decades.

In the past, learning shepherding was done mostly through apprenticeships. A person—typically a young man—would be given a small flock to manage under the supervision of an older, more experienced shepherd. Whereas now…

Alan Hutcheon: Young lads are now pushed into a thousand ewes with very little training. And I think everybody needs to learn their trade. So I was—started off with the west side, the Mow Law, and all the fields. There’s quite a lot of fields down here. I suppose 300 sheep at the most, maybe not even that 200, 250, to look after, to start with. And then as Scott retired, I can't remember just when, and then I moved on to doing the whole of West Side and Blake Dean.

These young lads now—there is a college still up and running. They go every two weeks and only in term time.

X Hutcheon: For one day. One day a fortnight.

Alan Hutcheon: And that's probably 15 times in a year they come out with this certificate or whatever they've got. And a lot of these lads are then put into looking after a thousand sheep. Now my view on that is, if you were a builder, you'd have to serve for four years or whatever your apprenticeship, and then work under somebody, and then you'd be classified that you could build a house. Why would you let a young lad that’s 15 days in college then look after 1,000 sheep.

Gill Lowes (narrator): The problem isn't just a matter of learning the trade – the daily tasks of shepherding. It’s also – and maybe even more importantly – to do with a much deeper, embedded and embodied kind of knowledge – of the sheep, and of the land itself and how best to work with it.

Stuart Nelson: My worry is, all this knowledge is going to go, someday. Is anybody enthused enough to come and do it and have a go? Do they have the know how? Rather than, you know, maybe go into the archives and listen to this. But that's not going to help, is it? You know, if there's a storm, well I roughly know where, if there's sheep missing, on there, there and there, you know, I've got a—whichever the way the wind's coming, I've got a reasonable idea where they're going to be.

Alan Hutcheon: You'd be walking round the hill there, and we'd be walking in the west side here, and out in the back side of the west side here, there was an old house, justs around about here somewhere. And we'd walk past that, and Jock would say, you know, look at it, there was the foundations of the house. There's nothing left except just the foundations. And that's where the garden was, he would tell me. That's all lost now, because nobody knows that now.

You know, I walked with him as a youngster. Nobody walked with me as a youngster, if you know what I mean. That generation thing's gone. And it's the same over on Shoulder Hill here. Down here, there was a house out here as well. And, you know, every now and then way back then, you'd go down and you'd have a look at it. And, you know, that's all lost now. And that

side of it, I think, is a shame.

Gill Lowes (narrator): It's true that things have changed, and that there are fewer young people and new entrants in hill farming. But nonetheless, young people who do enter the profession feel a sense of optimism. Even though some of the traditional training routes are not available anymore, they are finding new ways to learn the skills and knowledge they need.

Scott Iley: I suppose eight years ago when we moved here, I sort of came as a new entrant really, although my kind of family background was in sheep farming. And for me it's been a really positive experience. I think that the local community has probably been really supportive and happy to share the wisdom and the knowledge that people have gained over a lot of years. And generally, I've found that in these types of communities, because we're slightly remote, I think that people kind of need each other more. There's more kind of interdependence. And I think that that builds quite a strong sense of community, which has been a really positive thing. And yeah, I feel like we've been really well supported by the local community.

Sarah Chapman: My name's Sarah Chapman. I work—well, I help my husband on the estate and we basically look after sheep, cattle, and also, woodlands on this estate at Heathery Hall.

Gill Lowes (narrator): In 2021, the estate took back some of the tenanted land to run in hand.

Sarah Chapman: We're quite new to farming, so my husband got the estate manager's job here in 2018 initially just to look after the woodlands 'cause he's a forester, and also the properties on the estate. We took it back with a view to learning how to run it organically, as the estate owners wanted to. And we thought, ‘oh, well, we'll give it a bash.’ And, yeah, we're just learning and finding our feet and running it. I came into it with, basically an 8-year-old and 2-year-old twins. It wasn't the best time to come into farming. [laughs] It was a bit full on, let's say. That first lambing season was just a nightmare.

But we persevered and I had a lot of good people around me. Mandy has mentored us, a shepherdess, who's—How long have you been shepherding? 25 years. Too long. [laughs]. So you've had a lot of experience in anything that I needed help with. You were there on hand, on site as well to help me with, and mentor myself and my husband through it. And we've had people like Candice, we've had, Alan Scott, one of the old boys that's in Wooler, so he's taught me everything that I need to know about Cheviots and advises me on where to go to buy, where to go to sell.

It's just, yeah, I've met some really, really good, decent people that have given me good advice. And you kind of need that, you need that old knowledge to be passed down to people like me that are just getting into it and are very green. And, yeah, it's, it's been interesting. But I've been surrounded by people who know their craft.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Beyond support from local people, social media can also be a major source of learning and support for new entrant farmers.

Candice Bell: I wouldn't have met Sarah unless it was through social media.

Sarah Chapman: Yeah. Facebook.

Candice Bell: Yeah. Facebook, exactly. I think that's changed. Whereas, you know, in the hills, in the old days, it would've been seeing each other in the queue at the post office or seeing each other in the queue for getting your jerry can filled up or whatever. And now it's, you've got this communication, this support network, not only via people like Mandy who's here all the time, or when you need her. But you can message people and say, ‘what would you do in this situation? I've got a lamb that looks like this. What would you do?’ And it can be quick and it can be—that's a whole new aspect of sharing the load.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Sarah and Candice are part of a Facebook group called Ladies who Lamb.

Sarah Chapman: That's a brilliant forum, isn't it? For, um, just chatting through any problems. People put pictures up of and videos up of their, their pooly lambs, pooly sheep. And it's just a, an absolute wealth of knowledge, isn’t it?

Candice Bell: When you have pet lambs, the biggest thing you'll get is bloat. When they get to a certain age, they get, um, more prone to bloat. So they get to about five, six weeks old and they will expand. And then I put a video on of deflating a lamb with a needle, with a large gauge needle, and it pretty much went viral on ladies that lamb. So everybody is now asking for that video to be sent to them when they get—you know, I get these emergency messages, I've got a lamb with bloat, can you forward me that video? And it's actually been pinned now to the Facebook page so people can find it. Now, in the old days, yes, these shepherds would've known those tricks. Of course, they would. I learned that from an old shepherd, but they couldn't share that readily other than actually doing it in front of them. And so now I think that's opened that up.

Sarah Chapman: Definitely. And, and just with social media that on Facebook, that group and also on Instagram, loads of people are sharing what they're doing on a day-to-day basis, and how they do things. And you get friendly with a few good farmers if you know what I mean. And you share, you look at their videos and you see what they're doing at what time of year and that kind of—you kind of start planning your shepherding year around what people are doing around you and how they do things. I've learned a lot from Instagram and Facebook.

Candice Bell: Yeah. The biggest sort of family support you have is the ladies that lamb family, I would say.

Sarah Chapman: Yeah.

Candice Bell: I think the Ladies that Lamb just shows you, you're not the only one. Because the lambing shed in the middle of the night is a very lonely place. But actually you have seen people on that group saying, ‘Anyone awake, I've got trouble with this. What would you do?’ And actually people are answering at two o'clock in the morning. Because actually there's not just me sitting in the lambing shed, there's loads of us. And I do think that it's a good thing for, for that. I know it's just women and people say, ‘oh, well, you know, is, is there a men's one? It's awfully sexist if you can't have the men in.’ But actually it's not, it's, it's bigging up that community for women where we are not gonna be judged by men. This community of ladies that lamb is so supportive. And I think it has just bigged up—awful phrase—but bigged up this whole idea of women in agriculture.

That's the other thing is that they used to, people used to use the term shepherdess. And now are you a lady shepherd or are you just a shepherd? People say, ‘I don't want to be a shepherdess. I want to be a shepherd. Just because I'm a female, why should I be a shepherdess?’

[Music]

Gill Lowes (narrator): There are lots of possible ways to support more young people to choose hill farming as a career. But bringing young people back to the hills might also require accepting that things have changed, and thinking more broadly about how to keep the community alive.

[Music]

Some people see the co-existence of shooting estates with farming as one way to make sure there are enough people living in the hills to support thriving rural communities.

Alan Hutcheon: It's difficult to say it's right or wrong because it provides employment in the valley and you know, because there would be no more shepherds in the valley if the shooting wasn't there. And so therefore there is, in our valley here, there's four gamekeepers, so there'd be four families less. So, you know, you, to keep the countryside alive with people, I suppose it's a good thing in lots of ways. Um, I just sometimes think it maybe is at the forefront rather than working alongside.

Stuart Nelson: The bigger picture is that things change, and a lot of those houses what was shepherds in them, now there's keepers in them, with kids who go to school, and they have a spending power in the local economy.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Others see re-wilding and other forms of land management for restoring and conserving natural landscapes as a possible means of revitalising communities in the hills.

Chris Dalglish believes that there are opportunities to be found in new schemes for environmental land management.

Chris Dalglish: Perhaps not to the maximum extent they used to be, but certainly more than they are now, repopulation and in amongst that, opportunities for young people who are, you know, might be keen to build a life on the land and have a career on the land, and to raise families in these areas and to create communities or be part of communities.

Those opportunities come because we need a lot of innovation in the way farming is done.

So you need people coming in. You need people to sort of come in with energy and ideas to do things, but potentially it's also around—we might move towards some ways of farming the land, and managing land, which are more labour intensive than they have been for the last few decades. So, therefore you need more people to manage estates and to manage farms for environmental objectives. More hands-on approach, more gentle as a result. Fewer perhaps machines, fewer chemicals and so on. And if that can be achieved, and that has to stack up financially and it has to work. But if that can be achieved, it creates a lot more opportunities for people to be out on the land.

It's perhaps that the jobs have to change and they have to be more mixed. It's not just farming, of course, it's perhaps land management of which farming is one element, but of course you're doing many other things as a sort of nature conservationist, as a forester and a woodland manager and so on and so forth. So perhaps apprenticeships and training and opportunities for people as the sort of land managers of the future, of which farming, drawing on some of the traditions with innovation is a part of what they're doing.

So that's potentially quite exciting. That's potentially something quite hopeful in that. But clearly there's a lot for people to work out as to how that might be something that could be done and made to work.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Walter Riddell sees the Hepple Estate’s managed wilding approach as a way to increase local employment.

