Fifteen-foot drifts of snow between road and farmyard that take all morning to tunnel through. A doctor skiing over fields to treat a young woman with pneumonia. Men walking to the nearest village town for supplies and returning with just nine loaves of bread. These scenes of rural English winter from 1947, and memories of a grandfather who chose horses over cars and never learned to drive, are the backdrop to Rosamund Young’s The Wisdom of Sheep: Observations of a Family Farm, published last year. Young’s previous book, The Secret Life of Cows, was a beloved meditation on the cows at Kite’s Nest, her organic family farm in the Cotswolds - their personalities, friendships, quirks, and bovine intelligence.
The Wisdom of Sheep brims with anecdotes of farm life and of the countryside around. All animals are game for her observations, but sheep take center stage. We hear of Dandelion, a tiny lamb rejected by her mother, whom the farmers nursed by hand and was “lion-like” in her determination, and who now, with her daughter Carnation, lies in the farmyard alongside the road, monitoring traffic. Sheep, Young notes, are suspicious of wide-open gates, and so to get them out into the yard, they “leave the gate just a tiny bit open, as if by mistake, and only then will they all nip through, feeling naughty and elated.” After a flood turns paths to rivers and ravages the landscape, a bedraggled fox cub takes refuge in the sheep shed for shelter, and they accept its presence. Of cows, she observes that the “relationships between cows and their daughters are a beautiful, sometimes oddly complicated, rich and fascinating field of study.”
Young’s descriptions of landscape are also precise and evocative: “The wild cherry trees are slipping into autumn colors. The willows near the stream are still a vibrant green but the oaks have darkened already.” Hedgerows are festooned with “hazel, honeysuckle and a continuous hand-holding parade of hedgerow trees: ash, oak, maple, plum, hazel, willow, hawthorn and sloe.”
There are also stories of the people that populate this landscape, of lodgers and farmworkers in all of their varied and specific humanity, of the deaths of parents and of a house fire, of the endless labor of farming. In counterpoint to these are delightful asides, such as her assertion that most things in her life “are solvable with hard work and the answer to almost every problem is to work even harder, physically that is. But any problem not in this category can be addressed by climbing a tree.”
The Wisdom of Sheep plays out in a series of very short chapters, often just a few pages each, and many illustrated by small woodcuts. A chapter called “What’s in My Land Rover” consists simply of an illustration and a list, that includes chainsaw, thistle stocker, strong trowel, “string, lots of string,” “plumbing fittings for troughs with ball valves and floats,” thermometer, and a walking stick. Another, the pertinently titled “What Is There to be Glad about in November?”, includes “circuses of jackdaws and rooks, sky-diving, hang-gliding, free-wheeling and generally living it up in the evening skies for as long as they possibly can.” A chapter called “Exuberance” describes calves playing “games of pure joy, celebrating speed and grace and dexterity, as they dash and zigzag between and around the darkening shapes of older siblings, aunts, cousins, ex-babysitters et al.”
An antidote to the dark weather soon to be upon us, The Wisdom of Sheep offers delightful browsing, an ideal escape to the challenges and rewards of a rural landscape different from ours but rich with a similar tapestry of human and animal life, interwoven in a thousand ways.
Jared is an adult services librarian at the Howe Library in Hanover. He purchases a range of nonfiction for the library and conspires with a colleague to devise the library’s programming. When otherwise free, he’s usually in the mountains, swimming in local ponds and rivers, trying his hand at new cuisines, reading, or dreaming of walking the Scottish Highlands.