[andywalt]

In a few weeks time we will be collecting 4 ewe lamb herdwicks as we want to breed them in the future, we know they are very hardy and live on very rough forage ect, but if anyone has any experiance with them it would be nice to hear about any differant traits or tips please ?


regards

andy

[lachlanandmarcus]

All I know is my neighbours who have 300 Lleyns have one old Herdwick ewe who is their pet and used to go on the sledge with their grand-daughter in the snow every year! They love that Herdwick!

[Fleecewife]

Herdwicks require a cuddle every single day  just because they're wonderful 

[jaykay]

They are lovely. Also escape artists! Our neighbour, when he saw us getting ours, suggested we start them in his fields and then, perhaps, they'd end up in ours   and certainly every time we gathered them, one or other would run up the holding pen drystone walls and out   And they would be caught tightrope walking the wall tops. Might be better with fences!

Other than that, they can survive on very poor grazing but they grow very slowly. Give them decent grass and they grow more normally. Even so, tup them as shearlings, not lambs.

We didn't supplementary feed ours cake, other than a tiny bit to teach them to come to us, and then properly the 6 weeks before and the 4 weeks after lambing.

They lamb easily, don't always mother-up well (we penned ours for a couple of days, under an open-sided roof, to help with this).

Enjoy them, they are real characters  

[Padge]

i believe them to be 'awkward little b*****s   but you can't help but love them'          as said slower growing to reach a good carcass weight

[SallyintNorth]

I haven't had any myself although I really love the look of them but I know someone who has about 700 of them on the Lakeland Fells.  He says they'll lamb to a Herdwick or a Texel, a single lamb, every year from their second until they drop.  At the time I had this conversation with him his oldest lady was 14 and still producing and rearing a lamb each year.

I guess if they are on better ground they might have twins, and then the mothering-up problems you get with hill sheep and twins. 

The meat from an 18-24 months old Herdwick wether is reputedly as good as sheep meat gets.  I can vouch that hill-reared, grass-fed Swaledale wether of similar age is tremendous so would expect Herdwick to be at least as good.

[andywalt]

wow thanks for all the comments, my wife has fallen in love with them since she saw the sheep show at our local edenbridge agri show, im sure you have all seen the sheep show they go all around the country a very good informative and funny show for all.

I wonder how they are with electric fencing?

[mmu]

Are you in Kent?  I keep Herdwicks in Scotland, and it would be very different keeping them here.  Wouldn't change their character though, they are great sheep with a very long history.  I've found they have a tendency to be a bit wild unless you buy them as lambs and tame them up, but well worth the trouble. Good luck with them, they could do with spreading round the country a bit after the FM devastated their numbers, even if it does eventually effect their hardiness a bit.

[SallyintNorth]

The other thing to mention about Herdwicks (and some other hill breeds, including Swaledales) is that on their native Fells they are 'hefted'.  This means that they are trained, either by the farmer or by their mothers, to know the boundaries of their own area of the Fell, and they will stick within that territory without the need for fencing.

The implications for smallholder shepherds is that (i) Herdwicks may become distressed and try to get back to their normal ground if they are moved to another field, (ii) Herdwicks may expect to be able to roam quite widely (although within their territory) and may be distressed by being constrained in small areas.  This could account, at least in part, for the reputation of Herdwicks and other hill breeds that they are no respecter of fences, are flighty, difficult, etc.

It may for those reasons be a better idea to source your Herdwicks from another smallholder than from a Fell flock.

[jaykay]

We used to let ours take themselves from one field to the other when we were ready to move them and eventually I think they learned that all our fields were their heft.
I second buying lambs and training them.

We got a mixture of singles and twins from our Herdies, on rough grazing but better than 'fell'.

My experience of them as mothers was that the occasional shearling was a daft as any hill shearling and didn't realise she'd produced a lamb and why was this little black thing following her! The lambs tried hard to follow and by intervening and penning we usually sorted it out. Otherwise they were good and protective.

[andywalt]

very informative thanks guys, we are picking up 4 ewe lambs this sunday, we will be putting them in with our  lambs from this year, it will be very interesting, ill take some photos

[andywalt]

We have brought 7 Herdwick ewe lambs and we are collecting this friday...... they look great