Walter Riddell: This sort of wilding system tends to get stereotyped as shutting the door, walking away and not employing anyone. And just on that, we are now employing at Hepple three times as many people under this regime that we did under the old regime. Part of it is that if you go into this sort of a system, you still have to keep up a whole load of things like infrastructure, like walls, fences, we're planting trees, all sorts of things that draw on the local economy beyond the people that we employ here. So this is a sort of plea to those who believe that this scheme, this sort of system depletes the local community or depletes the local employment pool. It doesn't seem to, at this stage.

So, I'm quite sensitive to that notion of destroying the local community. Because it was one of the things that I love so much about coming up here. So, I think there's a responsibility on people to think about it, make sure that they're not destroying it. And I hope, I hope that it's well thought of so far from that perspective, what we're doing.

[Music]

Gill Lowes (narrator): Thank you for listening to Hefted! Upland Farming Heritage in the Cheviots. In this episode, you heard contributions from Stuart Nelson, Chris Dalglish, Alan Hutcheon, George Blacklock, Colin Matheson, Walter Brown, Bill Elliot (formerly a shepherd at the Mains of Yetholm), Mandy Smith, Scott Iley, Sarah Chapman, Candice Bell, Walter Riddell, and me Gill Lowes.

Episode 6 - 'A Perfect Republic'

Charles Armstrong: Another thing the shepherds used to be good at. I'm wasting your time, I think, but another thing they were good at were poaching salmon. And there was one story when they used to come out of the Scottish side—Jedburgh side, and in this particular story—horse and cart, there's that many salmon. I mean, the Coquet was tremendous for salmon. Well, the bailiff caught them, and they could have been brought up for murder. But they caught the bailiff, these poachers, and they stuffed him up a drain. You see, head first, but they put a post between his legs so he couldn't get back down. Well, they took the post out when they were finished, when they went home, but, I mean, that was pretty dangerous, you know.

[Theme music]

Gill Lowes (narrator): Welcome to Hefted! Upland Farming Heritage in the Cheviots. Episode 6: ‘A perfect Republic’

These days, most people understand farming as a purely commercial activity. Farmers produce food to sell to other people. A product just like any other, a business just like any other. We expect that farmers have to buy their food, their fuel, and all the other things they need to live and work, just like everyone else. But this hasn't always been the case.

In the Cheviots, farmers have a long history of producing not only for sale on markets, but also for their own subsistence. That is, providing their own basic needs not through the market, but directly from the land. Chris Dalglish explains that in the Middle Ages…

Chris Dalglish: There's a large element of subsistence farming—the crops around the village, much of that might be grown for subsistence. And of course people have their animals and they can get milk, cheese, and so on and some meat from that.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Even until much more recently, people farming in the Cheviots engaged in significant amounts of self-provisioning. For example, it was common until well into the 20th century for farmers to have a house cow to provide milk for themselves, or to keep pigs for their own table.

Walter Brown: All farms had that. You know, they had to have their own cow. They had two cows, because a cow only milks for 9 or 10 months, so you had— Ideally, you had a cow calving in the spring, and you milked that all summer, and then the other one calving in October or something so you had milk all the time because there was no way you could—I mean now you go and buy the milk, or Tesco turns up with it. But in those days there was nothing like that.

Valerie Brown: You had huge potato fields?

Walter Brown: Yeah, each farm had a potato field. I think the, the one here was where the sheep pens are now, somewhere there or down there. They had an area land that they grew potatoes in every year. I can't help but think that there must have been pretty poor cob by growing the same potatoes every year, but they did have that.

Charles Armstrong: Most places took on lambing stuff, and there was no lambing indoors in those days or anything like this. And your lambing man came. You had him for a month, and he did two things. One was he contributed, when the lambing was almost finished, to setting the garden.

That was a big thing, mind, setting the garden, or the what they called the tatie garth. All farms had a what they called a tatie garth, which was about a quarter of an acre, and that was so, I suppose, they could grow sufficient potatoes and whatever. And then they'd have, beyond the potato garth, they had a garden. where they grew the lettuce and the fine foods. And so he set the garden, and he also contributed to the cutting of the peats.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Peat was likely used as the primary domestic fuel source in the Cheviots for about as long as people have lived here. Peat is a substance, like soil, that forms in boggy areas when plants partly decompose. It stores a lot of carbon–more than forests–and is found all over the world, including in the uplands of the UK, like the Cheviots. To be used as fuel, peat has to be cut and dried, before it is burned.

Charles Armstrong: They cut them into—about like that. A proper spade to do it, and they laid them out like that, to dry, and then after a week or so, they turned them and stood them on the ends like that, two peats, like a little tent. That was what they called rickling. So you rickled them, and then after—and you put them at quarter to three sun. In that direction, quarter to three, because that meant that you got the best of the sun and the wind, a west wind, mainly it's—The wind always blew through them, same as stooking corn, and then you piped them or stacked them. And then they were led home and stacked outside the back door.

Walter Brown: They cut the peat in May. After they’d finished lambing time, sort of May, beginning of June, they cut the peat. And then they left it in the summer to dry. But I think lots of years there would be, you know, a wet summer, they wouldn't be very good. If it was a really dry, hot summer, the peats would be dry, but lots of years, you know, there would be a lot of rain and they wouldn't be very dry. And then they led them in—August, September time or the end of the summertime anyway. So it'd be a lot of leading. Leading with a horse and cart. I think I've heard it said that they needed about a cart load a week for this farm, so they probably had to lead 52 cart loads.

It would be very extensive here, not in my time. I mean, I can just remember the shepherd that lived further up the valley here. He left here in the 1960s, was it? Yes, the 1960s, and he—I can just remember going to the peat cutting, but it would finish in the 1960s here. But previous to that, you know, in the 1800s, this farm would be all supplied by peat. Peat diggings were out on the hill here. There's an area there called Broad Moss. Does it say Broad Moss? Here it is, is that it? That's certainly where they cut the peat there.

Because this farm, well there would be two or three houses here, and it would be the only fuel used. And there's masses of the old peat diggings out on there, on that area, it's called Broad Moss. And there's a track that goes up the hill, which is still called the old peat road yet, goes up through the wood and along the hillside.

Valerie Brown: Whereabout at the Hope were the peats?.

Walter Brown: The peats. The peats from the Hope. This is Langleeford, here, it’s a farm. There was a shepherd’s cottage called Langleeford Hope. It's now the shooting lodge. But they cut the peat up there in that area and there's a track goes up the hill there called the peat track.

If you were to go up there now, you can see the old—there's quite an area where they've cut the peat out. Because it was, it would be, I don't know how many years it would be cut there, but for a long, long time.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Peat is no longer used as a fuel source in the Cheviots. It was replaced by other fuel sources at some point during the 20th century as other options became available. It has remained in use in some other parts of the world, like Ireland, until the present day. But it is being increasingly abandoned as a fuel source because of the negative climatic and ecological impacts of harvesting and burning it.

Peat has a very high carbon content. That means that cutting and burning it releases a huge amount of carbon dioxide, one of the main greenhouse gases that is causing climate change.

Peat bogs are also important habitats for different kinds of wildlife. And they act like huge sponges, playing an important role in reducing flooding. But peat builds up over a very long time, meaning it’s very difficult to replace once it has been dug up and destroyed.

[Music]

While it's easy to be romantic about older ways of life, it's important to also remember that they relied on a completely different social structure.

As we've heard, setting the garden and cutting the peat were at least in part the responsibility of the hired lambing man who came once a year, a staffing expense that would be much more difficult to justify in today's economy. And this kind of more 'self-sufficient' way of life also relied on a very particular set of norms and expectations around the place of women on the farm.

Mandy Smith: These old boys up on the hills that were farming away up there, and the kids were running around the farm and, you know, it was very, very different. Their wives were at home. They were always at home cooking, cleaning, feeding everybody. They can't do it now. People need two wages regardless of whether it's the two wages that are working on the farm, or someone has to go off and work somewhere else and bring—they just can't farm how they used to.

Gill Lowes (narrator): In some places, these kinds of expectations about women continue—even if women do generally now formally work either on or off the farm—or both. In other places, things are changing. There are many more opportunities for women of the next generation to get into farming on their own account, for example. But change is never linear, and not everything changes at once.

Pam Brown: I'm seeing more and more shepherdess coming through. I mean, we've—well, we've got two girls working the farm today. One's 21, one's 17. Both want to be long term in farming. Not as many boys coming through, I don't think.

And within our family, sometimes I think it's a bit of an old-fashioned relationship. Like my husband would never lift a finger in the house. Like I'm on call tonight, if I get called out, there will be no tea for the kids. It'll be peanut butter sandwiches probably. So we're quite old fashioned that way. But then at the same time, my mother-in-law is—certainly has been in the past—very hands-on, like, like I am with doing lambing and stuff. Um, so yeah, I mean, my mother-in-law, I think, I think she probably would be. She wouldn't be classed as full time on the farm, and a lot of what she does is the stewardship paperwork and things like that. Going to a lot of meetings and stuff. But at lambing time, she's full time in the shed.

My husband and my father-in-law would be classed as way more than full-time. They'll be like 80 hours a week or something like that. And at lambing time, I'm 70 hours a week. I keep a time sheet only because we got some funding to do the holiday cottages and I need to show that our wage bill’s gone up—our wage bill hasn't gone up 'cause I don't get paid for it—but our hours worked has gone up. So I do actually keep a time sheet and it’s averaged about 70 hours a week.

So, and then like just generally in the community there was a real hoo-ha a few years ago. My husband is the chairman—or was the chairman of the local Shepherd's Supper—and it has always traditionally not allowed women, and people started to boycott it. Like there was people who—like men who had always gone to the Shepherd’s Supper and the night Shepherd’s Supper—they're sitting in the bar of the pub where the Shepherd’s Supper was, boycotting it, not going into Shepherd's Supper because they weren't allowing women to— But the numbers were going down and down and Rob's not the most organized, and it's just fizzled out and hasn't gone ahead now anyway. But it's just interesting that people were starting to stage a bit of a protest about women not being included.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Just like anyone, a good life for a farmer consists of more than just meeting their basic needs, like having enough to eat and a roof over their head. A good life also involves other, less concrete things, like a healthy social life.

