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‘How did we get home again? John Todd was a wonderful fast walker, and we made fifty miles a day from John o’ Groats down to Carlisle.’

The foregoing remarkable journey was but one of many the old shepherd had made. He had driven sheep to Fortwilliam, at the foot of the Caledonian Canal; had, when Barrow, now a great industrial centre, was a mere village, driven sheep to meet a brig which then plied between Peel Castle and the Isle of Man. The voyage took three days owing to contrary winds, and the poor animals ate every scrap of hay and straw on board the vessel. The shepherd had travelled South as well as North, and knew some of the walks of North and Central Wales well.

Many other stories of his life did he regale me with, but nothing, perhaps, which interested me more than the following curious statement:

‘Sheep possess a strong homing instinct on occasion. In the old days, before steam was used for transport, time and again they used to leave the intakes they were bought for and travel many a mile back home again. This was, perhaps, the most remarkable case I ever met with. In the early days of cross-breeding a farmer bought a score of Cheviot tups at one of the Scottish Border towns. A day or two after reaching the farm, they, having been smitted, were put upon the open fell, where they seemed to be quite at home; but before the week-end the shepherd reported every one of the new-comers missing. Every flock ranging the common was searched without success, and the farmer was beginning to fear they had been stolen, when a letter came from the Scottish sheep-walk saying the tups had returned. How they had managed to win home again across the width of three counties, and presumably along the great “drove road,” is beyond my comprehension. No doubt this tale is beyond your belief, but I have seen many similar instances. A wandering “stray” is no marvel in a land of shepherds; but a body of sheep moving in one direction, influenced by a common impulse, which carries them over some sixty miles of intersecting road and through terrifying difficulties (to a sheep), cannot be anything but wonderful