Sarah Shuffell 🐑🐑🐏 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

Beatrix Potter left fifteen farms and four thousand acres of the Lake District to the nation, with a condition attached that the fells are still arguing about. Peter Rabbit money bought that land. Book by book, farm by farm, from 1905 onward, a Londoner with an income and a stubborn streak buying up Lakeland ground as it came available to stop it being sold off in parcels for villas. What she did with it is the part that gets skipped. She farmed it. Properly. She bought Troutbeck Park in 1923 and built a Herdwick flock of over a thousand, took advice from her shepherd Tom Storey, showed her tups at local shows against men who had been doing it for four generations, and beat them. She was the first woman elected to lead the Herdwick Sheep Breeders' Association and died before she could take the chair. The Herdwick was in trouble for the reason all hill breeds get into trouble. Slow growing, fewer lambs, small carcass. On a balance sheet it loses to a lowland sheep every single time, and the only thing it is unbeatable at is living on a Cumbrian fell in February. She understood the other half too, which is the part that would get you shouted at today. That view, the one on the biscuit tin, the open fell and the walls and the cropped green, is not wilderness. It is a grazed landscape. Take the sheep off and you get bracken, then scrub, then a different place entirely, over about fifteen years. So when she died in December 1943 she left the lot to the National Trust, the largest gift of land it had ever had, with instructions. The farms were to stay working farms. The Herdwicks were to stay on them, heafed to their own ground, the flocks passing with the tenancy. Eighty years on, the fashionable position in that valley is that there are too many sheep on the fell and it should be allowed to go back. Back to what, nobody can say, because nobody has seen it. The last ungrazed version of that fell predates the pyramids and there is no photograph of it, no survey, and no living thing that remembers it. The woman who wrote Jemima Puddle-Duck saw this coming and wrote it into a legal document.