Charles Armstrong: The way of life that we had in the hills was tremendous. You know, the old shepherds, they used to move… It used to start in about October. They would visit their neighbour shepherds, and one of the things they did, they were all very keen on was Ha’penny Nup, a card game. And at the beginning of the season, they had a little bag and put so many pennies in it or ha’pennies, whatever. It wasn't big money, but they would visit one another's shepherd's house over the winter months. And when your money ran out, well, you were finished. You were finished.

There was that, and then, alongside that, they were all very good musicians, and you used to travel, you know, miles, fiddle in a bag, this, that, and the other, accordion. It was all done on foot. And the wives would go along as well, and they would—It was a party. So we weren't lonely. It lasted all winter.

[Music]

Gill Lowes (narrator): A lot of the activities in the shepherd’s social calendar used to be connected to seasonal collective working practices, like clipping.

Charles Armstrong: So, right, we've clipped the hogs, and the next job was the ewe clipping or the milk clipping. That was when we had the big gather. Now, this was the occasion of the year because in the hills, you were helped by your neighbours, and it was basically a festive season for the next fortnight or three weeks. And I was at one clipping where I think there was 36 shearers there, all from neighbouring farms, and you spent the season going there, going there, going there, going there, and you had their assistance to gather sheep.

Each valley had its—in most valleys—had help from your neighbour.

We used to join with Langleeford, where there was seven shepherds there, and we used to join with Wooler Common, which there was two there. And occasionally the common burn one would go to Wooler Common. The Langleeford one was the biggest one. They were usually the end of the season, and it was just a festive occasion.

And on one occasion—it was a great place to go, Langleeford. It was really—It was just an enjoyable occasion. Well, the farmer there was a character, a real character, and full of good fun and sport. Well, at this day, I think it gave everybody Lucozade. They were thirsty, you see. I'm sure it was Lucozade, but never mind. He'd introduced quite a drop of whiskey into the Lucozade. Well, probably more whiskey than what there was Lucozade. Well, some were poorly the next day. Some weren't, but that was the type of thing that used to happen.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Another key event of the social calendar was the sales.

Charles Armstrong: End of August, that was the start, where your best wether lambs would be run off, and in the old days, they would be driven to—well, it was Bellingham or Wooler, or a lot of lambs was Hawick, used to have a three day sale. They were driven miles to Hawick. That's all gone now.

Alan Hutcheon: There was always such great competition between the shepherds at sale time for your lambs. And you'd get all these pens of sheep and, you know, that was it. You were proud of what you had, and you're made to be proud, you know. Things had to be done a certain way. There was no sheep going to market, dirty or anything like that. It had to be clean, you know, clean and well presented, no matter what you did.

And there's a—as I say, it was a—oh, not a competition, but it was—you know, who could do, who could be best.

Hutcheon 2: Rivalry.

Alan Hutcheon: Yeah. Friendly rivalry, though. You know, if your lambs was 50 pence on a pound dearer than somebody else's, then it was ‘Oh, I'll beat him today,’ and then next time he would beat you and it was, it was that pride in what you do.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Today, people living in the hills have - and rely on! – cars to get them around and facilitate their lives—whether this be children's activities, a social event in the village, or visiting neighbours. But, not that long ago, people had to get around without cars. Not only that, but practically all social connection and interaction had to happen in person. Nowadays, of course, things like telephones and the internet have significantly changed how and when people in the hills can connect to one another—and to the world beyond the Cheviots.

Charles Armstrong: In 1947, the at Broadstruther before we went had a wireless, and it stopped working. He had to carry the battery from Broadstruther to Wooler, where he always had one on charge. It would last maybe three weeks. So he walked to Wooler and took the next battery back. The wireless still didn't work. So, the next stage, he picked—the same day, he picked the wireless up and took the wireless to Wooler and walked back at home.

They said he was three times at Wooler that day. You know, and the snow was damn nearly waist deep. That was 1947.

And living in the hills in those days, usually, that was— You'd get a young couple. They would get married and go to labour. Somebody retired out by, and aye, when the family came along, that was the biggest problem. And the one from—shepherd’s wife there, she had to be taken from there to the hospital by sledge. And the thing is that I'm just old enough to remember some of these people that experienced all of these things.

Stephen Crees: The Internet's changed things massively, hasn't it? Massively. I mean, the kids—so at one time I would think my kids would've been pulling my hair out being a certain age up here and now just they're in contact with the mates all over. Lauren has a friend—two cousins, in fact, in Nottingham. So, and she's on them each every day, speaking away to them.

Gill Lowes (narrator): One of the things that has had a huge effect on the way of life in the Cheviots is that the number of people living here has gone down, like we learned about in episode 5. Often, now, buildings that use to house local families are used as holiday homes for tourists.

Bill Elliot (1): You know, villages down, like, over the border there, Kirk Newton and Kilham, and you know, they were little villages—Mindrum and all them bits, you know, they used to have dances at their farms at nights. And, you know, well, now there's just—they're all holiday lets...

Gill Lowes (narrator): While the land is still used for productive purposes–farming and forestry, for example, it is also being increasingly used as a place of recreation.

Chris Dalglish: Commercial hunting has become more important on one or two estates in the area. So as hunting as a business—so people come from all over the world to on hunting holidays to the Cheviot Hills for game bird shooting. And if the estate prioritises that, what that means is that they will reduce the land that's given over to farming, to manage the land for more game birds for shooting. So, we've seen a reduction in the number of farms, the number of farmers, and farming families in some areas of the Cheviot Hills. And in their case, farming is taking on a different role where it's a tool for managing the vegetation for hunting purposes rather than about being about food production, which is farming's primary purpose, if you like.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Another major—and growing—recreational activity in the hills is walking. Today, Northumberland National Park receives more than 1 million visitors each year, mostly walkers. Yet the concept of recreational walking, particularly as something accessible to ordinary people, is relatively new. The first campaign for public recreational access to the countryside was initiated in the late 19th century, and it wasn’t until the mid-20th century that ‘hiking’ as we know it today became an established activity

Bill Elliot (1): Since the Pennine Way started, there's a lot of these walks round about here. There's St. Cuthbert's Way, Pennine Way, I think there's another one as well. It's always been—there's always been a lot of walkers, you know, come through there, aye? Aye. Which used to be slightly annoying, was, you know, you get a sheep on its back, and maybe it’d be out on the top and they would come to the house and tell me, which was good, but, you thought, well, why do you not just shove it over, like? They never seemed to have the sense to do that, like. But it was good that they came at least because it's an easy cure for that, like, if you know, because they die quite quickly this time of year when they're full of lush grass and everything, if you don't get them. But other than that, no, they were never a lot of bother, really.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Some people see the Cheviots–and other places like them–as a place to escape the hurly burly of city life. A place to breathe fresh air and recover in a more peaceful, more ‘natural’ environment. This idea is not actually that new, even if the number of people who are able to act on this belief and travel to the area has grown a lot in recent decades. In fact, Walter Brown shares the story of when Victorian author Sir Walter Scott visited the Cheviots for precisely this reason.

Walter Brown: What had happened, he'd—he was a youth, he was 19 year old then and he had tuberculosis. And he lived in Edinburgh, which would be a filthy city then. And he had to come out of the country to get—for his health. He came with his uncle, and they came to Wooler, because Wooler was a sort of health resort.

Gill Lowes (narrator): When he arrived in Wooler, though, the young Scott couldn’t find accommodation. Luckily, he met the Henderson family, farming at Langleeford—where Walter was later the tenant. They invited him to stay with them.

Walter Brown: And he wrote a letter from here. I've actually seen the original letter. I went to Edinburgh one day. It's in a museum in Edinburgh, the original letter. And I've got a copy of it with the whole letter, and he wrote a letter to his friend. Supposedly he shot a crow to get a quill to write the letter. But it says in there that— These Hendersons, the family were quite well educated and they said he wouldn't have needed to shoot a crow, they would have had a pen.

Yeah, well that's a romantic story, I know, but it gives you a bit of the letter in there. And he'd drunk the goat's whey, the milk, that was the health cure. The milk from the goat. And he said it was brought to his bedside every morning at six by a very pretty dairymaid.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Being able to access and visit rural places, like the Cheviots, is important for people’s mental and physical health. But problems can arise when the needs of visitors put pressure on local infrastructure.

In the UK, this tension often comes in the form of holiday lets. As more and more homes are turned into holiday accommodation, it becomes harder and harder for local people to find an affordable place to live.

Some landowners in the Cheviots are aware of the social problems that having too many holiday lets can contribute to. Places like the College Valley Estate are trying to avoid turning the hills into a place just for recreation and tourism but to keep it as a place where people actually live and work.

John Cresswell: I think the board and with Stephen is, they've been quite keen not to hollow it out. So we could have done—these 23 properties that Stephen has to look after, we could have let them all out for holiday cottages and instead we've done four. And the rest Stephen rents—quite carefully selected people who he thinks will play maybe a role if not on the estate, in the community.

Stephen Crees: The age when I first started here was quite elderly, the population, and I've tried to lower that a bit by getting a few younger families in, into some of the tenancies. But it just depends on, you know, you look for your rent and then you look to see where that sits in the market rent, market rental value, and then you think, well, there's a lot of young ones out there now that probably struggle to pay the rent that we are looking for. So then we'll make an assessment on that. I'll go back to the directors. If I find a perfect tenant, I'll say, ‘Look, they're not gonna afford this, but can we, yeah, possibly drop that a couple of hundred quid or whatever,’ you know, to try and get the average age down.

I've been lucky enough living here. I've brought my family up here, Liam's 16 now going on 17 at the end of the month, Lauren's 13. And they've lived here all their life, so privilege, really.

John Cresswell: The other thing Stephen's doing with people is, we've got a bunk house here, 26 bed—

Stephen Crees: 24

John Cresswell: 24. And we're putting a lot more effort into getting young adults or teenagers into the place. At the moment mainly through schools, but we're hoping these will be more multi-day trips, because we think it's quite important that people have the opportunity to get out at that age. And also, you know, there may be the odd one who wants to make a career up here. And if we can scoop them up, then that's a big, big positive, I think.

