Hannah Jackson - Call Me Red: A Shepherds Journey

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First published by Ebury Press in 2021

Copyright Hannah Jackson 2021
Plate section, (middle image) Tribal Clash

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover design by Arneaux

ISBN: 978-1-473-58776-2

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To Nan and Fraser.

For the woman who guided my dream
and the dog that got me there.

She designed a life she loved Anon.

Red. Take the centre. Up on the fell top. Shoddy is delivering me his instructions with relative calm at the moment, but we all know his rage burns real bright just below the surface. He will be tearing his lungs into me within a couple of hours. Its near guaranteed.

I dont even know how he can see me from all the way up there in the clouds. I must only be a tiny little dot, a red-tipped matchstick hidden among the great stack of grasses and rock, but Shoddy has a powerful instinct for cock-ups, real or imagined, and possesses a poet laureates creativity when it comes to his enthusiastic overuse of the f-bomb. He is the king of the sheep gather, the person with more experience than all of us put together, the elder statesman who we will all be deferring to when any major decision needs to be made, but everyone up here is highly likely to experience the sharp side of his tongue at some point today. You can hardly accuse Shoddy of being prejudiced: he hates us all equally. Youd be forgiven for thinking he emerged swearing from the womb with a flat cap on his head and a sheepdog by his side.

Its the summers end in 2020; time to gather all the sheep off the high fells and bring them down to the lush grazing pastures in the lower valleys. There are five farms up here today, meaning theres five farms worth of sheep spread out across miles of these hills, five farms worth of marks to decipher on the sheeps backs (when we do eventually get them all down) and, most challenging of all, five farms worth of opinion on how the gather should be executed.

There is always a bit of tension in the mornings before a big fell gather. The memory of all the stuff thats gone wrong here in the past. The hurdles, the scars and the big black holes that can suck sheep into their clutches for hours. All the physical snags that Shoddy knows instinctively from a lifetime spent in this area, and expects us to know too, as if we had already had his shepherds map of the land hammered into us by our fathers, and their fathers before that, and their fathers before that. Instead, the reality is that Ive just rocked up here fresh for a days work as a contract shepherd: a sheep-farming mercenary out for another paid gig somewhere on the high fell.

You get used to this on contract jobs. It can feel a little intimidating at first, but what the lads from all these local farms might have over me in knowledge of this particular patch, I make up for in pure grit and determination. Not only that, but I gather across multiple fells throughout the year, right across Cumbria and into the Lakes, from the end of June right through until November, so my experience is on par with theirs. They may well have seen every challenge this piece of fell can throw up, but, believe me, my dog and I have also seen it all, just in different places.

Im only 28, but I already have my own farm and my own animals to care for when Im not out on jobs like this. Sheep, pigs, goats, chickens, ducks and a horse; all waiting for me down on my own fields in Croglin. Even if you were from an ordinary farming background it would have taken a steep learning curve to get into my position at such a young age, but I grew up in a working-class terrace in the middle of urban Wirral and didnt even set foot on a commercial farm until I was 20. You would have struggled to chuck a ball across the yard in my first home, let alone keep sheep, and yet here I am now: confident and secure with my job, my relationship and my dog, high up in these uncompromising hills. Its been one hell of a journey, though.

Its still the last week of summer, but today it may as well be November. Its going to be wet. The kind of wet that soaks you right through and should ordinarily cancel these big gatherings, but this one has already been postponed twice and everyone is getting itchy paws and wellies. Impatience isnt a reason to get worked up, though. Really, we should have all stood down for one more day. The forecast is glorious tomorrow, but this morning, I couldnt even see the fell out the back of my own farm.

The hills in this part of Cumbria pull in rain clouds and nail them down all day. No matter how hard the wind blows that rain will not be shifted from its tether, but its not about how cold or wet you get, its the lack of visibility that makes these days an absolute grind. Filthy low cloud bases are capable of hiding entire flocks of sheep from me and my dog. This is the sort of day that separates the men from the boys, the dogs from the shepherds, and the sheep from every single one of us. If you can avoid gathering on days like this, then you definitely should, but Shoddy cant do tomorrow. He said at the meet-up that we should just gather tomorrow without him. I wont be around forever, he joked. But we all know what the punchline of that one is: by all means crack on without me tomorrow if you want, but if you make a mistake, and Im not there, then it is all on every single one of your heads. So, Im annoyed about that, Im annoyed about the weather and, to cap it all off, my lift has just cried off, so Im having to walk the entire fell before Ive even started work. Shoddy isnt the only one who can dish it out. If I get crossed today then theyre all getting it. I pull my jacket up tight round my neck and stomp off into the mist.

Here, they just call me Red. It has been a battle to get to this point, but when I cross that line and join the gather Im no longer a townie, a Scouser, or a woman. Im the Red Shepherdess: the hard-worn, bad-ass contract shepherd and farmer with Fraser, the top dog that everyone respects, at my heel. No one in these hills today would dare ask me: So, whats it like to be a female shepherd? And yet that is the very question I have had to answer time and again through every single step of my career so far.

We push into our section and spot the sheep scattered randomly across the entire hillside. Its like someone has thrown a handful of rice up into the wind and left it all where it fell. They are spread out everywhere. Come by, Fraser. I command him firmly without needing to shout. He is desperate to go at them.