Esther Rutter - This Golden Fleece: A Journey Through Britains Knitted History

Biographies of things can make salient what might otherwise remain obscure.

IGOR KOPYTOFF , The Cultural Biography of Things

It was December, the dog-end of the year. Across the country, offices hit their annual administrative climax. Work piled up: reports to finish, invoices to issue, Christmas cards to send. I scribbled my signature on letters to people I had never met, compiled spreadsheets, printed out an acreage of labels. I hated not only the grind of endless meetings and stuffing envelopes, but also the secondary nature of this job, centred on assisting someone elses working life. At home in the evening, I sat and stewed as I knitted a soft blue scarf, a Christmas present for my mother-in-law. Knitting normally soothes me, but the repetitive knit, purl, knit of the scarf did not occupy enough of my mind to wrest away my frustration with work. My mind turned to January, with its promise of newness. I did not want to spend another year in that office. I wanted out.

Christmas arrived, and I headed south to pay my respects to parents, siblings, friends. After a week squashed into a small house whilst rain thrummed on the windows, I travelled with my husband to visit his family in Grasmere, Cumbria. New Years Day dawned clear and cold, and we strode out to shake off the old years languor. The frost-nipped air blew in chilly celebration as we got out of the car at Rusland Cross and took our first steps of the year towards High Ickenthwaite.

Bundled into coats, with scarves wrapping us like untidy parcels, we were pushed along by brisk winter winds. After an hour, we reached the wood at Heald Brow, which was ringed with a fence topped with rusting wire. Caught in the fences barbs were tufts of wool, silver in winters weak sun. Sheep, at the bounds of their territory, scratched their itches here, leaving traces of themselves on the wire. I pulled away some fibres and rolled them on my palm. Grey, black and white, the strands curled in my hand. They felt waxy against my fingers, soft and greasy with lanolin. I balled the fibres in my pocket, carrying them with me like a charm.

Cumbria is a landscape shaped by sheep. The countys hilly slopes require a particular type of farming: upland shepherding, quite different from its lowland cousin. Old Westmorland and Cumberlands drystone walls enclose the more fertile land around farms, keeping sheep away from the valleys cultivated fields to graze on the fells. This higher pasture is common land: sheep are free to graze as far as their feet can take them. Native Herdwick sheep need no fences: they are heafed or hefted, equipped with internal compasses calibrated to their own acreage.

By half-past three, the gloaming began to gather in, driving us indoors. Warm and weary, I let the weather pin me to the sofa, where I looked again through my Christmas presents. Inside a paper bag with the tag love from Mum were four balls of wool peaty black, charcoal, dove grey, white. Banded with paper round the middle, this was Shetland Heritage yarn from Jamieson & Smith. Printed on the band was a line of tiny symbols: a shepherds crook, a hand dipped in water, an iron crossed through, and my favourite three tiny Shetland sheep with horns and curling fleeces, staring down the crook. Three renegades from Britains north-east edge, their horns a proud trumpet and a warning.

I took a sniff. A strong outdoor smell, rich and greasy, caught my nostrils. It was an unmistakably sheepy funk, the same scent from Heald Brow wood. Woolly fibres waved and snaked away from the yarns central strand, black flecked with white, cream specks on brown. This was soft and sturdy Shetland oo, the w and l clipped off the English word. Familiar yet strange; the wool had come from among some seven hundred crofts and farms in Shetlands scattered archipelago, caught between the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea. My four balls of yarn, fading dark to light, yielded to the pressure in my palm then bounced back, comfortable in their shape. My fingers prickled with the urge to knit them up. What would I make from this hardy wool?