[Theme music]

Gill Lowes (narrator): Thank you for listening to Hefted! Upland Farming Heritage in the Cheviots.

This episode’s title is taken from William Wordsworth’s 1810 travel guide for the Lake District, but we thought it suited the Cheviots, too. 

‌ In this episode, you heard contributions from Charles Armstrong, Chris Dalglish, Walter Brown, Mandy Smith, Pam Brown, Alan Hutcheon, Stephen Crees, Bill Elliot (formerly a shepherd at the Mains of Yetholm), John Cresswell, and me Gill Lowes.

Episode 7 - What is this land for?

Charles Armstrong: If you have money, you can do a lot of things. You can do any mortal thing if you've got money, but if you haven't got money, you can do nothing.

[Theme music]

Gill Lowes (narrator): Welcome to Hefted! Upland Farming Heritage in the Cheviots. Episode 7: What is this land for?

Why do people farm in the hills? What is this land used and managed for? To make a living, certainly. But also to produce food, and to manage, alter and restore the environment.

Chris Dalglish: the Cheviot Hills have always been used for different purposes, different land uses. That's the case in the Middle Ages. It's the case right through the creation of the modern farms, and it's the case now. What I mean by that is hill farming is one use, but alongside that, you've got hunting, medieval hunting, but also sport hunting from the Victorian era onwards. And hunting is, is now—so largely we're talking about game bird shooting—hunting now is a commercially profitable business in the area. So hunting is another major land use. Forestry—woodland is another major land use that we have to think about. And then there are others beside. Nature conservation you might think of as another land use that's quite important here.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Of course, in British uplands like the Cheviots, farming has always been - and remains - a core land use. But, as Chris mentioned, land use is actually very diverse. This diversity is partly a result of different people having different ideas about how the uplands should be used, and what the purpose or goal of upland land-use is.

Obviously, farmers themselves have important perspectives, and are a major decision-maker when it comes to deciding what the land is for. But they make their decisions in a much broader context. Landowners, industry, and the government also have their own – sometimes competing – ideas about how the land should be used.

The idea that the government can - and should - intervene in food production has a very long history going back to ancient times. For example, the Roman empire used to regularly intervene in land management and food supply to ensure food security for civilian and military populations. But Chris Dalglish explains that modern forms of agricultural law and policy that we might recognise today were only introduced in the UK in the early 20th century.

Chris Dalglish: In the 1930s, the UK government is already concerned about the extent to which the UK is reliant on imports. So what you get in the 1930s before the war, but then post-war especially, is new legislation and new government policies which are really trying to—I mean, in modern terms, you could say increase the food security of the United Kingdom. So it's all about increasing production, increasing domestic production, and relying less on what's coming in from abroad. What they do is you provide guaranteed prices for farm produce within the UK so the farmers and the landowners know that they've got a guaranteed price for the produce and can therefore invest in increasing production. And they also control prices of imports to reduce the competition from abroad.

Gill Lowes (narrator): This system of price support and control was in place, more or less, from the 1940s through to the 1970s.

But agricultural policy is not just about financial support for farmers. It also has a major effect on the ins and outs of how farms are run. That’s because agricultural policy creates incentives for farmers to manage the land in particular ways in order to reach government goals and receive government grants and payments. And this, in turn, can have major effects on things like rural employment, and the environmental impacts of farming.

The price support and import control system Chris describes led to huge increases in the stocking rate of sheep in hill farming across the UK, including in the Cheviots.

Chris Dalglish: So more and more sheep in our area being put on the hills because the economic conditions are right because of government regulation. Then in the 1970s, the UK joins—well now the European Union, was the European economic community, and therefore signs up to the Common Agricultural Policy. To begin with not much changed. Through the rest of the seventies into the eighties it’s still very much a focus on increasing domestic production, controlling import prices to achieve that and also guaranteeing domestic prices to achieve that. The next big change really comes in the 1980s. There's a move from price guarantees and controlling prices of imports to subsidies. And that's the start with the Common Agricultural Policy at European level of policymakers believing that farming policy should not just be about farming, it should be about meeting environmental objectives as well. So, we get a shift to the policies wanting to limit production, not increase production, and also to encourage land uses and farming which is more environmentally beneficial.

So to begin with, the subsidies are linked to production. So for example, how many sheep you have on your land and the subsidies are about controlling those numbers.

Gill Lowes (narrator): In the 1990s, a system of ewe premiums, also known as headage payments, was introduced for upland farms. Ewe premiums are a subsidy payment to farmers based on the number of ewes they keep, up to a certain number of ewes. This system has been phased out in England but continues in Scotland.

Piers Holmesmith: When ewe premiums came in the early ‘90s, that gave us another jump up the ladder. Because, basically, the factor of the estate said—you see, you could only have a thousand quota per person, right? So, Anne was in a partnership with me, my wife. So we could only really have two thousand sheep. So he told us, he said, ‘Well, if you can get round it,’ he said, ‘you can get more quota, you go ahead and get it,’ basically. So anyway, we found a way round it, and we finished up with a quota for, God knows, nearly 4, 000.

Oh, it was a big cheque. [laughs] It was a big check. But, then, it's a pity you've got to farm and rely upon subsidies all the time. It's far better if you can stand on your own feet, but that's not to be.

Gill Lowes (narrator): But not everyone was able to get around the limits imposed by headage quotas. Some estates, like the College Valley, found they had to reduce the number of sheep - and shepherds - as a result.

Bill Elliot (2): College Valley being a company, we got the full payment on the first thousand ewes and then 50 percent on the remainder, which was knocking—it was about 4, 800 we were short of. We were running about 5, 800 ewes in those days. So the decision was made that I had to reduce shepherds.

So, that was in ’92, I think it would be, ‘92. So I had to reduce shepherds. And to do that, I said, ‘the only way to do it is basically reduce the sheep on Cheviot.’ So I reduced them by a third. So went down from about 1, 800 on Cheviot down to about 1, 200. It was an awful situation to be in, but yet I was given time to do it, and the estate said, you know, good redundancies and whatever. So I was very lucky. The husband and wife team at Goldscleugh were approaching retirement so they were given a house for life and a very good redundancy. The shepherd at Dunsdale—a wonderful guy who was qualified as a teacher. So anyway he said, ‘oh well right, I'll go back to teaching.’ And the shepherd at Mounthooly stayed. So it all sorted itself out and it was just wonderful to have the time to explain and do it.

Chris Dalglish: But as time goes on, that system shifts and it becomes decoupled from the numbers of animals you have on the land for a pasture farm and attached to how much land—how many hectares you have. So it's an area-based scheme. One of the effects of that change and the subsidies and the way they work is that we see quite a dramatic reduction in the numbers of sheep on the hills. And that's one of the objectives of the policy is to reduce the numbers of sheep in the hills because there's been overgrazing from an environmental perspective.

Alan Hutcheon: We needed more food producers, we needed this, we needed that. We were given headage payments to have stock there, so therefore farmers was going to take advantage of that. And I suppose looking back at it, it did destroy the land a bit.

Chris Dalglish: With the UK's exit from the European Union, we've had agricultural policy being set within the UK again, and it's devolved. So we have different policies in England and in Scotland, and the Cheviot Hills, the border runs right across the top of those hills. So one farm you might have the Scottish policy in place. Then over the fence in the neighbouring farm, it's the English policy. And that will change how farming operates on one side of the fence to the other, if you like,

The system in Scotland, in a nutshell, is mirroring the way the EU system worked in the sense that it's got universal payments to farmers for farming, and then additional payments for environmental goods particularly. So, it's driven by food production and food security, but also by environmental objectives around the land use. In England, you've got a more of a free market kind of approach where there's no universal basic payment for farming. There's specific payments for environmental projects

Gill Lowes (narrator): Candice Bell is an arable farmer in the lowlands to the North-East of the Cheviots, who has taken advantage of the various environmental schemes the government has offered in recent years.

Candice Bell: We've actually taken out a quite a bit of, um, non-productive or less productive land and put it into various stewardships. So things that are like, non harvestable crops and things, wildflower meadow pasture mixes, that sort of thing. And for the areas that were notoriously not yielding with the conventional crops.

So we are not organic. We are a conventional farm. So yes, we spray things and we get rid of things that shouldn't be there and whatnot, but this—these areas that weren't making us any money—in fact, you know, you would go through it and think, ‘oh, well we might as well just spray that off because it's not gonna create anything.’ We've now sown these to this government scheme. And so we're getting income from that, but also we are increasing, birds and bees and insects and various things like that. And we have seen a difference.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Under the stewardship schemes Candice is a part of, grazing is allowed at certain times. She has two white-faced woodland sheep, a rare breed of sheep that is classed as a conservation grazer.

Candice Bell: They eat everything. They're like goats. So you've put—we've put them into this field and it's got rushes at the bottom and there's a few nettles and thistles, but they've eaten the lot. If I got a flock of these, I could put them in there to graze that.

Gill Lowes (narrator): But would Candice and her family have engaged in these ecologically protective activities without stewardship and other environmental farming schemes?

Candice Bell: I suppose in a way we probably wouldn't have done had there not been a financial benefit, to be honest, because, you know, it's a business we've gotta make money.

It used to be quite a—it was one of these things, ‘is it worth being in it?’ And if you have to ask that question, then no, it probably isn't. But, actually, it is worth being in it now because you, you know, your carbon credits and all those sort of things, it all adds up. So yeah, I think it is now worth it even though there's paperwork. It’s—they've certainly refined the schemes from the old ELS and the HLS that they used to do. They have refined the schemes now.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Pam Brown and her family also farm part of their land under stewardship arrangements.

Pam Brown: We've always been in some sort of stewardship program, but it changes all the time. I think it lends itself really well to our hill farm because it's pretty—it's always been quite low input anyway. We were organic before we were in the stewardship scheme, and when we came out of being organic, we actually didn't—it's not like we could suddenly use lots of things that we couldn't use before. Because we just didn't do very much with that stock anyway. But a lot of it's just about not doing certain things, which is very easy to not do something, really, just leave it alone. So that's fine. At home, it maybe takes a bit more balancing in the lowland because you would probably stick a lot more sheep in a certain field, you would plough it out. We're not allowed to plough it out on some of the schemes. So I feel like at the hill harm it's getting paid to do what we're already doing really.

