Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
When I lived in the South of France, in the 1970s, at first light on certain days in early
June, I would be slowly awakened from my slumber by a distant river of sound flowing into
my dreams. It rose in a seamless crescendo - imagine Ravel's Bolero played by a gamelan
orchestra - until it reached a gentle climax and then equally imperceptibly faded away until
it could be heard no more.
It was the sound of
transhumance
, a thousand or more sheep being driven up to the sum-
mer pastures on the plateau, and it remains the sweetest noise I have ever heard. The sheep
were folded in our village at the foot of the escarpment overnight and at four in the morn-
ing, when it was cool, decked in their brightly coloured crests and pom-poms and tinkling
or clunking bells whose size and tuning denoted rank, they would start the six kilometre
climb up to the mountain pass.
In the early 1970s there were about eight flocks which made the ascent, and the mayor
of the village valiantly enlarged the enclosure which was rented out to the shepherds to ac-
commodate their growing flocks overnight. But by the mid 1980s there were only three or
four left, and although
transhumance
from the plains to the mountains still takes place, it is
now carried out in a single day in lorries.
Graham Harvey has performed a welcome service in reminding us that
trans-humance
was once a feature of the British (particularly the Celtic) agricultural economy, though like
so many peasant practices it appears to have been abandoned in this country well before it
fell into decline in mainland Europe. The shielings, as summer pastures were known both in
England and Scotland, endured on the Isle of Lewis until the 1950s, but in most other areas
they fell into disuse in the 19th century. They were much loved, as indeed
transhumances
are everywhere - they are after all a summer holiday. In Britain, where, as in the Alps,
dairy cows for cheese and butter were more commonly summer pastured than sheep, the
shielings were often the preserve of young women. Harvey quotes from a number of stir-
ring reminiscences, this being one recorded in Ireland in 1943:
I often heard my mother talking about the fine girls who were her companions in
the shieling. There was in her company a fine woman from Feann-a-Bhuidhe above
there called Úna Mícheáil Síle … When she and my mother were in the shieling in
their youth they were always close friends … I heard her say that she was as strong
as a stag. There was no man in the glen as strong and as active as she … The summer
pasturing continued in this district until my mother was twenty years old or more. That
was about 90 years ago. I heard her say that the last summer was the most beautiful
and pleasurable they ever had. They were a band of young spirited girls with little to
trouble them.
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It is heartening to imagine that this admirable tradition might return as Britain re-rural-
izes, though young dairymaids of the future might find their serenity troubled by tourists
