THE SHEEP. 
27 
THE CHEVIOT BREED. 
enclosure, they may he fed during the continuance of the snow. A sufficient number of these stells being placed in suitable 
situations, there will always exist places of security, to which the Sheep on different parts of the farm may he promptly conveyed. 
No words can convey to those who have never witnessed the scene, an idea of the terrible effect of the winter storms which 
ravage these alpine regions. In an amusing series of Tales, by James Hogg, commonly known as the Etterick Shepherd, graphic 
descriptions are given of the scenes of desolation which sometimes present themselves, and of which the memory survives from 
generation to generation in the traditionary annals of the shepherds. Of one of these, familiarly termed the Thirteen Drifty Days, 
he thus speaks from tradition :— 
“ It is said that for thirteen days and nights the snow-drift never once abated : the ground was covered with frozen snow 
when it commenced, and during all the time of its continuance the Sheep never broke their fast. The cold was intense to a degree 
never before remembered; and about the fifth and sixth days of the storm, the young Sheep began to fall into a sleepy and torpid 
state, and all that were so affected in the evening died over-night. The intensity of the frost-wind often cut them off when in that 
state quite instantaneously. About the ninth and tenth days, the shepherds began to build up huge semicircular walls of their 
dead, in order to afford some shelter for the living remainder; but such shelter availed little, for about the same time the want of 
food began to be felt so severely that they were frequently seen tearing one another’s wool with their teeth. When the storm 
abated, on the fourteenth day from its commencement, there was on many a high-lying farm not a living sheep to be seen. Large 
misshapen walls of dead, surrounding a small prostrate flock likewise all dead, and frozen stiff in their lairs, were all that remained 
to the forlorn shepherd and his master; and though on low-lying farms, where the snow was not so hard before the tempest began, 
numbers of sheep weathered the storm, yet their constitutions received such a shock, that the greater part of them perished after¬ 
wards ; and the final consequence was, that about nine-tenths of all the sheep in the south of Scotland were destroyed. In the 
extensive pastoral district of Eskdale-muir, which maintains upwards of 20,000 sheep, it is said none were left alive, but forty 
young wethers on one farm, and five old ewes on another. The farm of Phaup remained without a stock and without a tenant 
for twenty years after the storm; and when at length one very honest and liberal-minded man ventured to take a lease of it, it 
was at the annual rent of 4 a great coat and a pair of hose!’ It is now rented at L.500. An extensive glen in Tweedsmuir, 
now belonging to Sir James Montgomery of Stanhope, became a common at that time, to which any man drove his flocks that 
pleased, and it continued so for nearly a century.” 
He continues : 44 The years 1709, 1740, and 1772, were likewise all years notable for severity, and for the losses sustained 
among the flocks of sheep. In the latter, the snow lay from the middle of December until the middle of April, and was all that 
time hard frozen. Partial thaws always kept the farmer’s hopes of relief alive, and thus prevented him from removing his sheep 
to a lower situation, till at length they grew so weak that they could not be removed. There has not been such a general loss in 
the days of any man living as in that year.” 
44 But of all the storms that ever Scotland witnessed, or I hope ever will again behold, there is none of them that can once be 
compared with that of the memorable night between Friday the 24th and Saturday the 25th of January 1794. This storm fell 
with peculiar violence on that division of the South of Scotland that lies between Crawford-muir and the Border. In these bounds 
seventeen shepherds perished, and upwards of thirty were carried home insensible, who afterwards recovered. The number of 
sheep that were lost far outwent any possibility of calculation. Whole flocks were overwhelmed with snow, and no one ever 
knew where they were till the snow was dissolved, and they were all found dead. I myself witnessed one particular instance 
of this, on the farm of Thickside : there were twelve scores of excellent ewes, all one age, that were missing all the time that the 
snow lay, which was only a week, and no traces of them could be found; when the snow went away, they were discovered all lying 
dead, with their heads one way, as if a flock of sheep had dropped dead going from the washing. Many hundreds were driven into 
waters, burns, and lakes, by the violence of the storm, where they were buried or frozen up, and these the flood carried away, so 
that they were never seen or found by the owners at all. The greater part of the rivers on which the storm was most deadly, run 
into the Solway Frith, on which there is a place called the Beds of Esk, where the tide throws out, and leaves whatever is 
carried into it by the rivers. When the flood after the storm subsided, there were found on that place, and the shores adjacent, 
one thousand eight hundred and forty sheep, nine black cattle, three horses, two men, one woman, forty-five dogs, and one hundred 
and eighty hares, besides a number of meaner animals.” 
After describing his return from a distant excursion through the mountains, and certain presages of a coming storm, he 
continues : 
44 I then went to my bed in the byre-loft, where I slept with a neighbour shepherd, named BoRTirwiCK ; but though fatigued 
with walking through the snow, I could not close an eye, so that I heard the first burst of the storm, which commenced between 
one and two, with a fury that no one can conceive who does not remember it. Besides, the place where I lived being exposed to 
H * 