[Music]

Gill Lowes (narrator): It's not just government policies that influence farmers' choices and practices. Landowners, too, have different views and ideas about what the land is for.

Chris Dalglish: There's already in the Middle Ages a very commercial side to the farming in the area we are talking about. The landowners, particularly the church, are keen to use the land for commercial farming purposes. So you have very large sheep flocks in this area going all the way back to the 12th century that the tenants are managing or the church is managing directly itself, but through employees, if you like, on the ground. So you have large sheep flocks that are being raised, and the wool trade is a very big deal in the Middle Ages. So the wool is one of the primary products there for use in textile industries.

Gill Lowes (narrator): In the 17th and 18th centuries, the modern 'farm' that we would recognise today came into existence.

Chris Dalglish: It fundamentally changes the nature of the farming community, the relationships between people and how people are making a living. So you go from these villages of the Middle Ages with many families living together, different tenants all with rights to the same area, the same territory to one farmer being responsible for a single block of land, the farm. And that—the farmer there really becomes a manager, a farm manager. They're in charge of the strategy of how to manage the farm to produce the rent that is then paid to the landlord and to make profit for the farmer and to pay all the costs. So the farmer is in charge.

You have a community within the farm, but the relationships are different. They are in effect employees of the farmer. And that would include several shepherds, usually, on one of these hill farms, and other laborers as well. So you have a substantial number of people probably still on the farms in the 18th century, 19th century, well into the 20th century. But the relationships between them and the farm are very different.

And in terms of the economy of the farm, if you like, or how people are making a living, the farms become very specialized. They're—unlike the Middle Ages when it's a mixed economy growing and producing lots of different things. It's a very specialized economy. So the purpose of the hill farms is really to produce these store lambs, the crop of sheep that every year you sell onto other farms elsewhere in the country to fatten up for market. That’s the primary objective of the farm. And that's, that's where the money comes from: through the store lambs and the meat, but also from selling a crop of wool after shearing.

I mean really that's a system that's driven by the landowners and what they want from the land at that point, which is changing and really economically driven way of thinking about the land. And it's also driven by the new class of tenant farmers with their individual farms and who are crucial to establishing the new system because they're the managers of the individual farms. For everybody else, yeah, it is a real change of position, so you maybe have people who were previously tenants becoming laborers on the land. So their relationship with the land fundamentally changes.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Today, different landowners have different objectives - whether commercial, or more environmental.

Chris Dalglish: Within the commercial side, they may be looking to run the estate for farming or for forestry, or for hunting or all of the above. Nature conservation has obviously become more and more of a concern as well for some landowners. And in some estates you have a mix of all of these objectives and the balance between them will vary. So the objectives the landowner sets, that's quite important for deciding what will happen on the ground, how much land is given over to farming, whether those farms are let out to tenants or managed by the estate directly, how the farming is done and whether any conditions are set around that.

Gill Lowes (narrator): For example, more commercially-minded owners might change tenancy arrangements to increase their returns from the land.

Alan Hutcheon: In ‘89 I think as well, that's when the valley was tenanted out. They decided that, you know, it would be better to tenant the farms out, make more money, I suppose. And that when really the big stock numbers changed in the valley. You know, you were taking tenant farmers in who obviously were paying quite a bit for rent, so therefore to justify the rents, they had to put stock numbers up too. And that's when, certainly on Attonburn, the stock numbers were increased by quite a bit. Both in cattle and sheep.

I do think the tenant in the farms in the Roxburgh Estate was the big change for me and the big change for the valley.

Gill Lowes (narrator): In the 1960s and 70s, large-scale forestry planting started to come to the fore in the Cheviots. The government bought land for public forestry plantations. And private and charitable landowners got involved in woodland and forestry development - for both commercial and, later on, environmental purposes.

George Blacklock: The forestry started about 1960, maybe slightly earlier. I think there was some subsidy or something for planting, and so there's—this was something new in the valley—forestry department. Of course, it was all on the Duke of Roxburgh's estate, and they had their forestry department down at Bowmont Hill, And then they came up the valley and planted quite a few trees. Then further up the valley, above Attonburn, they took one hirsel. They planted about half of it.

Gill Lowes (narrator): When trees were planted, this often reduced the land that was considered to be available for farming.

Bill Elliot (2): The Duke of Northumberland was the first chairman of College Valley when it was bought, and he loved his trees. It was all planted for, yes, thinking of the future, for the timber. So yes—

Fiona Elliot: There would be sort of thinking to a commercial value, wouldn't there?

Bill Elliot (2): That was purely commercial in those days.

Fiona Elliot: There was thinking that timber was going to be required for housing. There was a demand.

Bill Elliot (2): Pit props. The coal mines were taking a huge amount of timber for pit props in those days.

The planting was done from ‘59 until—the major bits would be finished by about, I'm guessing, sort of ‘65, ‘66. So that was all the big blocks. The first one we planted would be Southernknowe, Goldscleugh, Dunsdale, Mounthooly was all—and Elsdonburn, Trowupbur and that would do away with one shepherd. There used to be two shepherds of Fleehope until then. The next block might have been Elsdonburn. And I think there was a third shepherd at Elsdonburn in those days.

There was a head forester, Jim Young, and there was another forester, Tommy Wright. And the two Ballys, John and his son, Mick Bally.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Many of these early forestry plantations were created without much thought to the environment at all. Some were even planted on deep peat, which would be unlikely to happen today. While some thought would have been given to shelter for stock, for example, the priority was producing a large amount of timber.

Bill Elliot (2): And then, with the National Park, their influence, and College Valley wanting to go greener, then native woodlands came in. The wilderness planting up above Mounthooly would come in 1990-odd. So yes, that would be driven by the National Park as well. Lord Ridley had a big estate at Blagdon and he was chairman for a number of years. And he was heavily into that,

Gill Lowes (narrator): Another change in how landowners thought about the land came with the area-based payments in the early 2000s, which Chris mentioned earlier. That’s because under the area-based scheme, payments started going to landowners, rather than to farmers who, in the Cheviots, are mostly tenants.

According to Chris, this scheme decoupled government payments from farming itself. That may have had downsides for farming, but it did allow some landowners to think differently about how the land might be used, including for forestry. More recently, planting trees for carbon offsetting purposes has become more common.

So, it's clear that changing government policy, and changes in the priorities and activities of landowners, have often put pressures on tenant farmers and shepherds to change how they farm. They have had to change to make ends meet, and to meet the requirements of the government and of their landlords.

But it's not just changes to tenancies, or subsidy rules, that affect these choices that farmers must make. Changes in the wider economic landscape also have a major impact.

One major shift has been the catastrophic decline in the value of wool over the past century.

Charles Armstrong: going back to the beginning of my farming career, wool used to pay the rent. Wool would contribute to the shepherd's wage, either the rent or the shepherd. Last year, there was quite a lot of wool just set fire to.

Alan Hutcheon: When I started out, the clats, as we called them, it was all the daggings off the ewes—all the ewes were tailed out after lambing time, all the muck taken off and what have you, and wool along with muck and whatever. And they were—we used to gather them all in and put them in on a loft in a shed, dry them out and we used to get, it was a bit of pocket money, but we used to get quite a bit of money for the daggings then.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Clearly, wool was worth much more in those days. Today, it’s a very different story.

Charles Armstrong: So the wool is a disaster. It's a liability. But you've got to take it off to keep the sheep healthy and happy.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Not only has the value of wool fallen, but the cost of inputs has gone up - everything from petrol and diesel, to fertiliser, to silage wrap. For many farmers, the only way to make it through not only all the changes to policy and landowner preferences, but also the other economic changes over the decades, has been to increase efficiency and productivity. In other words, to intensify their farming systems. It's important to remember that intensification was also actively incentivised by government policy for a long time, too.

Nelson: We've been for Swales for a long, long—like most of the time now. But as we crossed them out, they live better. They suit the place better from our point of view of management. And also, you know, it just suits us at that time. But the reason the change was, was the money. Couldn't afford it. Because I always remember following Dad around the hill one day. I was about yea big, eight year old or something. And Dad was away in front, he got, I was trailing along behind. And I can always remember him swearing and kicking this ewe. She’d died.

Because it was May. We came in the May, and the valuation, and they were worth 16 pound 50, ewes. And I remember Dad kicking this dead ewe, and he's saying, ‘and that's another, 16 pound 50 down the drain.’ That'll never leave me.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Charles Armstrong describes his experience when he started out farming.

Charles Armstrong: We took it over in, I would say, good condition. But myself being young and brother being younger than I, were ambitious, and broke away from tradition a little bit. It was a pure Blackface flock. But we introduced Swale blood. And then back to the Blackfaces again, just to try and improve productivity.

Gill Lowes (narrator): They increased their stocking rates, with the goal of selling one lamb for each acre of land.

Charles Armstrong: We had to introduce the use of nitrogen on hill ground, things that had never, never been done before. We increased the cow numbers from basically nothing to about 100. All Galloway cows, and we made silage. Well, that hadn't been done in the past years over our farming career. At Earle Hill we put buildings up, we financed them ourselves, the landlord didn't.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Everything Charles and his brother did was to try to improve productivity. To make more money, and so improve their standard of living. And they achieved that goal.

Charles Armstrong: We were just moving into modern times, and we took it to the maximum.

George Blacklock: Things changed quite a lot that period of time. Up the Bowmont Valley,

they put a lot more stock on. You know, each heft, each hill, their flock number was increased. I think by about 20 percent. You see, Attonburn and Mowhaugh was run together. And the cattle between them was probably about a hundred breeding cows, and then that went up to 200. So that put a lot of strain on the farm you know, to get enough fodder to feed them through the winter.

In the College Valley they kept the stock much the same, but if anybody left or anybody retired, they didn't replace them. So there's two ways of doing it.

[Music]

Gill Lowes (narrator): Intensification has been heavily incentivised for a long time. And, in many cases, it has been the only option farmers have been able to see to keep their farms afloat economically.

There are today, though, some farmers and landowners who are making the difficult decision to choose a different path. Scott Iley has decided to make the radical – radical in the Cheviots – decision to completely remove sheep from the land he farms, introducing cattle instead.

