The privilege of feeling homesick

 

I’m a very privileged man. I have the honour of feeling like I belong, like I’m part of something. I get to feel homesick.

It sounds strange to say that homesickness is a privilege, but the older I get on this rock I’ve been placed on, the more I believe it is. To belong somewhere — truly belong — is an honour.

I can’t pretend to know exactly how a sheep thinks, but having worked with them my whole life, I’m sure every sheep farmer and crofter knows the same thing. Much like Spider-Man has his spidey sense, shepherds have “sheep sense.”

Out on the hill, gathering sheep across 3,000 acres, all of that comes into play. What looks like a massive game of tag becomes a battle of instinct, patience, and outmanoeuvring.

And I think our sheep, much like me, get homesick.

For them, home is not a house with four walls, or a barn, or even a croft. Home is a stretch of moorland, a bend in the burn, a steep brae, a certain slope in a certain wind. The place they belong.

Like my family, our flock — and the flocks of the few neighbours left who still use our common grazings — have been shaped by that belonging. Formed by the land, and by the simple truth of being hill ewes.

At this time of year, though, the hill cannot give them what they need. Not while they carry lambs. They know it as well as we do. So we gather.

Bringing the ewes back to the croft is no simple thing now. With so few sheep left on the hill, they’ve spread wider across the moor. Our common grazings are unfenced — the fences used to be the sheep themselves.

To the human eye, there are no boundaries out there, but sheep know their patch. Like wild things, and maybe like people too, they hold to their own ground. Invisible lines were once enough. For generations, a crofter could go to the hill and gather from the same area year after year, knowing his sheep would be there.

But those lines, like the banks of a flooding river, have begun to erode.

With fewer sheep on the moor, the old boundaries have weakened. The sheep spread further, the gather grows bigger, and what was once two days’ work becomes seven or eight — lifting small pockets of sheep from far corners of a vast and weathered place.

And still, even now, I struggle to explain what it feels like to gather a hill with your dogs.

It makes you feel small. Small against the west-side moorland, where the moor can at times seem almost featureless in its scale. But every time, without fail, I feel the pride of carrying on the hill tradition of those who came before me.

I’m taken back to a time when these moors — now crossed by few — were once a highway, a working road, a route to the shieling and to a life that depended on them. Those days are long gone, but they still live in the blood.

And always there is that thought: if they could see me now.

What would they make of it all? The changes. The climate. The seasons. The sheep. The heather. The birds. The insects. All of them passing through this changing of the guard, again and again.

And now it comes to me.

Now it is my turn.

Am I doing it justice?

That thought rings in my ears at the very same moment I’m shouting, “ORLA, STAND!” — the dog, or dogs, at my side.

Because for now, there’s no time to dwell too long on the past.

In the next three weeks, our ewes will be lambing, and we have to get them home. Off the riverbanks, off the slopes, off the peat hags.

Will we get them all? Probably not.

A few always slip the net.

But sheep know where they belong.

And more often than not, they’ll return in their own time. Sometimes, after lambing on the hill, a ewe will bring herself and her new lamb right back to the back of the hill gate, catching the smell of the fresher grass inland, knowing — in whatever way a sheep knows such things — that the lamb she’s brought unaided into the world will be safer, and better off, for now at least, on the croft.

And maybe that’s what homesickness really is.

Just the pull of the place that knows how to keep you.