A red flag warns that Warcop Army base firing range in the fells near Appleby is operational. Walkers beware. Harry Beadle knows all about that, having shepherded his black-faced Swaddle sheep on Murton Pike for much of his 92 years.
Even as we chat the distant rat-tat-tat of gunfire interrupts the autumn calm, along with the faint rattle of Mr Beadle’s wheezing. He has been diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a narrowing of the airways following years of labouring in dusty barns.
How different things are now from when he would once bound over the slopes, directing his sheepdogs with yells and whistles. “We thought we were immortal,” he says. “Once I climbed down Murton Scar in galoshes.” He points up to the band of limestone cliffs, incongruous against the pea-green slopes and admits he did something that would be unthinkable today.
“I found a fledgling chick in a hawk’s nest, put it in a pocket and climbed back up as the buzzard repeatedly threatened me with its beak.” Sadly the chick choked to death on a trout village lads had caught to feed it. “Different times, those,” he says later, making me a cup of Nescafé in the house he helped build.
His mother had polio and a withered leg, meaning she had less control of her unruly son. At first they lived at isolated Harthwaite, the nearest cottage to High Cup Nick, a deep chasm on the Pennine fellside resembling a scar that could have been caused by a meteorite.
“She sold me to a farmer when I was 14, for £9,” Harry told me. “ ‘Take him away,’ she said, ‘give him food and shelter and learn him how to work.’
“The hirings were like a cattle market, a kind of slavery really. You ate what was given to you and never asked for more.” Otherwise, you are given to understand, the response would be the same that Mr Bumble the beadle gave Oliver Twist when he committed this cardinal sin.
• The Guardian’s former northern editor Martin Wainwright will chair a discussion on Country Diary, with diarists Mark Cocker and Derek Niemann and former editor Celia Locks, at 11.30am on Saturday 15 November at Stamford Arts Centre, Lincolnshire. More details at www.newnetworksfornature.org.uk
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