Shepherds on the road
in Romania and Wales
In 2008 the Raţiu Foundation gave me a grant to study shepherding and transhumance in Romania. Transhumance is a technical word for the journeys shepherds make while walking sheep between summer and winter grazing. It’s an archaic custom which has somehow survived even in Western Europe, although nowadays many farmers transport their sheep between pastures by lorry. Even so, there are some who still drive their flocks on foot. I’m writing a book about shepherds who go on the road in Romania, but have also been talking to Welsh sheep farmers who practise a form of transhumance. That’s an ongoing story, and meanwhile, I’d like to share some of the contacts I’ve made.
Since 2008 the Romanian photographer, Dragoş Lumpan, has been working on a documentary photo essay and film called the The Last Transhumance. He’s been working in six countries: Albania, Greece, Italy, Romania, Turkey and Wales (it is a country to the Welsh if not an independent state). Helping him meet shepherds in Wales and organise exhibitions here has turned my work into a much more interesting project. In January, Dragoş showed around 20 of the 50,000 photos he’s shot so far at Oriel Q in Narberth, Pembrokeshire, near my own base.The same selection is going to the Radnorshire Museum in Llandrindod Wells during June and July, and the National Wool Museum in Drefach Felindre from 9th December 2011.
Erwyd Howells is a professional shepherd based in Ceredigion, mid Wales. He doesn’t have any sheep of his own but hires himself out to farmers, using his own dogs (Border Collies and Welsh sheepdogs) with which he also competes in trials. Erwyd has written a book called Good Men and True about the shepherds of mid-Wales, many of whom he grew up with. It tells the life stories of twenty or so men - and women - shepherds dating back to the early part of the 20th century. Written with a meticulous and loving eye for detail, illustrated with photographs he’s collected from the families concerned and enriched by a lifetime of personal experience, the book not only details the joys and miseries of shepherding and describes individual characters with clear eye, but it also contains fascinating ethnographic details such as what shearing suppers were like, how Welsh shepherds count their sheep (with an arcane numbering system that sounds like an incantation), how they mark sheep’s ears, how to train a sheepdog and a lot more.
Claudia Murg is a Romanian journalist who lives in Britain. She has worked for the investigative BBC tv programme Panorama and with filmmaker Angus MacQueen, and plans to make her own film about how EU legislation is affecting Romania’s small farmers. Michael Pearson is a retired solicitor who has made the same topic the subject of his doctoral thesis at the University of Kent. While working with Claudia and Michael I came across many other people intent on similar studies, not least the Adept Foundation, which is based in Transylvania, and the Land Economy Research Group which is raising awareness of the vital role played by the cattle, goats, horses and sheep which small-scale farmers still graze on Europe’s mountains. The interaction of these modest herds and flocks with wild mountain habitats (sometimes called High Nature Value Grassland) is directly responsible for maintaining the bio-diversity of the entire European continent.
Often dismissed by policy-makers as being of no importance, the ‘little’ farmers of Europe are precious beyond price (for a detailed analysis of how Romanian smallholders are being made to feel worthless by Romanian officials and EU policies, see Katy Fox. The more of them we lose, the more bio-diversity will shrivel and the sicker our planet will become. They have survived up to now because without them people would have had no other affordable sources of food. Their importance to the environment, nature conservation, kinship structures and mental as well as physical health is being recognised but as people die or leave for better paid work their land is being taken for holiday homes and golf courses which destroy the balance of nature by creating monocultures. The CAP has been a laughing stock for years but can anyone save these small-holdings - or change our perception of them before they disappear altogether? Click here to see a new policy document written by the European Forum on Nature Conservation and Pastoralism. It confronts these issues and is lobbying to get funds directed to remote rural areas where they are really needed rather than to the largest, most intensive and wealthiest farms where they are not. At least someone is trying...
Liviu Marian (left) is a Romanian shepherd in the Apuseni Mountains of western Transylvania. He owns around two thousand head of hardy Ţurcana sheep (centre right) which he looks after by himself, with the help of a dozen dogs. Most them are the large, hairy kind of Carpathian sheepdog (bottom left) which are there to protect the sheep from bears and wolves, but a couple are smaller, busier types which are more like British collies. They do the actual herding (top right). The Apuseni are separate from and smaller than the Carpathians, but no less beautiful. Liviu spends all summer with his flock, up on the wide, meadow like ridges of the mountains, sleeping out or in a timber hut that he’s built next to a wood-fenced corral and a couple of haystacks on his own land. A few miles to the west, the idyllic pastoral scenery is scarred by open-cast gold and copper mines whose metals have provided income for the mountain people for centuries but which are now the cause of agonising environmental controversy. Self-reliant and self-deprecating, Liviu jokes that he couldn’t be anything else but a shepherd because he doesn’t know how. Liviu is like most of the vocational shepherds I’ve met in that he loves being in the mountains, has a true feel ing for his work and cares enough for his animals to spend all night with them when they are sick.
Tim Salmon is a writer, traveller and Grecophile (if that’s a genuine word) who has published superb guide books, cookery books and travel books including one called The Unwritten Places. It’s about the Vlach (Aromanian) shepherds of northern Greece whom he walked with on an autumn transhumance (dhiava) in the mid-1990s. He later turned the book into a film called Dhiava and continues his thirty year love affair with the rural Hellenic world. Tim Salmon has also written Schizophrenia: who cares? It’s a passionate, scathing but also funny account of looking after his schizophrenic son while also having to deal with the sheer incompetence and insensitivity of government organisations that are supposedly there to help. Given the frustration he must have felt it could easily have been a rant, but isn’t.
Keith Bowen is an artist and writer who has made a speciality of studying, painting and writing about the shepherds of Snowdon. His book, Snowdon Shepherd, follows the shepherding year in its annual cycle, illustrated with great character studies, of people, sheep and dogs as well as superb landscape settings that make Snowdon look as though it’s a million miles and a hundred years away from Britain’s urban sprawl.
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