British lamb meets woolly bureaucracy

Sweet, succulent lamb from hill sheep is no longer gracing our dining tables, supposedly because it's cheaper to provide us with larger cuts from lowland and imported meat. Dee McQuillan reports on a crisis that smacks of idiocy and bureaucracy.

There are a lot of lambs up in them there hills that no one wants to eat. Which raises another question: what the heck are farmers doing breeding lambs that we Brits – traditionally a lamb-devouring nation – can't be bothered to eat?

The hill lambs in question – and estimates are that they number more than one million – come from distinct breeds of sheep, for example Scottish Blackface, Swaledale and Welsh Mountain. Some hill breeds are very ancient, others very localised. In the words of Chris Lloyd of The National Sheep Association, 'Hill sheep have evolved to survive on the most marginal farming land in Britain, land where crops or cattle are an impossibility. These sheep live in the hilliest, rockiest, wettest and bleakest conditions.'

According to my crash course in sheep-keeping, among the special characteristics of hill sheep are an extra-tough fleece (kemp wool is the expert term) to protect against driving rain and drifting snow, a robust immune system and an understanding of their terrain. This last is a fascinating subject, one that you should discuss with the next shepherd you meet, provided you have plenty of time.

In essence, sheep bred on the hillside have a homing instinct that brings them back to the hedges and rocks they were born beside. This area is their base for all the time they spend free ranging and the attachment is what makes them manageable on the vast and – to a townie's eye – featureless expanse of a Scottish glen or Cumbrian fell. 'Hefted' is one of several terms describing this attachment of particular sheep to a patch of hill. Hill lambs also copy the adults and so learn where to shelter and feed.

As these sheep and lambs have to walk and climb further for poorer food, they have evolved to become smaller and lighter than breeds of sheep that have spent centuries leading an easy life in meadows and downs down south. Yet only recently has anyone had a problem with this evolutionary fact of life. The population of the surrounding regions used to eat and enjoy local lamb, and any smart city butcher could shift new season's Welsh mountain lamb – hill bred and hill fed. It was believed that the fine, sweet flavour made up for the lack of bulk, and that is something I agree with still, even though the Meat & Livestock boys may tell me they know of no scientifically acceptable exercise to have identified differences in what they term 'eating quality'. Fattiness is not the reason for the failure of the home market in hill lambs either: the official line is that there is no difference in lean-to-fat ratios between breeds and grazing locations, whereas common sense would suggest that an active mountain lamb may be slightly less fat.

What has happened to the home market is that it has fallen victim to the creeping malaise of standardisation: it is as simple, as tediously predictable and as depressing as that. According to the Meat & Livestock Commission, a six-month-old lowland lamb would yield about 10 chops per kilo, compared with 20 chops from a hill lamb. And these joints from hill lambs, or light lamb as we are now supposed to call them, allegedly no longer suit UK shoppers who have, over the past 20 years, come to depend on the supermarkets for all their provisions.

During the 1990s the strict regulation of slaughterhouses and the move to (yes, here's another you will have heard before) large, centralised, expensive plants have also made hill sheep less economic. It costs as much to dispatch, cut and package a light lamb as a heavy one, so profit for dealers and wholesalers is less on a small lamb, which means that these intermediaries now offer hill farmers a rotten, rock-bottom price when their sheep go to market. The National Farmers' Union confirms that the decline of local slaughter, of old-fashioned butcher/slaughterers and of good local butchers selling lamb bought locally is very much part of the problem of falling home consumption.

Until the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease a few years ago, hill farmers thought they had found a safe way around bureaucracy and public indifference. Their meat was going abroad, chiefly to Spain and Greece, where small lambs are spit-roast whole or halved and baked very simply so the dealers are saved most of the butchery costs. That export market has now been closed and here in Britain we are left facing the contradiction that some of our most breathtakingly beautiful countryside provides fantastic free-range lamb that few of us get to eat because it does not suit the system.

I have not strayed off into the landscape without good reason. If you think about wild, rugged places like Bodmin Moor, Scar Fell or Rannoch Moor, there are always tiny dots on the landscape called sheep. Hill sheep are the only farm animals capable of thriving up there and raising lambs is one of very few environmentally acceptable ways of scratching a living on these beautiful but hard surfaces.

The sheep keep steep slopes and remote valleys neatly grazed and free of bracken. They are essential, too, in keeping hardy farmers hefted to their ancestral mountains and moors. The lambs taste just about as good as a lamb can get, and yet the farmers fear that too few will get into the shops and supermarkets. What a sad, crazy muddle.

Where to buy light lamb
Light (hill) lamb is now available from independent butchers and major supermarkets. If you prefer to buy direct from the producers, vacuum-packed lamb ready for cooking or for the freezer is available from Farmers First. For details, see www.fwi.co.uk. Alternatively, to find out where your nearest farmers' market is, visit www.farmersmarkets.net