Icons of spring

But the hard toil on the farmstead that ensures fluffy bundles can be seen frolicking in the fields every spring is a mystery to many.

Farming reporter Jennie Dennett spent an afternoon in the lambing shed to be briefed on the art of sheep farming.

WITH his hardened hands thrust into the pockets of his fleece, farmer Richard Harper leans back in his wellies to admire his flock of newborn lambs.

"It's satisfying when you see them knocking about like this," says Richard with pride as he watches them tottering around the green pastures of his Lune Valley farm.

For Richard and his wife Joyce, lambing is the toughest time of year at the 145 acres they work at Hebblethwaite Farm, near Marthwaite, just outside Sedbergh.

Joyce gets up at 6am to take the early shift in the lambing shed while Richard keeps watch over his pregnant ewes well into the night. Their sons Jonathan, 11, and Graham, 16, also muck in, bottle-feeding rejected or orphan lambs and helping out with watering and feeding.

But the couple who rarely take a break from their flock of 400, mainly Suffolk-cross, ewes and 30 cattle wouldn't have it any other way.

"It's physically very tiring but I enjoy it," says 43-year-old Richard, who grew up on the farm and later took it over from his father. "It's the first sign of spring and I'm sentimental!"

For the Harpers, the sheep farming year begins in September when they put their tups (rams) to their ewes. Nature takes its course with the addition of a cunning tup jacket' on the rams.

"It's a harness with a square wax crayon that sits in it," explains Richard. "When he does his bit you can see it on the ewe's fleece."

The colour of the crayon is swapped roughly every 21 days the length of the ewes' fertility cycle so he knows which sheep are ready for lambing and when.

A more modern technology than the trusty jacket is also brought into play. In a single morning a scanning contractor passes an ultrasound camera over the belly of each ewe to let Richard know how many lambs the flock is expecting.

Around five months after the ewes conceive, Richard rounds up the sheep with matching colours and brings them indoors.

There, the lambs often enter the world - feet and head first with no need for assistance.

But sometimes Joyce and Richard have to don arm-length rubber gloves to tease the lambs into the right birthing position and pull them out.

On a cloudy Monday they do just that for a struggling ewe. For fans of Radio 4's rural soap The Archers, the sound effects for an animal birth rubber gloves squelching a dollup of yoghurt followed by a wet towel plopped in a bucket mimic perfectly the real event.

Richard expertly wipes mucus from the newborn's mouth and blows hard into the muzzle to get it breathing freely, before mum takes over, licking her lamb clean.

For triplets, they encourage one of the lambs to latch on to a new mother simply because ewes have only two teats so the third sibling is unlikely to thrive.

"If we can catch a single one lambing and we have a triplet lamb that's still got all the goo on, the mother might look after both. The sheep sort of get confused."

Old farmers used to skin a dead lamb and strap it on to another lamb which needed new motherly acceptance - since sheep identify their offspring by scent.

But Richard - who has no qualms about the messy business of birth yet can't stomach TV hospital dramas - avoids this technique. "It's just gruesome!"

Instead, he uses the lamb adopter', a compact pen where ewes are lightly restrained so they cannot deny others' lambs their teats. The ewes usually accept these adopted lambs.

If the weather is fine, the sheep and lambs are back in the field after 24 hours where the lambs are "bounced on" i.e. left to graze open grassland and topped up with animal feed.

"I go round the fields twice a day, morning and night," says Richard. "If a lamb is parted from its mother it won't last long."

By May, weighing-in at around 40lbs, the lamb rearing cycle comes to an end.

Richard and Joyce are not emotional about it, rather they take pride in seeing a good lamb heading off to Hawes Auction Mart where they should fetch around £48 each.

"For the last ten years we have tried to produce what the market wants," says Richard. "That seems to be a good, thick-set, tight-skinned, white-fleeced lamb."

After all, as much as everyone likes seeing lambs on the hills, plenty of us also love a bit of quality lamb on our plates.