While this seems like a dramatic shift – and in many ways it is – it’s also one that a surprisingly large number of farmers in the area are making or considering.

Scott Iley: In my own experience, I feel like the cattle fit in this landscape in a lot of ways, a lot better than the sheep did. Not needing all of the chemical intervention. The cattle just seem to be able to thrive on this type of ground with sort of lower labour requirements and lower inputs.

Gill Lowes (narrator): This means that Scott has been able to take a different approach to making sure his farm does well financially. Instead of increasing inputs and working harder, he’s actually reduced his inputs as much as possible. This approach, which is also popular in the regenerative and agroecological farming communities, has allowed him to reduce his costs. The outcomes of this change for his farm business have been positive.

Scott Iley: The economics of the changes that I've made have been quite positive.

And using the kind of, farm-bench process and benchmarking the business, that really helped me actually in sort of giving me the courage to make some of the shifts, particularly in getting rid of the sheep. Because I realized that the sheep were economically so marginal, that made that decision a lot easier. Realising that actually I could have a lot less of the work that I didn't enjoy and a lot more of the work that I do enjoy and make a lot more money doing it, that kind of made the whole process a lot easier. So yeah, I think the economics of farm businesses is quite complex to disentangle, especially when it's sort of tied up with our own kind of sense of identity and what we do. But I think that for me, this shift makes complete sense in terms of the economics of the business.

So, for me, I've found it to be quite a good shift. In some ways I think the only thing that slowed me down in making that change was really the kind of cultural and social rather than the actual practicalities of managing the livestock.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Walter Riddell is another land manager in the area who has made the decision to change the management of the farm. For the Riddells, this has involved shifting away from an approach that centres farming and towards what they call 'managed wilding', which focuses on restoring the landscape through gently managed natural processes.

Walter Riddell: Because this is a private property and there's not a huge pile of money that sits behind it in an endowment, as it were, as a charity, it's always had to have a degree of profitability. There has to be an element of balancing the books. But I think, in a way, that's been massively skewed, I think, in the past by saying, ‘right, this area we're going to do something like grouse farming or sheep farming, timber.’ And that's the only thing that you do. So you just massively distort what you said was meant to be balanced. There should be balance across those different things. And hasn't been because—and I think the reason that there hasn't is that in each of those areas that we have done: sheep farming, timber and grouse farming, we've tried to produce a commodity.

And I think this is the heart of all the problems of the uplands. This amazing landscape is asked to do something like that, is asked to produce a commodity. And if you produce commodities—I spent a horrible 17 years in an air-conditioned office in London trying to invest in things—you have to produce masses of it at the lowest possible—to get the lowest possible cost. And that isn't a system that suits these uplands really well.

So our plan here, and it's some similar to the sort of plan at College Valley, which has had actually a sense of balance for much longer, is to balance everything behind one priority.

And that sounds counterintuitive, but the one priority is ecological health. And if we get byproducts that we can sell like meat or like gin or like the ability to show people around an extraordinary place, then we can sell that and make a bit of profit. But it's not disturbing the sort of core health of the place, the natural part of the place.

And then the second piece of it is that we try and always use local people to do as much as possible. The reason is that they know more than most people about what this land is like and how it works. We believe really strongly that you can't achieve big landscape scale nature restoration without farming, without farming skills. In fact, some of the things that we've been asking the Robsons to do here, and I know we're going to be doing at College Valley, require skills that perhaps have been lost to some farms for some years, and combine both, ou know, sort of really advanced modern farming systems, like no-fence collars or radio tagging, with some of the old school, inverted commas old school, shepherding techniques, and allowing extensive farming to, to both look and be, perhaps, what it used to be like on the commons many hundreds of years ago.

[Theme music]

Gill Lowes (narrator): Thank you for listening to Hefted! Upland Farming Heritage in the Cheviots.

In this episode, you heard contributions from Charles Armstrong, Chris Dalglish, Piers Holmesmith, Bill Elliot (formerly of College Valley), Alan Hutcheon, Candice Bell, Pam Brown, George Blacklock, Stuart Nelson, Scott Iley, Walter Riddell, and me Gill Lowes.

Episode 8 - Changes to the Land

[Theme music]

Gill Lowes (narrator): Welcome to Hefted! Upland Farming Heritage in the Cheviots. Episode 8: A natural landscape?

Farming inevitably affects the environment. All human activities do. But what impacts has farming had on the landscape of the Cheviots? And what effects has the environment - and environmental change - had on farming here?

Perhaps more than any other industry, farming is directly dependent upon its environment, in ways that many other industries are not. For example, different kinds of plants will grow better in different kinds of soils. Heather, for instance, grows best in the acidic soils often found on granite land. And, more obviously, the weather has a significant effect on how farming is done.

George Blacklock: You know, it depended on the kind of weather you was getting and everything, that dictated a lot of your work. Always has in hill farming. If you got a nice dry summer, the sheep on Cheviot did exceptionally well because up on the top it was all peat and whatnot, and you'd spend a lot of time up there. They were out the bottoms where there were trees and whatnot, and you got flies and whatnot but up there they got peace. And you could bring lambs in off the top of Cheviot in the end of August fat. And if it was a wet year, they were not fat. Just swings with the weather.

Gill Lowes (narrator): As the climate changes, different weather patterns may become prominent. For example, many farmers in the Cheviots have noticed the winters becoming much milder in their lifetimes. Spring comes earlier and autumn comes later.

George Blacklock: Talking about climate change, certainly the winters were a lot more severe then than they are now. When I started work, you could just about guarantee a couple of storms every winter, maybe for ten days or a fortnight, it’d come quite a bit snow—and it could lie there for ten days fortnight, maybe sunny days and hard frosts at night, and the wind got up, you've got your roads blown full of snow and whatnot. You could just about guarantee that twice a winter. Compared to now it's, it's different.

Michael Elliot: We used to wash the sheep kind of the end of August time. Depending if it was, if it was the 90, you might have been into September a little bit, but kind of two weeks before the sale. And every time we washed the sheep, there was ice in that dipper.

Now I know it was static water, but we don't get frosts here now. You know, we've often had hard frosts in August, in the past. We are not getting the frosts now that what we used to get.

Colin Matheson: When I was starting out in land agency, I was always told by all the farmers and cottagers, ‘never set your garden before the May term.’ The May term in England is 13th of May, when tenancies change. In Scotland, it's May the 28th. So, when farms changed hands, they wouldn't have planted their gardens and they wouldn't have sown anything at all. So you waited till the May term. And one of the reasons was that if you sowed, I don't know, potatoes and other stuff in April, say, and then sowed another plot of ground in May, the May vegetables always outstrip the April one because it's too soon up here. So you never set your garden before May. Well, now people are setting their gardens in April and stuff's rocketing away.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Flooding - which has always affected the Cheviots - seems to be getting worse.

Stuart Nelson: I think now what we're finding, and what I've been noticing for quite a while now, it's more extremes. The weather, you know, it rains and rains and rains, and then—but like, you know, it would probably rain a week to ten days beforehand, but it rains two days now, the same volume of water falls. You know, and then it’s flash flooding.

Michael Elliot: We flood very badly. If we get a lot of rain at the top of the valley, we get a flood. If we see a lot of rain forecast, we move the sheep off the bottom somehow. We just get them up a wee bit of height.

We were really lucky with the cows. We still had the cows and there was a muckle big flood. And I having to wade—I had the tractor, wading through and everything. But it was dangerous. It really was. But we got them. We saved everything. Because what we did, we cut them into the wood. The wood, when you're coming down the brae there, we got them into there and got them to go up and got them onto the other side. But, phew.

The whole valley's always been a wee bit prone to it. But it's doing more damage.

Gill Lowes (narrator): At the same time, summers seem to be getting drier.

Scott Iley: It's probably about two months now since we had any rain, so are we gonna see drier springs or drier summers? What are the challenges arising from that in terms of water management and that kind of thing?

Gill Lowes (narrator): These changes have had negative effects. For example, they are thought to have contributed to an increase in the burdens of parasites and pests, and other stresses on the landscape.

Bill Elliot (1): I think they're, you know—grass I think seems to come quicker now as well, just with not having these hard frosts and. But then again, not getting the frost, I think that might be something to do with all these parasites as well, because we always reckoned that they used to get killed in the wintertime if you got a really, really—spell, maybe a week or ten days of really hard frost. And well, that doesn't seem to happen now

Walter Riddell: There never used to be tick on these hills. And for whatever the reason, I suspect that climate change is the most important, it's become a huge, huge issue. And it's not only an issue in itself, but it's carrying diseases that we've never had before. So those are big risks. And I would also say that in relation to this drought stress that we're seeing, obviously very significant at the moment, but you're seeing through summers we're getting things like heather beetle on a scale that we've never had before. We're having stress on some of the trees that we've never had before, and I think that's probably a contributory factor to why they're coming to some of the phytophthora fungal attacks and things like that.

So, I think it's getting to a point where it's really visible on the landscape. You're not—you're seeing tree death, you're seeing heather death, you're seeing bracken expansion and insect populations emerge, which just didn't happen in the old days. So it's a big, big problem.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Human activities are leading directly to climate change, altering weather patterns. These changes to the weather are having serious impacts on farming and farmers. Most of these impacts will make it much more challenging and unpredictable to make a living from the land.

Farming - particularly intensive livestock farming - is not innocent in this. While debate rages over precisely what farming’s role is, there is no doubt that farming has significantly contributed to the changes we are now seeing in the global climate.

Farming also has major impacts on the environment on a much more local scale. Just like with any human land use, farming alters the ecology to suit human needs. And the landscape of the Cheviots is no exception. This is not a 'natural' landscape, but one fundamentally shaped by humans. That doesn't mean it's necessarily bad, or wrong - but we should recognise that our landscapes are a product of human needs and human desires over time.

Chris Dalglish: In terms of the environmental impacts of farming and the way farming has changed over time—and we have a lot of good evidence for that, and largely this is coming from pollen studies, so pollen that's preserved in the peat on the high grounds or in sediments, in rivers and, and lakes in the area. And from those studies, from that evidence, we have quite a good picture of how the vegetation in the hills has changed. And we can tie that in with the way the land use has changed.

