SHEARING UNDER COVER.

This is how yesterday started, with an echoingly, empty barn with a few cattle in it, not for long however as the cows were moved out, all except for one little lad. I will come to him later. The mountain road was empty and quiet except for swallows and swifts darting in and out of the barn feeding their chicks in the high rafters. Eyes looking skywards, hoping for the rain to hold off long enough to dry about 250 ewes in the mountain breeze before herding them up from the in-bye fields, to the barn for de-fleecing. They were gathered from the lower farm and brought up the road in a loudly bleating stream.

They were then neatly herded into the barn to stay dry until the shearer arrived at midday and then the really hard work could begin on yet another session of shearing. 

The noise in the barn of several hundred bleating ewes and their lambs seemed to reverberate off the walls and bounce back, creating a cacophony  of sound that is quite awesome. And this lot having come off the freedom of the mountain grazing, just want to get back out on the commons as soon as possible, but they've several hours wait ahead of them.

Baled wool from the day before, was stacked ready to be taken away for the Wool Marketing board, who provide the "sheets" (empty wool sacks), which once shearing begins, fill quickly as willing hands take the freshly shorn fleece away from the shearer's board and lay it shorn side down, outside up on the rolling boards in the barn.

The fleece is then folded as neatly as possible, bring both sides over and in and then starting from the nearest end, rolled into a neat bundle, before adding it into the bag alongside the others, until each bag is packed as full as possible, when it is sewn up with a very large iron needle and a long lenghth of white nylon cord, it's quite a task to get the cord tight enough to keep the sack secure for moving into storage.

Or, as in the stack above, they are held together with 8 inch long, squared wooden pins.

The sheared ewes, were less vociferous and seemed fascinated by these strange, large white things, that smelled like themselves but were silent and didn't move about. They kept sniffing at them. Meanwhile in the barn. was another silent observer of all the action.

This four day old calf, left alone in the barn because he quite simply does not want to go out with his mam and the other cattle.
He's perfectly healthy but just a bit of a loner and seemed perfectly content watching the goings on in the ovine, not bovine hours of the day. He even moved nearer to the action as if to have a better viewpoint of the activity in the barn.

The shearer was on his own today. He reckons to shear an average of 40 sheep per hour. With 250 to get through he had his work cut out. Meanwhile the farmer and his two helpers, kept up a steady flow of sheep through the various gates and pens, rolled fleeces and bagged them, raked up all the loose wool from the shearers board to give him a clean working space and generally kept the whole process running smoothly.

Outside the barn, the fleece-free and released were foraging for any greenery they could and ... if tall enough,  to reach over the fence, like these two ... the rewards were good.
But no self respecting, free roaming sheep likes to be penned in and they wanted freedom.

The noise level was getting louder as the hours went by, then finally just before the mile journey up the mountain road to freedom ... yep ... the weather closed in and a heavy mist cloaked the mountain in a damp shroud with very little visibility. I went up to the gate to witness their arrival.

They had spent the weekend getting inoculated, drenched and dosed, spent hours in the barn and it's vicinity, and now in the dank, darkening evening, all that now came between them and the freedom of thousands of acres of common ground,
<<<  was this single gate. I could hear the farmer and his dogs, could hear the eager bleating, which sounded loud through the very poor visibility and finally like an uphill stream they surged towards the gate and the now rain drenched pastures awaiting them. They obviously thought the verges were worth a passing nibble and munch.

But eventually they were over the boundary and heading off into the damp, clinging mist.