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The Herdwick sheep is the most important animal in the history of the Lake District landscape. Not the most spectacular — the peregrine falcon and the osprey are more dramatic. Not the rarest — the red squirrel is more threatened. But no other animal has shaped the landscape of the Lake District more directly, over a longer period, than the Herdwick, and no other animal is more completely bound up with the human story of this place.
Beatrix Potter understood this. She spent the last thirty-five years of her life breeding Herdwicks, became one of the leading experts on the breed and left four thousand acres of Herdwick farmland to the National Trust with the specific requirement that it continue to be farmed with Herdwicks. The landscape you see from the road between Windermere and Grasmere — the grazed fells, the dry stone walls, the characteristic look of the Lake District upland — is, to a significant degree, Beatrix Potter's legacy.
Herdwicks are a small, hardy breed of mountain sheep, native to the central and western Lake District. They are easily recognised: the face and legs are pale grey or white, the fleece in young animals is dark brown or black, lightening to grey with age. Adult Herdwicks have a characteristic expression that many people describe as alert or intelligent; they are certainly more active and aware than lowland breeds.
The breed is ancient — the exact origin is uncertain, with theories ranging from Norse introduction in the 9th century to pre-Roman native stock — and it is adapted to the Lake District in a way that no other breed is. Herdwicks can survive on the open fell through the worst Lake District winters with minimal supplementary feeding. They maintain body weight on the sparse upland vegetation — the coarse grasses, rushes, heather and bilberry — that other sheep breeds cannot sustain themselves on.
The most remarkable characteristic of the Herdwick is heafting — the ability to maintain a knowledge of a specific area of fellside (a "heaf") across generations. Herdwicks learn their heaf from their mothers in the first year of life, and they maintain this knowledge for their own lifetimes, rarely straying beyond the heaf boundaries they have learned.
This means that when a flock of Herdwicks is sold with a Lake District farm, the knowledge embedded in the flock — which part of the fell belongs to this farm, where the best grazing is in different seasons, where to shelter in different weather — is sold with it. The sheep carry knowledge of the landscape that cannot be replicated quickly. When the foot-and-mouth outbreak of 2001 resulted in the culling of large numbers of Herdwick flocks, this heaf knowledge was lost in areas where entire flocks were destroyed, and the rebuilding of heafted populations is a decades-long process.
Beatrix Potter began farming at Hill Top in Near Sawrey in 1905, when she bought the farm with the proceeds of the first Peter Rabbit books. She had no farming background but taught herself — consulting shepherds, attending agricultural shows, reading widely. Within a few years she was breeding prize-winning Herdwicks. By the time of her death in 1943 she was one of the most respected Herdwick breeders in Cumbria.
Potter's legacy to the breed is considerable. Her land purchases preserved large areas of traditional Herdwick farmland from development. Her bequest to the National Trust specified that the farms she left should continue to be farmed with Herdwicks. The National Trust, as the single largest landowner in the Lake District, now farms approximately a quarter of the Lake District's Herdwick sheep and is one of the main forces in the breed's continuation.
Herdwick wool is coarse by the standards of fine wool breeds. It is not suitable for next-to-skin garments but is excellent for outerwear and carpets. The Herdwick Sheep Breeders' Association has worked in recent decades to develop markets for Herdwick wool products, including the HERDWICK brand, which supplies wool to manufacturers of tweed, carpets and upholstery fabrics.
The wool is naturally water-repellent — an adaptation to the wet Lake District climate — and extremely durable. These characteristics make Herdwick wool well suited to hard-wearing outdoor textiles.
Herdwicks graze the open fells throughout the Lake District, typically above the intake walls (the stone walls that mark the lower limit of the open fell). On our Beatrix Potter tours, the expert storyteller will point out the Herdwick flocks on the farmland that Beatrix Potter bought and explain the connection between the sheep, the landscape and Potter's conservation work.
Herdwick sheep are part of the landscape story on our Beatrix Potter Hidden Country and Beatrix Potter Hill Top & Windermere Cruise tours.