What that shows is in the very long term, after the last ice age, you have a gradual recolonization of the hills by shrubs and trees. And then as time goes on, we have a landscape that's entirely wooded. So, perhaps 7,000 years ago, something like that. When farming—there are people there at that time, but they're hunting, they're gathering, they're largely living off natural resources—when farming comes in, in pre-history, again, it stays largely a wooded landscape. So people clear areas within the woodland and they're farming that. And that continues for several thousand years.

There's a really dramatic change that we can see in the pollen evidence about 2,000 years ago, maybe from 200BC through to 300AD, 400AD, that period. It's a dramatic change. It's really widespread. What happens is the woodland is cleared and it's cleared extensively. And farming is intensified. The open landscapes of the Cheviot Hills that we have today really an artifact of that big change in the vegetation 2,000 years ago when the woodland is cleared.

Gill Lowes (narrator): From that time, the Cheviot Hills have been a farmed landscape.

Chris Dalglish: In the Middle Ages when we have the farming system where you've got seasonal use of the uplands, the vegetation in the uplands that is created by that system is quite mixed. And you have a mosaic of heathland, so it's dominated by heather and other heathland plants. Then you've got grasslands with quite a diverse grassland species of different grasses and grassland herbs. And then you've got some pockets of woodland, which is probably managed woodland. So it's not wild or totally natural, it's managed by people. It's a mixed landscape of heather heathland, species-rich grasslands and woodland, with crops on the lower ground.

Gill Lowes (narrator): As we talked about in episode 7, there has been a move in recent centuries - and especially the past 70 years - to increase efficiency and productivity. This shift has been driven by all kinds of changes both within and beyond the farm. And it has often meant changing the plant make-up of pastures, boosting pasture growth with the application of fertilisers, and increasing stocking rates – among other changes. The consequences for biodiversity and environmental health have been significant.

Chris Dalglish: When modern farming comes in the 17th, 18th century with year-round grazing of the hills, more intense grazing, that really begins to change—have an impact on the vegetation, the ecology of the uplands. And really what we can see—and this intensifies in the 19th century, and we can see big changes in the 19th century with the ecology, largely through intensive sheep grazing of the hills—is that heathland, the heather retreats and the extent of the heather really reduces.

So that wasn't a natural landscape in an absolute sense. It was a landscape or an ecology that was created by medieval farming. But that's really pushed back by the modern farming, intensive sheep grazing. The impact of the intensive grazing is that we move from a species-rich grassland or a more diverse grassland to a species-poor grassland. So the diversity of the herbs and the grasses and so on, in the upland grazing areas, is much reduced.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Environmental change and ecological damage have also been brought about by other land uses in the hills. For example, managing the land for hunting often requires particularly heavy use of toxic anti-parasitics to protect grouse health. And, while most walkers and recreational land users are responsible, the carelessness of a few can cause significant damage through erosion and fire.

Farmers and shepherds have noticed significant changes to the ecosystems they work and live in.

George Blacklock: The river and the little burns. When you were young, you used to go away fishing, you ken. You could go away and you caught fish all the time. You ken, a little trout about that size. There's nothing in them now. And I think that's a terrible shame.

Walter Brown: There used to be black grouse on this farm, which was pretty rare. When Lilburn Estates first took the farm over, there was some black grouse appeared on here again, about, oh, just up to four or six, maybe. They've now gone again. But I remember my father saying, when they first came here, there was black grouse here.

Scott Iley: This hillside out here is named after grey partridge, which are now completely absent. And the traditional hay meadows that we manage here have about a hundred different species of plant and flower in them, which, when those meadows were first enclosed, all of those plants would've been widespread across the whole landscape, and now they only exist in these very, very small pockets. And so the trend within the whole landscape really is towards simplification and reduction in biodiversity.

[Music]

Gill Lowes (narrator): Policymakers, landowners and farmers are making efforts to change the way the land is managed. In particular, they are trying to deal with some of the damage that has been done to the environment of the Cheviots, and other upland regions. And, they are trying to mitigate and adapt to future changes. In some cases, these land management changes mean looking to historical and inherited practices that may have ecological or climate benefits and which could be revived. One of these practices is seasonal grazing.

Seasonal grazing was a core feature of farming in the Cheviots from at least the Middle Ages, right through to the introduction of year-round grazing in the 18th century. Seasonal grazing allows the land to recover from the impact of livestock each year, making space for a more diverse range of grassland plant species. And this has positive knock-on effects for the biodiversity of the rest of the ecosystem, too.

Other practices include peat restoration and re-wetting, maintaining and restoring wildflower meadows, and planting more diverse native woodlands.

Stephen Crees: One thing we are looking at and have done for the last probably 10 years is the species of trees that were grown. So, for instance, we are diversifying that. So it was sitka spruce predominantly up here—well actually it was mixed con, we had a few different conifers up here. But now we are changing that.

Gill Lowes (narrator): While these plantings have been done mostly for the sake of biodiversity, they may have other benefits, too. For example, the shade of the trees will probably keep the hills a little cooler.

College Valley are also rewetting the hills of the estate.

Stephen Crees: On the hill mainly we are rewetting a bit, so we are blocking grips that was opened up because we got government payments back in the day for that. So we've blocked some of those up, and holding a wee bit more water in the hill, which will help the springs for the properties hopefully in this kind of weather. So we have still got some good wet spots on the hill, even though we've been dry for quite some time now.

Gill Lowes (narrator): A more controversial strategy for responding to the environmental changes of recent decades is to reduce the number of sheep on the hills. Many farmers recognise that the very high numbers of sheep encouraged by subsidies, landowner preferences and market conditions in the 20th century caused significant landscape degradation. As a result, it is recognised that something needs to change.

Colin Matheson: I think the stock were reduced because it was recognised that, certainly Cheviot, in places, was too heavily grazed. Not, you know, completely over the whole thing, but they would concentrate on certain areas.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Some younger farmers in the area are adopting more ‘regenerative’ approaches to farming. Regenerative approaches try to work with the natural behaviours of animals and natural cycles to environmentally ‘regenerate’ farmland through farming.

Sarah Chapman: We've just sat through a grazing course with James Rebanks down in Cumbria, learning how to develop the farm regeneratively. And technically it's more geared towards the cattle grazing if we want to do it that way. So that's what we're kind of learning about and moving towards at the moment. So we do have 300 head of sheep at the moment, but that will be limited and we'll grow the cattle.

From what we've been learning and the studies that we've looked into, the cattle graze it more efficiently than the sheep. They just pick out the good bits of the grazing and they just hone down on that in the grassland. So that's why we're kind of limiting our sheep. We still want to keep sheep here down at Heathery, but it's probably gonna move towards more cattle.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Reducing stocking rates can feel like a very modern change. But in fact, it can also involve returning to older practices that recognised - and were perhaps more resilient to – the variability of the climate and the possibility of extreme weather.

Alan Hutcheon: Balance is all to do with what the ground can carry. Sometimes when you had these really dry summers, especially Percy Law and Shoulder Hill, it was like a desert.

You know, no grass on it. They tell me, before I started to work, that one year it was that dry that the sheep off Percy Law had to go down to the parkland at Floors Castle, because it was that dry. And this is what I think generations now don't totally understand: that you will have the—and it might be once in a blue moon as they would call it, maybe not 10 years, 15 years—but there will be some time it comes along that that is the number that can carry. Same in a storm, you know, if you've got too many and you haven't got the feed to feed them or what.

It was very much low input at that time because that's what you did and that's how it was. You know, you didn't have the means of—the fertilizer and stuff like that to bulk up your feed. So you were actually keeping the stock that you could actually look after and feed and summer graze without any inputs.

Walter Brown: I don't, I cannot see it going back to the quantity of sheep there was. But I think there should always be sheep. And I would hate to see the thing go into wilderness, just because of what my life has been, but,

Brown 2: you can understand, Walter’s a sheep man, he doesn't like the fact that the sheep are disappearing.

Walter Brown: You know, sheep farming was my life. I mean, the fact that people have come up this valley for—tourists since the 1950s, ‘60s or something, so you’re talking about 50, 60 years. They've come to see the landscape that the sheep made. The sheep made that landscape

Gill Lowes (narrator): Others see the landscape a bit differently. Scott Iley grew up the son of a shepherd in the College Valley, and is now a tenant farmer in the Coquet Valley.

Scott Iley: I see the landscape as a community of living things of community, of—like a web of life. And I felt that over time, particularly in the grassland, the biodiversity of the sward was being depleted. I think when I look around these hills I feel that it's a fairly degraded landscape and I think sometimes I've been kind of haunted by the ghosts of what is missing and what's been lost.

I became concerned that the way I was managing the sheep was contributing to that. And I was quite keen to try and develop grazing strategies which would reverse that and develop grazing strategies where the livestock could be used to actually increase biodiversity rather than decrease it,

Gill Lowes (narrator): Scott began to think that technologies such as electric fences and no-fence collars could help him to manage the landscape in a more open way that could help to achieve that goal.

Scott Iley: And I tried to do that with the sheep, but it was just really hard and it just didn't work. There were bits where I'd re-seeded sort of species-rich grassland on the hill from seed that I'd harvested from the meadow. And you put up, you know, three strands of electric around it and it just takes one awkward sheep to push through and then you're spending a day untangling wire and they've grazed out all the kind of, plants that were just starting to germinate and come through. So it was pretty frustrating.

And there were lots of other things. I felt like with the sheep, I was constantly having to use chemical interventions, with fly sprays and wormers and all the rest of it. Whereas the cattle, I felt I could keep cattle in this environment without all of that chemical input. And I just felt like, if I was going to achieve the vision that I had for the land I was gonna have to just move away from the sheep.

It took a long time to make the decision. I think that after I'd made the decision, I felt quite comfortable with it and I was a little bit worried about how that decision would be seen in the local community because to some extent I think people who are engaged in particularly sheep farming, it can feel like a part of the local identity. And if you are sort of stepping away from keeping sheep, for some people, I think that can feel quite threatening because it can feel like a threat to not just the kind of cultural history of the area but also a threat to the identity of who we are as a community.

And I don't know what people are saying about me behind my back, but certainly people have taken it very well, I think, and people seem, as far as I know, to have kind of understood some of that decision making in that shift. So it's been, it's been tricky in some ways, but I think it's been the right decision for me and for this place.

