Seven years I’ve known sheep. Seven years as shepherd, seven years as midwife, seven years as spectator and seven years, at times, as undertaker.

I’m no rancher with my 12 ladies, but they are tying me anew to this land of ours. This column will be a record of a time in the life of these sheep and this land and living of ours.

A menagerie of the trials and tribulations of being a shepherd to my own flock for the first time. In the series, I hope to talk to you of my life and the life of these animals.

I’m no expert when it comes to grass growth, but I know the intimacies of life and the lessons it provides.

In ways, this column will record not just the sheep but the rural world in which I live.

Sheep, those small little creatures, have come and won my heart. The sheep is a brave animal, a strong animal and, when the chips are down, a valuable wee investment.

But I’ve never owned my own flock. I’ve been busy with cattle, busy being the ‘cow man’, but now I have come to see that no farm is complete, no farmer complete without a flock of his own.

So it has come to pass that I’ve bought 12 sheep from my parents. Twelve hoggets, to be precise. It’s a step into a new world for me, a step into the unknown.

I’ve known these hoggets since birth, and they know this ground. It seems right to keep them here. They are Suffolk crosses with good breeding, their black faces belying their ancestry back to the start of our sheeping days on this farm.

We began with Suffolks, learned the ways of sheep with this breed. They were hard days when I knew not the way of sheep, when a tangle of legs at birth caused me confusion.

They were the days before I had returned to the farm, before I had returned to Longford to make my life amongst the fields and land that know my name.

Farming is a conversation between land and rain but in ways I think it is a song between farmers and what the Irish philosopher and son of the soil, John O’Donohue, called our clay souls.

I’m trying to connect fully to my clay soul. I’ve found it in the dauby ground of the Midlands. It is as rich as anywhere else in the world.

There were other hoggets, more hoggets, but 12 seemed like a good number. There are 12 months in a year, 12 signs in the zodiac, even our Lord had 12 apostles.

Twelve, it seems to me, was fitting. Twelve was and is the right number to start with.

So, I have been seven years at home now and daily I learn the lesson of what it means to be centred in a place.

These sheep, these 12 ladies I have bought, are part of my landscape of the farm now. The girls are up in the upper ground with the rest of the commercial herd. They are doing fine.

The history of this farm of ours dates back to my great-grandfather who came from the nearby village of Ballinamuck where the infamous 1798 rebellion ended.

Great-grandfather Connell married into a family called the Reillys; what is remembered of him is fairly scant. He was a farmer, he was a tenant to Lord Granard. He walked these fields long before I was even thought of.

My mother’s people came from Bunlahy, a parish nearby. Her people date to her land to the 1700s and came, I’m told, originally from Cavan, the land of the Brefni tribe, but as to when they came south, we do not know, and those that did are long gone.

The family has known these homelands all our lives, but the farm I occupy is a new thing, a creation of my father and mothers dreams and will.

Apart from the home paddocks, the other lands belonged to other families other people, but slowly over the course of 20 years, my parents have built the farm into our holding.

We call it Birchview. From the Soran river to the hills of Clonfin right down to the Camlin river, it is a universe all of our own making.

Others have left their hand-prints on this land, their names for fields and places remaining long after their departure telling us of the people of history.

Some of the fields have known our hands, and they have been reshaped and repurposed and given new titles, like the garden (though it has never known vegetables) and the potato field (though it is now a pasture field.)

With this column, I hope you’ll take the step with me and together we will venture into a new land. Here’s to the journey ahead and the living along the way. Here’s to the 12. Long may they live.

 

John Connell lives and farms in Longford