Getting ready for the ram

This time of year is like Christmas to the rams. They’ve been waiting 12 long months for their chance to perform – and it’s almost here! I’m away filming in Inverness for 4 weekends in a row just now, so it means that any work on the sheep has to be done midweek. Easy enough in the summer, but it’s getting dark so quickly, it’s a struggle to get anything done after work. The plan was to separate the flock into smaller groups, put them into separate fields, ready for the rams to be added next week.

I went in the croft to gather them around 5.30.

I went out to get my dad and things started to mist up.

We got all 60+ sheep into a pen quite quickly, and set about separating them.

I made a couple of runs with the trailer up to a field further up in the village and things got very dark very quickly!

The sheep are in 4 smaller flocks now. Nearly 30 to the Big Fellow (Cheviot), 20ish to the new Suffolk, around 12 to another Cheviot and 5 Blackface gimmers to a Blackface ram.

It was so dark when we finished but it’s all done now, ready for the rams to be released next Tuesday!