A couple of days before leaving for Shacklabank farm in Cumbria, I emailed the farmer, Alison O'Neill, to ask about our weekend itinerary. The response was this: 'On Saturday, you'll help with sheep clipping. On Sunday I'll be taking you for a high-level eight-mile hike in the Howgills.'
Hmmm. When I heard about Alison's 'free-range walking holidays' based on her working farm, I'd started to cultivate pleasant images of me and my friend Sarah wading through wildflower meadows, lolling in fresh hay, eating scones. Suddenly these bucolic images melted away. We hadn't bargained on actual sweaty, smelly farm work. A friend helpfully tells me that once you've rugby-tackled the sheep to the ground to shear them, they poo all over you. However, the fleece is coated in lanolin, so at least we'll have soft hands.
Three hours on the train from London and we are in Oxenholme. Alison collects us from the station and drives us five miles into the hills. Shacklabank appears like one of those two-dimensional farms you'd draw as a child, clinging to the side of a steep hillside speckled with sheep.
'We were worried about you girls, so we've laid on a light supper,' Alison says. The table is heaped with food and a huge bucket of red roses and wild herbs. There's a wood-burning stove behind us and floral, polka-dot and patchwork cushions everywhere. We're offered local cheeses, red pears and grapes, a pile of potatoes pulled out of the ground two hours ago, home-made coleslaw and ham from a nearby farm. We sup tea and eat home-made shortbread, encrusted with crystalised ginger. It feels as though we've stepped into a children's book: part Hobbit hole, part Alice in Wonderland tea party. 'It's different up here, girls,' Alison explains. 'All you have to worry about are tractors and trifles.'
Last September, Alison became the only female farmer in Cumbria qualified to guide in the hills and began organising her holidays which combine walking with a taste of farm life. In 2006, Country Living magazine awarded her its Women in Rural Enterprise Award for best business idea.
'I live for the hills,' Alison tells us. She grew up on her grandparents' farm in the Howgills, then travelled the world for 15 years before returning eight years ago, in her mid-thirties, to rent a small farm from the church. She now has 60 sheep, two cows, three fell ponies, six dogs and a flock of chickens to tend.
We're given a fitness assessment, in which we are declared 'liggers' not 'lishuns' (fit, not fat) before being shown to our caravan. Guests have the choice of two caravans on the farm or a double room in the farmhouse. The caravans are cosy, not fancy. There are patchwork quilts and fluffy towels, organic products in the bathroom, a fridge full of biscuits, chocolate, milk, eggs and jam, and a gas fire. We lie full-bellied in front of it and fret slightly about the following day's activities.
After breakfast (pork and Stilton sausages and a gammon chop for the meat eaters, bright yellow free-range eggs for me), we strike out on to the fells to round up some sheep. Moss, the farmyard sheepdog, is deaf and can only work to hand signals, fine if he's looking at you but a bit problematic if he isn't. Instead we bring John, a farmer from down the road, and his sheepdog, Cap, and trudge up the hill in the rain to fetch 16 Cumbrian Rough Fells that have been out since winter.
It's a 'clashy and clarty' (wet and mucky) summer's day and the logistics of getting the flock off the hillside, through several gates, down the lane and up into the clipping barn aren't easy. There's a lot of clapping, whooping, wading through becks and skidding through mud. Alison picks one errant sheep out of a ditch by its horns and walks it to the barn between her legs. She's wearing a skirt and a baby-blue woolly hat. She makes sheep farming look glamorous.
We don't have to worry about being gored or pooed on as we won't actually clip the sheep. Two men with forearms as thick as thighs are on the clipping platform. Alison's husband is helping out too. 'Jump over here, Nell, and worm this one, will you?' He hands me a sort of glue-gun device attached to a bottle of worming fluid. 'What? Up the bum?' I ask. Thankfully, you just have to slide the spout into the side of its mouth.
Scarlett, Alison's seven-year-old daughter, Sarah and I fold and roll the wool into bundles. The fleeces are warm, greasy and smelly; it's an oddly macabre job, but Scarlett doesn't mind tearing off the clumps of poo stuck to the wool.
For lunch it's fresh cheese scones, apricot flapjacks and raspberry and apple pie on hay bales in the barn. We take the dogs for a stroll alongside a beck. We drag our wet, smelly selves back to the caravan for a shower and rest before our evening meal (a heart-shaped, root-vegetable lasagne) then head for Dent, a tiny, cobbled village, with Alison.
Over a pint, she tells us how, on her wedding day, she road one of her ponies bareback around Dent in her wedding dress. We learn of her passion for Pre-Raphaelite paintings, Gone with the Wind and Greyfriars Bobby. We learn what women look for in a man up here: 'Good teeth, good feet, small ears and a kindly eye. The same things you'd look for in a tup [ram].' The men are looking for 'a cook's arse and the face of an angel'.
Alison tells us that tomorrow we'll be free-ranging over the Howgills, down the side of a 700ft waterfall before calling into the Cross Keys Temperance Inn for ham and eggs and a pot of tea.
Next day the skies clear and the Howgills bristle in the distance. By 10am we're at the fell gate and on a 1,550ft ascent of Winder. A vast panorama opens up: Sedburgh, Morecambe Bay, the Yorkshire Dales, the Lake District and the Pennines all lie beneath us. From the cairn at the top, we take the saddle along Hobdale Scar, striking deep into the hills before another ascent to Calders (2,200ft).
Accompanied by singing swifts, we leave the main path for Great Dummacks (2,100ft). From here, we take a terrifying sheep track along the ledge of Cautley Crag. I have to shield my right eye from the vertiginous valley of fallen scree. We reach the beck and paddle barefoot across the icy waters, then stop for lunch behind Cautley Spout, a 700ft waterfall.
Alison has brought a hip flask of damson gin up the hill, so we toast the waterfall and pluck wild bilberries from the bushes at our feet before beginning the steep descent down Cautley Spout. At the foot of the waterfall, knees wobbling, I look back up at the Cautley Crag, amazed that we had shuffled along the narrow ledge up there.
There's just time for toasted teacakes topped with Wensleydale cheese and a huge slice of home-made lemon meringue pie before catching our train back. We have our tea in the farmyard and stare across the conquered hills. Our knees ache, our cheeks are burnt and our clothes smell of tup testosterone, but we feel girlishly reinvigorated by the whole experience - and have soft, shepherdess hands to prove it.
Essentials
Weekend farm experience £300 per person, five-day holiday £525, including transfers, food, accommodation and guided walks. Shacklabank farm 01539 620134; www.shacklabank.co.uk.
Train tickets courtesy of Virgin. Value advance fares from London Euston to Oxenholme are from £16.50 single and include seat reservations. Tickets can be booked by phoning 08457 222333 or online at www.virgintrains.com.
