Calming farm experience in the Lake District where you can hug sheep
There’s a tingle of anticipation in the tussocky field that slopes up towards Holme Fell behind one of the most photographed farmhouses in the Lake District. Beneath a colourless winter sky, our small group stands still and silent in woolly hats and warm coats, staring at a gap in a dry-stone wall. Suddenly, it fills with a cloud of grey and 15 or so Herdwick sheep come trotting and bleating down the hill towards us.
We hold out palms of sheep nuts for them to nibble, before the animals lean in for ear scratches and neck rubs. The sheep then sit down as though inviting us to follow their lead. Within minutes, everyone is on the ground, oblivious to the chill, hands buried in the animals’ cosy double fleeces. No one speaks. The only sounds are bird calls, baas and the occasional high-pitched honking of distant whooper swans.
This spellbinding encounter is taking place at Yew Tree Farm in Coniston, a National Trust farm formerly owned by the author, illustrator and Herdwick sheep breeder Beatrix Potter.
Its tenants Jon Watson and his wife, Jo McGrath, keep around 1,000 Herdwick sheep and 80 Belted Galloway cattle on the fell slopes around the 17th-century farmhouse that starred as Beatrix’s home in the 2006 film Miss Potter.
“These sheep haven’t been trained to come and sit with us; it’s their choice,” says Jo. “Herdwicks are more self-assured and less flighty than other sheep because they’re so primitive. I think their innate curiosity is part of their survival instinct: they want to interact with us and find out what’s in it for them.”
Herdwick sheep have lived in the Lake District for many centuries and they’ve been largely left to their own devices because neither their wool (coarse, dark and short-fibred) nor their meat (lean, slow-growing and strong-flavoured) was considered desirable by the 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century sheep breeders who created our traditional and modern hybrid breeds. But with small carcasses and low productivity – they deliver half as many lambs, on average, as modern hybrid breeds – they were also commercially worthless to sheep farmer Jon when he arrived at the farm in 2002 and found himself obliged to keep them.
“They’re a legacy from Beatrix Potter: when she bequeathed her Lakeland farms to the National Trust, she stipulated that the Herdwicks had to stay,” says Jon, a first-generation farmer who came here from North Yorkshire.
“I thought they were a waste of space. But gradually, I came to appreciate how they fit here. They can survive the coldest winters and climb the craggiest mountains, where other sheep would just cower behind the walls.”
Their grazing, he explains, has shaped this World Heritage landscape. “Without it, these hills would become a sea of bracken and lose their unique biodiversity.” Crucially, the Herdwicks’ innate knowledge of their own turf, or “heft”, passed down from ewe to lamb over centuries, means they can be farmed on open fells. “If they weren’t hefted, they’d wander all over the Lake District and you’d never know where they were,” Jon says. “Beatrix Potter understood that if we lost that legacy, we’d never get it back.”
Jon has spent the past two decades championing the Herdwick as a source of nature-friendly fine food. His farm-based butchery business Heritage Meats sells Herdwick hogget (aged one to two years) and mutton to influential chefs who appreciate the rich flavour and fine-grained texture of meat grown slowly on a natural diet of mountain grasses, heather and bilberries.
It was with some bemusement, then, that he observed Yew Tree Farm’s latest diversification taking shape. Now, as well as getting married in the 17th-century barn or renting Miss Potter’s farmhouse, you can learn about her favourite breed before being introduced to a small flock of friendly sheep.
It began soon after Jo, an animal portrait artist, met Jon at an exhibition (he bought one of her paintings) and moved to Yew Tree Farm in 2013. Suffering from undiagnosed ADHD and feeling overwhelmed by work and family life – the couple have three children between them – she began taking time out with a group of docile sheep in the field behind the house. “It really calmed me,” she says. “I started inviting my friends to sit with the sheep, and they started inviting their friends.”
Jo launched the Herdwick Experience six years ago: “It was taking up so much of my time that it had to pay its way if I wanted to continue.”
She runs it with Mel Oddy, a former guest who was so entranced by the healing power of Herdwicks that she gave up her corporate job and persuaded her husband to move with her to the Lake District so she could become Jo’s business partner.
“When I’m sitting with the sheep, I feel my blood pressure drop,” Mel says. “Before I came here, I was constantly anxious and hadn’t slept properly for years. Now I sleep like a log.”
Locals and tourists love getting close to the pretty sheep that are as integral to the Lakeland landscape as golden bracken and glassy tarns. “I never realised how long their eyelashes were,” says Tess, a tour guide, who has since learned that a Herdwick’s lashes protect its eyes from freezing shut during snowstorms so it can find its way to food and shelter. For some participants, however, the experience can be profound.
“We’ve seen people with severe autism become incredibly relaxed,” Jo says. “We’ve hosted NHS staff traumatised by their experiences during the Covid pandemic and former soldiers with PTSD. It’s not unusual for people to burst into tears.”
Something about the animals’ lack of judgment and gentle acceptance provokes an emotional release, she thinks. “When they trust you, when they choose to be in your space, it inflates you with contentment. For me, it’s like being filled up with warm, buttery caramel.”
Prices from £45 per person at the Herdwick Experience, for more information visit Yew Tree Farm.
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