Skirly Crag by Helen Percy: Chaplain who found solace with a different kind of flock

What tools does the modern shepherdess need with her at lambing time?

Along with ropes, gloves, iodine and feeding bottles, she will also carry a bottle of washing-up liquid, which works wonderfully as a lubricant to ease trapped lambs out of their mother’s bellies.

The supermarket own-brand stuff won’t do though – it’s too runny and foamy to do the job.

This account of the life of an itinerant shepherdess is full of such interesting and unglamorous details. In spring, Helen Percy’s uniform is ‘waterproofs, the same shirt worn for a week, jeans smeared with globs of birthing fluid’.

The hours are brutal, sometimes starting at four in the morning and ending close to midnight, with ten minutes snatched here or there to wolf down baked beans from an unwashed pan. ‘I’ve given myself food poisoning on more than one occasion,’ she admits cheerfully.

Lambing is the busiest time. She might start as midwife to an early flock in England, followed by a stint on a lowland farm in the Borders in March and April, and then finish late in the season in the Highlands. Castrating lambs is just one of the jobs she takes in her stride.

At other times of year she is in demand for dipping (immersing the sheep in a chemical solution to rid them of parasites such as lice, ticks, and mites) or shearing.

Percy isn’t from a farming family, but she decided when she was 13 that she was going to be a shepherdess.

Instead, she ended up studying theology and worked as a minister of religion and a prison chaplain.

She left the church after being sexually abused by one of her congregation – the subject of her first book, Scandalous, Immoral And Improper – and found work on a Scottish sheep farm.

She couldn’t drive a tractor or quad bike and didn’t have a sheepdog but she proved her worth: her small hands came in very useful at lambing time because they could fit inside a ewe’s cervix.

Percy is full of wonder for the abilities of the collies she works with. One of her sheepdogs has an uncanny way of knowing when a lamb, far in the distance, is in trouble.

Although she clearly revels in her life as a shepherdess, parts of this book are distressing. She meets too many farmers who half-starve their flock and keep their dogs on short chains in tiny kennels.

On one particularly awful farm, she sneaks a neglected lamb with hypothermia into her caravan so she can wrap it in a hot-water bottle. Percy has a special feeling for wounded animals: her menagerie (who often travel with her) includes an epileptic hare and a tame duck.

This episodic, at times elliptical book, is a glimpse into a lifestyle that is harsh yet fulfilling. In her previous career, Percy’s job was to find ways of helping people who were in difficult situations.

Now she does the same for a different kind of flock.