Round Up and Fetch!

I'm so glad that we decided to go to Southerscales on Wednesday afternoon for the limestone pavement and trees which featured in yesterdays blip as this morning was totally foggy! It didn't really clear until late morning, and even then it was still very hazy. We decided on a shopping trip down into Hawes, which also included a visit to the cheese shop at the Wensleydale Creamery, and some sample tasting. The Wensleydale and salted Caramel cheese was a particular favourite of mine.

In the afternoon we walked down along to River Ure to the far end of Hawes on the way to Simonstone to where there was a Sheepdog demonstration due to take place. The shepherd, Richard Fawcett, was going to demonstrate 5 different dogs. He started off telling us about the local area and farming, and then how he trains dogs and enters trials with them and how he is also a trials judge, next week he was going to South Africa to judge their national trials.

It was interesting to see the different dogs personalities come out as Richard worked them. It was amazing how the dogs all responded to the same 4 basic voice commands, but how each dog had their own whistle commands, so if he was working two dogs at the same time he used whistle commands to control the dogs.

Here we have Gibbs rounding up and fetching some of the demo sheep, which were Swaledale sheep.