Sheep Farming Quotes

“This was the very heart of Wales' rainforest zone, where the oceanic climate conspires to make conditions perfect for the rich profusion of plant life that we'd spent the past week exploring. Yet here, humanity had found a rainforest and turned it into a desert. It had started long ago, no doubt: Wales' Green Desert is the product of agricultural malpractice dating back to the twelfth-century monks of Strata Florida. But what began as a profitable enterprise in medieval times today supports a mere twenty-eight farms over an area covering 46,000 acres. The farming unions claim that rewilding will lead to rural depopulation, but centuries of overgrazing have already drained the land of both people and wildlife.

And in doing so, Wales is losing part of its heritage, its culture. Because the Wales of this great country's myths and legends was a rainforest nation, whose peoples lived and coexisted with the Atlantic oakwoods that once carpeted their land, celebrating them in song. They knew these rainforests and knew them deeply, weaving them into their stories, vesting their greatest heroes with a magic derived from that profound knowledge of place and ecology.

There is a way back from this, but it is unlikely to come through a culture war between sheep farmers and rewilders. The truth is that there is more than enough space in Wales, as there is in the rest of Britain, both for farming to continue and for more rainforest to flourish.”
― Guy Shrubsole, The Lost Rainforests of Britain

“If as much thought were given when transferring the unemployed of Great Britain to the dominions as a successful squatter is obliged to give to his flocks, the British Empire would be far more prosperous than it is.”
― Arthur W. Upfield, The Sands of Windee

“For the sheep farmer, seventy years of intercourse had made the moor sit to him more closely than the most supple of garments... He had made his covenant with the moor: it had bogged him and drenched him, deceived, scorched, numbed him with cold, tested his endurance, memory and skill; until a large part of his nature was so interpenetrated with its nature that apart from it he would have lost reality. His love for it indeed was beyond all covenant. Like his love for Jenny, it had the quality of life itself, absolute and uncovenanted.”
― Nan Shepherd, A Pass in the Grampians

“Even in the early phases of tenant reduction, during the seventeenth century, many of the dispossessed appear to have maintained a foothold in the local area, often by turning to spinning and other activity associated with sheep farming - a more formal division of production and gendering of the working population. However, by the 1710s, the decade when the Buccleuchs began efforts to rationalise their 'South Country' operations, as many as two thirds of the Ettrick and Yarrow valley farms were under a single tenancy. By the 1790s, it was nine in ten. It is across this period that widespread dispossession seems to have turned into widespread clearance across the Southern Uplands in general, and Ettrick and Yarrow in particular. Tenants compelled to flit at the end of a tack would take with them wives, children, elderly relatives and unrelated servants, each removal amounting to a substantial dent to the population.”
― Angus Sutherland, Scottish Literary Review, Autumn/Winter 2025