When all the sheep had been counted and driven into the pens which they were to occupy for the night the shepherd would invite the farmers to his house and entertain them with oatcakes, Wensleydale cheese and home-brewed beer; meanwhile, the conversation turned upon the past lambing season and the prospects for the next hay harvest.  When the farmers had taken their leave Peregrine would pay a visit to the pens to see that all the sheep were properly marked and in a fit condition for a moorland life.  Next morning he opened the pens and took the ewes and lambs on to the moors.

For the next ten months they were under his sole charge, except during the short periods of time when they had to be brought down to the farms.  The first occasion was “clipping-time,” at the end of June, before the hay harvest began.  Then, on the first of September, they returned to the dale in order that the ram lambs might be taken from the flocks and sold at the September fairs.  Once again, before winter set in, the farmers demanded their sheep of Peregrine in order to anoint them with a salve of tar, butter and grease, which would keep out the wet.  For the rest the flocks remained with Peregrine on the moors, and it was his duty to drive them from one part to another when change of herbage required it.

The moors seemed woven into the fabric of Peregrine’s life, and he belonged to them as exclusively as the grouse or mountain linnet.  He knew every rock upon their crests and every runnel of water that fretted its channel through the peat; he could mark down the merlin’s nest among the heather and the falcon’s eyrie in the cleft of the scar.  If he started a brooding grouse and the young birds scattered themselves in all directions, he could gather them all around him by imitating the mother’s call-note.  The moor had for him few secrets and no terrors.  He could find his way through driving mist or snowstorm, knowing exactly where the sheep would take shelter from the blast, and rescuing them from the danger of falling over rocks or becoming buried in snowdrifts.  The sun by day and the stars by night were for him both clock and compass, and if these failed him he directed his homeward course by observing how the cotton-grass or withered sedge swayed in the wind.

Except when wrapped in snow, the high moors of the Pennine range present for eight months of the year a harmony of sober colours, in which the grey of the rocks, the bleached purple of the heather blossom and the faded yellows and browns of bent and bracken overpower the patches of green herbage.  But twice in the course of the short summer the moors burst into flower and array themselves with a bravery with which no lowland meadow can compare.  The first season of bloom is in early June, when the chalices or the cloud-berry and the nodding plumes of the cottongrass spring from an emerald carpet of bilberry and ling.  These two flowers are pure white, and the raiment of the moors is that of a bride prepared to meet her bridegroom, the sun.  By July the white has passed, and the moors have assumed once more a sombre hue.  But August follows, and once again they burst into flower.  No longer is their vesture white and virginal; now they bloom as a matron and a queen, gloriously arrayed in a seamless robe of purple heather.