ON Lismore, the lamb sales have started in earnest now. It has been a good year. With the rain in the winter and the warm, dry spring, the grass has grown well and the lambs born in early April had a more pleasant start to life.

Last April was bitterly cold and the lambs were all born outside on the hills – not that our hills are all that high, 100 metres at most, but exposed enough to winds off the Atlantic. This April was more like summer.

The sheep on this grassy island provide the background rhythm to the year alongside the flowers, moving from the wood anemones and primroses of early spring to the hawthorn berries and bright-coloured leaves of autumn.

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Prices have been good although it’s not been quite like normal. Sellers have had to drop off their animals and leave. No jostling ringside like usual. No catching up with other farmers and eyeing up the opposition as others lambs are brought into the ring. No carousing and the feeling of a good day out; the culmination of a year’s hard work. But at least the prices have been good.

With the constant back and forward of the trailers full of baa-ing lambs and the extra visitors, it’s sometimes hard to get on the ferry when you would like to. Which can be irritating when you are trying to fix up a vet’s appointment for your dog or need petrol for your car. Booking is essential. A far cry from lockdown, when booking was impossible and the ferries often ran empty.

Walking around the island as I do every day with my dog, it’s easy to think that the landscape with its dry stone dykes and grassy meadows was always like this. But Lismore was historically an arable island. The limestone soil is fertile and around the scattered townships were crops of barley and oats with cattle in the “outfields” beyond the cultivated areas.

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In the evening light it’s still possible to see the remnants of these “runrigs”, the narrow ridges and furrows that were carefully ploughed across even the steepest of slopes.

I sometimes stand and squint and try to imagine on the CGI of my inner eye the brown of the ploughed earth and the gold of the ripened grain around the now abandoned settlements.

It was mostly the price of wool that changed all this but the Clearances were complicated, nowhere near as simplistic as often it might appear, and not all the landowners quite the villains that they were frequently portrayed. But about one-third of the island here was completely cleared and although a little was later resettled, the southernmost part remains eerily silent.

No tarmacked road, no electricity or telephone wires. Just grass and sheep and a few cattle, and here and there a few crumbling cottages nestling in a sheltered spot.

In this age of social media and non-stop instant news, it’s intriguing to realise that apart from the drop in the price of wool, one of the major factors in the ending of the mass Clearances, in the Highlands at least, was the power of the press.

Reports in The Scotsman were picked up by the Times in London, who sent reporters “up north” to cover the story. Its readers were indignant. Especially later on, when pathetic photos of children and old women outside their tumbled cottages were circulated.

On Lismore the sheep have stayed, with the human population a fraction of what it was. The sheep are part of the rhythm of the year though, and this year especially to have a normal rhythm – lambing, dipping, shearing collecting, selling – has been wonderfully soothing. Even if you can’t get on the ferry.

Rosemary Barry
Lismore