The beauty of statuesque sheep: Country diary 100 years ago

Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 8 November 1915

Oxfordshire
One of the signs of the changing season here is that the sheep have gone into winter quarters on the turnip fields. Our house being surrounded by arable land, we generally have a patch of swedes or other roots somewhere in view, and one of the first associations of this time, when the sheep are penned among them, is, I am sorry to say, the human or superhuman coughing of these animals, at times a quite heartrending sound, because the mind instinctively conjures up the picture of some broken-down benighted wanderer gasping his life away under the hedge. The sheep himself is not, I fancy, suffering much more than a tickling of the throat; certainly if the sound he makes meant what it seems to mean he would be dead in the morning.

Even when penned, sheep are extremely picturesque and even beautiful objects in a landscape; it is not only that the light hangs luminously in their deep fleeces, but that the instinct of the flock seems to express itself as an instinct for grouping, for the statuesque. This moment a score or so of sheep, not penned, are in the field opposite my window, now under plough. The main body has ranged itself along the border furrow in a straight line, and has thrown out a scattering of outposts in a semi-circle over the stubble. No artist could have posed them better - nor half so well!