The Sheep Stell

Over 20 years ago, well before the current trend for nature writing, Janet White wrote ‘The Sheep Stell,’ a beautiful and evocative memoir about her life as a shepherdess. Throughout her life Janet has always tended sheep – first as a young woman in the Cheviot Hills, where she was treated with bewilderment by the other shepherds, before leaving Britain to live on an uninhabited island off the coast of New Zealand with a bonfire as her only means of communication with the mainland and only her flock of 200 sheep for company. After a brutal attack by an obsessed young man bent on her destruction, she was forced to leave her beloved island and return to England, where she married, became a smallholder in Sussex and finally bought a hill farm in Somerset where she still lives today. Her memoir tells the tale of a woman before her time.