Shepherds, hefting and knowledge that lives in the sheep

Comparisons of hefted flocks usually pick a winner. This one picks the circumstances, which is more useful.

What hefting is

A hefted flock keeps to a particular area of open hill without fences, having learned it from previous generations. Lambs learn the range from their mothers over their first years, which makes the knowledge cumulative and inherited. It is why large areas of unfenced upland can be grazed by distinct flocks that do not mix.

Because the knowledge is learned from the mother rather than inherited, a heft belongs to a group of animals rather than to a breed, which is why hefted flocks are sold with the farm and why buying replacement sheep does not buy the ground knowledge with them.

It is genuinely fragile

If a heft is lost — through disease, destocking or sale — the knowledge goes with the animals. Re-establishing it requires intensive shepherding over several years to teach a new flock the ground. This is why the mass culls during foot-and-mouth outbreaks were so damaging beyond the immediate loss.

Locally, rebuilding one means shepherding new animals back onto the same ground repeatedly over several years, sometimes behind temporary fencing, which is a labour cost nobody funds and a skill fewer people now have.

It shapes the landscape

Distinct hefts grazing at different intensities produce the mosaic that upland habitats depend on. Where hefting collapses and stock are removed entirely, vegetation change follows quickly.

This is one reason destocking as a conservation measure has more complicated effects than expected. A heft is not a single patch either, since the animals use different ground through the year — the tops in summer, the shelter of the gullies in bad weather, the enclosed land at lambing — and it is that seasonal movement rather than the numbers that produces the mosaic.

The knowledge is not written down

Shepherds know which ground is used in which season, where sheep shelter in storms and where they will be found when missing. That knowledge is local, verbal and lost when a holding changes hands outside the family. Some of it is being recorded, and most is not.

Where it has been recorded it has usually taken the form of maps drawn with the graziers themselves, and even then a map is a poor substitute for somebody who can say what the sheep do in an east wind in February.

Why it matters to walkers

Sheep on open hill are not stray; they are on their own ground and belong to someone. Dogs disturbing a hefted flock can scatter animals off their range as well as causing direct harm. The apparently empty hill is a working system with a structure that is invisible unless described.

Sheep on open hill carry their ownership on them, in ear tags and in coloured marks placed to a pattern each farm keeps to, so an animal in difficulty can be reported to the right person if you note the mark as well as the location.

How much of that applies depends on the terrain you are actually in.

The same logic appears under other names

Seasonal movement of stock between winter ground and summer pasture — transhumance in the Alps and Pyrenees, shieling and saeter systems in Scotland and Scandinavia, reindeer herding across the far north — all rest on animals and people knowing ground and routes rather than on fencing. Those systems built the drove roads, mountain tracks and summer huts that a great many walking routes now follow, so the path underfoot frequently exists because livestock needed to get up there twice a year.

Where the practice stops, the buildings and the vegetation change together, which is why abandoned summer pasture is such a recognisable landscape type across upland Europe. Access law in several countries grew directly out of this history and grants walkers the use of routes that exist for stock, which is one more reason rights differ so sharply between countries with otherwise similar hills.

Side by side

The takeaway

The empty hill is a working system. The sheep know where they live.

Go slowly enough to notice, and most of this stops being advice and starts being obvious.