My relationship with sheep has changed. I must have encountered a million of them in my time as I strolled, rambled, ran, staggered and stomped my way around the countryside. They have always ignored me. Sometimes they would stare, utterly without interest. But, bar the odd baa, it was as if I wasn’t there. Fair enough.
I spent last week on a hill farm near Dolgellau in Snowdonia. One afternoon, the farmer sent me to feed several dozen ewes bearing twins. They were at the far side of a big field. I was told to wave the bag of feed in their direction. They didn’t even look up. Shake it and they will come, I was assured. None of them moved. Until one of them did. Then a couple fell in behind her, and soon the rest joined en masse, following like, well, sheep.
The flock picked up speed. What I should not do, I had been warned, was to stand there holding the bag because, in their rush to get at it, things could turn ugly. Denis Healey’s jibe about Geoffrey Howe came to mind, about how an attack by him was like “being savaged by a dead sheep”. What a comedy death this would be, I reflected: mauled by hungry ewes. Quietly, steadily, relentlessly, they advanced. Unfreezing, I remembered my instructions, and poured the feed into little piles two metres apart. And, without so much as a baa of gratitude they set about it with relish. Job done.
The following day, I went for a stroll up to the same field. The sheep were grazing far away. Admiring the view, I got that creepy feeling that I wasn’t alone. Slowly, I turned around to see that the whole flock had stolen up behind me. Hundreds of them, standing stock-still, staring at me, the food man. “I’m sorry,” I bleated. “Not today.” They beheld me in disappointment for a moment more. Then, as one, with quiet disdain, they turned and walked away. For once, I had meant something to sheep. And then I hadn’t.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
