Lambing starts in the second week of February and runs, more or less without pause, into the middle of March. For six weeks the shed lights stay on through the night and somebody is always awake.
Most of it is quiet, uneventful work — checking, moving, feeding, checking again. The drama is rare and usually brief. What stays with you is the ordinary rhythm of it: the noise of the shed at four in the morning, and the moment a lamb finds its feet.
By the end of March the fields along the Dove are full of them, and the dale sounds completely different for a month.