Gill Lowes (narrator): All of these changes - from the minor, to the more dramatic - have both benefits and challenges. They won't be straightforward. They will need constant experimenting to get them right. And all of them, if they are adopted widely, may change the aesthetic, environmental and even cultural character of the Cheviots.

But although the present landscape of the Cheviots can feel natural and eternal, as we’ve explored in different ways over the course of this series, this isn’t really the case. Human activities have shaped and reshaped this landscape countless times over the millennia, with very different ecological outcomes. The relationship between people and the environment in the uplands is deeply complex. It has never been stable and unchanging, and it will continue to change both now and into the future.

Hepple Estate's approach – getting rid of sheep entirely, and actively encouraging more woodland growth – that approach will significantly change the environmental character of upland areas like the Cheviots. Walter Riddell expects woodland cover on the estate to increase from around 5 to 30% over coming decades. While this is a change he hopes for, he also recognises that the loss of the iconic heather and grassland character of the landscape has downsides, too.

Walter Riddell: The Wildlife Trust has bought a huge block of land just to my east, and I think that's allowed a bit more sort of public discourse about the pros and cons of this sort of management system and reducing sheep and possibly producing a set of habitats that aren't quite as suitable for wading birds. That's one of the big, sort of hot topics.

You know, the icon of the national park is a curlew, you know, beautiful choice, but it requires a very specific set of habitats. And I think some of the changes that certainly we are making is not going to be supportive of a really prolific wader population here. That said, it's been collapsing over the last 20 years. We've got to the point here, many other places have got to the point, where there aren't many. So you are ending up trying to do things to preserve a bird that doesn't really exist anymore.

We're trying to retain water in ponds and hold up the flow of water down the burns. We are seeing wading bird populations begin to tick up here a bit. Things like lapwing. But that's just a tiny pinprick on a big landscape. To keep the whole landscape in aspic to preserve just a few birds that aren't really here anymore, well, that's a bit of a bet. It's a funny thing to do.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Other changes are not quite so dramatic, but will still result in big changes to the visual - and productive - value of the land.

Walter Brown: The policy to reduce the sheep numbers because they wanted to regenerate the heather. Because the sheep over the time do eat the heather out if there was—if there's too many. I mean, the heather certainly has regenerated since they've reduced the sheep numbers. I mean, heather apparently lives for a long time underneath the ground, so when you reduce the sheep numbers, the heather comes back again. But some of the older heather, because there isn't plenty of sheep to keep the heather down, now some of the older established heather is getting too long and rank. There's areas on this farm where, you know, it's two or three feet high. I mean, they do burn it and they do cut it, but then there's restrictions on that now, you know, there's restrictions on what—how much they can burn.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Some worry that without close management, the vegetation will also become a fire hazard, especially in the hotter, drier summers the Cheviots are often now experiencing.

Bill Elliot (1): The bracken will be, it seems to be far worse now than what it was, because it shoots away if it's not kept down. It'll be, I think it'll be one of the worst things that's got out of hand. Up the College Valley, well Walter would probably, maybe be telling you, but there, they put everything, all the stock off there because they wanted all the wildflowers and everything to grow. Well, a couple of years and the wildflowers were all choked out. You know, all the nettles and bracken and thistles grew and choked all the flowers out. So, that was the point. You know when the sheep was on, maybe there was as many flows, but you always got some.

Gill Lowes (narrator): But addressing the question of how to continue producing food in ways that avoid environmental damage and fight climate change will take significant trial and error to get right.

Scott Iley: And I think that for me it's been really important to recognize that that process of exploring those questions is gonna involve failure as well. And there are things that I have tried on farm, which have just completely failed. And I think that it's been really important for me to learn that this is how we find answers and this is how we move forward. But it sometimes I feel like it requires quite a bit of courage to think, ‘I'm gonna try this, even though I know that it might fail. But through failing, hopefully I'll learn something.’

[Music]

Gill Lowes (narrator): Ultimately, there is no 'objectively' correct way to manage the landscape. What is right depends on what outcome is wanted. Over the past 10,000 years, the Cheviots have been frozen, glacial wastes; densely wooded forests; mixed farming manors; and intensively grazed farms. Each of these landscapes - aside from the first - has been the result of a very different human society with very different goals.

This tells us that - rather than seeing the landscape as a battle ground between farmers and environmentalists, between food production and nature - instead, it might be more helpful to treat farmers as a central part of solving environmental problems, and environmental concerns as a central aspect of creating the kinds of farming systems we need in the 21st century and beyond. And this means getting better at including farmers in decision-making about farming landscapes and policies.

Alan Hutcheon: There is room for every everything, but you've gotta remember that most of the land is used for farming as well. It's the same with all these, you know, these stewardship schemes and subsidies that's coming. A lot of your stocking rates that you're—you're not actually involved in it. In fact, if you're asked a question about the land management, they think you're being negative by not agreeing with what they're saying. And it's only because you care for, and you've worked in it for all those years.

But a lot of the stocking numbers are made that up by men that don't know any better. They'll see you've got 100 acres there, and you've got so many sheep on it. They think that same 100 acres on a poorer bit of ground should have the same numbers on it. It's just a block of land to them.

Gill Lowes (narrator): In other words, farmers have an intimate knowledge of the landscape. And that knowledge can be very valuable for decisions about what changes are needed and how to implement them.

Stuart Nelson: I can always remember my grandfather coming in from the hill, coming down through here, then back in. He come in, I can’t remember, it'd be in August sometime, maybe end of July, beginning of August. He said, ‘it's going to rain.’ And I said, ‘oh, aye, righto.’ You know. He says, ‘oh well, there's water coming, there's a little, the dampness, there's a little bit of water coming into the bottom of the drains, where the springs are.’ And I said, ‘alright, yeah.’ I just, I was just listening in the background, I wasn't commenting, obviously. Be seen and not heard was how it was then.

Chris Dalglish: Was he right?

Stuart Nelson: Yeah. But I worked it out. Well, it's not hard to work out, actually. When you think about it is because high pressure, and as it was changing, the low pressure would take the pressure off and the water would come back up.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Not only are farmers deeply familiar with the land - they often have a deep care for the land, and a desire to look after it as well as possible.

Alan Hutcheon: As a schoolboy from, probably from nine or ten, either with Jock or George, at the weekends and at nights when I come home from school. And I can remember again walking down the hill, and I can see—I'd been 12 maybe, walking down the hill, and a bird would fly out, just where we were walking down next to the path, and Jock would say, ‘go quietly and pat the ground.’ Because you'd see where it—and there would be a nest of eggs.

That's all lost to us now. You know, they're there, but you're not aware of it now.

When you've grown up, as I have, on the farm, you're very aware through your forefathers of how you should look after the land. That was—you know—it's—the land has survived all these years because of being looked after. And that is a, you know, something that's followed down the lines. And sometimes you go about your daily jobs, business, whatever you like to call it. And you don't realize what you're seeing and how you are part of it. And it's only when somebody like yourselves will come and ask you about it and you know, you're seeing this on a daily basis. What's going on, different times of year, what you have on the hill, what you haven't on the hill. And it's just part of your daily routine, but until you actually think about it… it's there, and in lots of ways, you've been a custodian of that.

Colin Matheson: There's got to be a—there's got to be balance, that's what I come back to.

Environmental concerns should shape good farming. You know, for instance, if you're going to go on wrecking your soil, you're not farming very well. You know, this, the whole idea of not ploughing and regenerative farming, it's not that fluffy. It's pretty good common sense.

Scott Iley: As a community of upland farmers, I do feel like we're being asked to do a lot of different things now. And there's basically an awful lot of people living on a small island with not a huge amount of land. And the sort of messaging from government is that we need to build more houses and plant more trees and grow more food and sequester more carbon and increase biodiversity. And it can be difficult, I think, for land managers to understand how we can achieve all of those things. And because we have such a limited kind of land base. And sometimes it feels like it's a bit of an impossible situation because we're being asked to do everything and not all of those interests can sit that well together.

So I think it's a real challenge and for me, I suppose, it's really interesting to think about how we continue to produce food in this landscape while also increasing biodiversity and sequestering more carbon, and how we develop systems that allow us to do that.

Gill Lowes (narrator): Over the past eight episodes, we’ve shared stories about many different aspects of hill farming heritage in the Cheviot hills. From the ins and outs of a shepherd’s life, to the animals on their farms and the technology they use; from the nature of working and living in the hills, to changing ideas about what the land should be used for, and how land uses have changed the land.

Across the whole series, the one thing we’ve tried to emphasise is change. Looking at the heritage of upland farming isn’t just about looking backwards to see how things were. It’s not about trying to determine which practices and ways of doing things are right and which are wrong. Nor is it about trying to preserve an image of the past in amber, as if people ‘back then’ had it all figured out, and we just need to ‘get back’ to the old ways.

Instead, we’ve looked at the living heritage of hill farming in the Cheviots as a way of better understanding change. Things have always changed – things are changing – and things will continue to change. As that happens, knowledge and practices are passed from one generation to the next. They evolve and adapt as each generation responds creatively to new circumstances. Heritage is not something that’s stuck in the past, but something which is alive. Something which can be revived. Something which adapts to meet the needs of people today and in the future.

So, farming practices will change. Environmental conditions will change. Our societies and economies will change. The question is, what changes do we want to see in our upland landscapes, and beyond? And what role might our living heritage have to play in helping us to make sure those changes are positive ones?

Thank you for listening to Hefted! Upland Farming Heritage in the Cheviots. We hope you’ve enjoyed the series. In this episode, you heard contributions from George Blacklock, Michael Elliot, Colin Matheson, Stuart Nelson, Scott Iley, Bill Elliot (formerly a shepherd at the Mains of Yetholm), Walter Riddell, Chris Dalglish, Walter Brown, Stephen Crees, Sarah Chapman, Alan Hutcheon, and me Gill Lowes.

This series was produced by Olivia Oldham-Dorrington. The music was composed and performed by Alistair Anderson, and our series artwork is by Anthea Wood. Thank you also to Caroline Smith for her help with research, and to Chris Dalglish and Chris Gerrard for their contributions. This series was made possible with generous funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.