Glensaugh has experienced its first prolonged period of snow cover since February 2001. This has added to the winter feeding routine with hay being offered to some of the Blackface ewes which have been blown off their own ground. There is no free lunch for these animals and efforts are being made to help them return to their own parts of the hill, or to ground from which the snow has been blown clear, often requiring routes to be dug through the deeper drifts. Storm feeding of hill sheep is only ever a stopgap measure and ewes are still expected to forage for themselves. Molasses-based mineral blocks are also used to supplement the diet of the hill ewes; their usefulness is open to debate because ewes congregate round them and their grazing patterns are disrupted.

These arguments would have been well understood by the shepherds who contributed essays to “Herding a Hill Hirsel” which was edited by my late great grandfather and published in 1929. While the basic common sense in hill sheep management has not changed much over the years, the time allowed for carrying out the annual routine has been cut drastically as shepherds’ flocks have increased from 600 by a factor of at least two.

The pregnancy scanning of ewes is a recent technological innovation which has assisted management by allowing carriers of multiple foetuses to be segregated and receive preferential management. The crossbred flock was scanned recently, indicating a potential lamb crop of over 200% and many sets of triplets. While lambing is still some seven weeks away, the 2009 production year has already begun; two cows calved this week, both to our new Limousin bull, Butler.