Our Sheep
The core of our flock is the Whitefaced Woodland.
The Whitefaced Woodland is a sturdy hill sheep from the Peak District and the Yorkshire borders. Their name comes from the Woodland Valley in the High Peak; it doesn’t relate to woods and woodland – these sheep like nothing better than to demolish a tasty, leafy branch!
Whitefaced Woodlands are hardy, thrifty sheep and excellent mothers, but the lambs mature quite slowly, and the ewes have fewer lambs than some more ‘commercial’ breeds. The pure Woodland ewe lambs, plus any really outstanding ram lambs will be kept on the farm until autumn of the following year. Then we select the ones we want to add to our flock and sell the remainder as breeding stock.
To give us more lambs, which will mature slightly quicker, we put some of our Woodlands to a Teeswater or Wensleydale ram. The male lambs from this crossing are exceptionally good to eat. We keep the females – with their curly dreadlocks – for the next stage. Raising livestock is a long process…
When these girls are just over a year old, they will be shorn with great care to provide top notch longwool fleeces, much sought after by handspinners, with the finest wool generally coming from this first clipping.
At 18 months old, the shearlings, as they are now called, join the older longwool ewes to be mated with our Southdown rams Kingston (pictured above), Hagrid, and Earl. And that is what produces our quality ‘meat lambs’, who spend their entire life out in our Teesdale pastures.
