of hills and river valleys...

On Thursday, I left the seaside behind, heading back to the Southern Uplands and to work. I love this time of year when the fullness of summer creates green canopies over country roads and the silage has been gathered up and formed into great, fat yellow cylinders ready to be packaged into black, pale green, and pink sacks for winter feeding - pink for breast cancer awareness, how excellent is that? The wee, fragile lambs of spring are sturdy and confident now, so big that poor patient mamas are lifted nearly off their hooves as their youngsters look for a cheeky feed.

Different sounds and smells here compared to the coast, the marked absence of herring-gulls fighting, for one. A family of swallows are annual, honoured eaves-guests and chat away in high-pitched peeps to one another outside the bedroom window in the early morning; four hatchlings this year. To the back of the house, where the Clyde loops and winds and becomes a natural boundary between newly-shorn fields, oyster catchers stalk the ground in search of snacks. Further along the valley, the hum of a tractor at work, a little late to the silage gathering. Closer, out front of house, the green and yellow of another tractor catches my eye. I watch it bounce along the road to turn off for the next field. Just like God, John Deere is ever-present.

At the moment, the field at the front is home to a flock of Bluefaced Leicesters. An odd-looking breed, tall with long, aristocratic noses and lovely sticky-up ears; they've now become a favourite. When I first arrived in the area I wondered if they were goats. Five years on, I am a little more advanced in the language and look of sheep, have learnt how not to get in the way at lambing time and have fed the occasional orphan lamb as needed. Yesterday morning, looking out at the field, I missed a perfect Kodak moment of what appeared to be synchronised sheeping. The flock had assembled by the gate. Rather than bunching themselves up, they were in a drawn out line of twos and threes, bodies all perfectly aligned, eyes all facing north-west and out to the valley as if watching the river. All were perfectly still. One of their number wasn't playing the game; in contrast, it was determinedly facing the other way refusing to conform. Or perhaps this was the star of the 'team' doing a solo? Having seen the young shepherd earlier in his trusty, rusty blue quad bike - with Don the collie at the back balancing on velcro paws - I knew the sheep hadn't come to wait for him. For fully five minutes, I watched them as they stood, stock still, poised and alert. I wondered what they were going to do. Nothing, apparently.
Sheep are weird.
Most of the farmers around here claim that the sole aim of a sheep is to see how quickly it can die.
Twenty minutes later, coming back by the front, they'd daundered off back up over the ridge of the hill and were lost to sight. Time now, however, to turn from sheep and turn to work.