Thinking back on that walk over the Pegsdon Hills in September [see last entry] I was reminded of a couple of snaps that I meant to post at the time.

 These days the hills are managed for nature conservation and the grass is grazed by sheep with that in mind. Once the sheep would have been there for purely agricultural reasons. There is a photograph in Hitchin museum taken in the nineteenth century on these same hills. It shows a shepherd with his flock and he seems as remote to our time and place as discovering a lost tribe in the Amazon.

 As L.P. Hartley once put it "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there". A noticeable trend in conservation management is to connect with the past by reintroducing historic breeds of livestock. I approached the hills through Hoo Bit nature reserve and the black sheep of the family were milling around: