Herdwick ewes come home for lambing

Borrowdale, Lake District Ever the good shepherd, he recognises the snow-white faces of many of his Herdwicks like he does people

Jostling each other, bleating the while, 400 pregnant Herdwick ewes make their way along the bottle-neck road from Stonethwaite in Borrowdale. Their destination? Nook Farm, hidden behind the huddle of slate-roofed cottages in Rosthwaite, the next village towards Keswick. Here they will give birth to the year's lambs, soon to be seen skipping in the dale's threadbare fields, which have not yet started to grow the fresh grass they will need to thrive. But in the meantime, the ewes are blocking the road as we meet head-on, forcing me to park up against the wall to let them by.

Several walkers wearing Coast-to-Coast beanie hats are already waiting. Their route will take them 192 miles from Robin Hood's Bay to St Bees, east to west across three national parks, rather than from the Irish Sea to the east coast, which is the direction recommended by Alfred Wainwright, who originally devised the unofficial long-distance footpath in the 1970s.