40 GRANGE HEAD FARM APR / MAY 2022 • farmers-mart . co . uk
IT ’ LL BE ALL WHITE ON THE NIGHT -
and through the day !
Chris Berry talks Cheviots with Stephen Hallam of Grange Head Farm , Egton Bridge
WHITE faced sheep were certainly not what you would have expected to see in the North York Moors when Stephen Hallam and his wife Karen arrived from Glossop in Derbyshire .
‘ We came here because we wanted our own farm that would be somewhere big enough to bring up a family ,’ says Stephen . ‘ I ’ d never been up here before and had never been to the east coast , so I didn ’ t know what to expect . We had a look at the area and we were lucky enough to get the tenancy of Grange Head Farm where we have lived since February 2003 .’
‘ It is tenanted from the Mulgrave Estate . Grange Head Farm runs to 477 acres of mostly rough grazing and we rent a further 150 acres in Egton Bridge and have common grazing across 4500 acres on Egton High Moor that goes towards Rosedale Abbey .’
‘ After starting with Swaledales we began shifting towards Cheviots in 2009 when we bought 170 Cheviot ewe lambs off Joyce Campbell of Armadale in Thurso .’
When they first started with the Cheviots , Stephen reckoned that others on the Moors thought he ’ d lost his marbles .
‘ It was like ‘ what have the Hallams gone and got those whitefaced sheep for ? They ’ ll not do any good around here ’, but now we have 1600 breeding Cheviot ewes and since we took them on there are now loads that have them all around .’
‘ It ’ s not just that they are cheaper to keep , you also get a damned sight better lamb of anywhere between 40-45 kilos and the sheep last longer . They are a lot hardier than your Swaledales .’
‘ We scan the Cheviot ewes on the moor and we sell our wether lambs with no problem at all whereas we always struggled like mad to get rid of the Swale wether lambs . We were making nothing on the Swales but the Cheviot wethers have always sold as well as surplus ewe lambs .’
Stephen says they use a handful of the own Cheviot tups but also attend the two main Cheviot tup sales at Lockerbie and Lairg .
‘ The better ones for us generally come from the Lairg sale . They are hardy enough from the Lockerbie sale but even hardier from Lairg and we do need that hardiness up here , which is what led us to them in the first place . It ’ s a lot drier here than we experienced in Glossop , but the hardiness is needed because of the harsh east winds , which can be a killer . It fettled us last year when we lost 50-60 lambs .’
‘ We don ’ t go silly when we are buying tups . The highest priced tup we ’ ve ever bought was 3000 guineas , but they are going up in value every year .’
Lambing starts around 1 April and is largely down to Stephen and Karen . They have three sons – Jack , who has a joinery business in the village ; Jamie who helps at lambing time and John at Teesside University ; and a daughter Kate who is still at school .
‘ We bought ourselves a couple of diggers , which has become our farm diversification and that ’ s what Jamie does the rest of the time . It ’ s what we ’ ve done
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