1. So how did this come about?
Summer evening, watching for foxes
From furniture designer, to kitchen designer, to cookery school owner, to food stylist, to new product developer, to renovation and interior design project manager, and now sheep?
How did this happen? It’s the question friends and family have asked often. It’s been a roughly circuitous route, hence the name. I love country living, which is how I lived as a child before my family moved to Dublin when I was seven. I love animals. Ponies, horses, cats, dogs and hens were always a part of my life, though not all at once.
At times we have had an absolute menagerie here, from hamsters and rabbits right up to horses with everything in between. Each has brought chaos, exasperation, hilarity, fun and sometimes heartbreak.
Having approached every job in my life as a project that starts as an idea, moving to development and then completion, I have jumped from design to food and back again depending on what opportunities have arisen.
Sheep were not ever in any plan, but during those years of the Covid pandemic - which now seems like a strange dream, I spent more time at home and outdoors than I had for quite some time. In March 2022 I came across Instagram and TikTok accounts that featured Swiss Valais Blacknose sheep. Now I challenge anybody who sees videos and photographs of these sheep, to not fall instantly in love. They are the most extraordinary-looking animals, they have the most beautiful faces, and a friendly, endearing temperament. The lambs in particular are absolutely bonkers and utterly adorable.
My husband and I had for many decades battled with the grass around our home. We live on the side of a hill in Co. Carlow, deep in the Barrow Valley. Lawnmowers and hills do not mix. Livestock belonging to a neighbouring farmer grazed here each year, but the cows weren't located right up at the house.
The area of approximately an acre around the house was an absolute tyranny from April to October. Many different types of lawnmower and meadow-mower had been bought and broken over the years, and nothing was really making a difference. It was taking a lot of time during the summer to manage this rough grass and it also felt fundamantally unnecessary. Having read a book a decade before called “American Green, The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn” by Ted Steinberg, which traced how this became the marker for a “successful” life, we questioned why we were cutting the grass and what was an alternative.
Here was a fantastic habitat for so many different insects, animals and wildflowers, being cut down all the time for no justifiable reason other than appearance. However, we did not want the area around the house to look poorly maintained and neglected.
April Higgins, Co. Limerick, with her pedigree Swiss Valais Blacknose sheep.
I decided I would love to get sheep as a solution for the endless grass mowing. Just two. Of course, if you're going to just get just two sheep that are going to be right outside your kitchen window, the obvious choice is to make sure to choose ones that are cute, engaging and friendly.
Enter April Higgins of Bopeep Valais Blacknose, Co. Limerick. April is the queen of Valais Blacknose breeding and marketing in Ireland and further afield. A Covid lockdown side-project to her already busy life working in agri-pharmaceuticals and living on a large commercial sheep farm, her introduction to these sheep had prompted the same reaction as many others: instant fascination.
Growing up in the West of Ireland on a cattle farm and showing pedigree animals during the summer season, she was skilled and knowledgeable about breeding top class stock already. April fell utterly in love with these sheep and in 2020 started a pedigree breeding programme.
Communication over and back via her avidly followed social media accounts, resulted in a visit to her farm in the spring of 2022. I came away not only utterly inspired by April, her enthusiasm, expertise, knowledge and charming personality, but I was convinced having met these incredible loveable, gentle sheep that this was the way to go if I wanted to ‘get a few sheep’.
That somewhat naive and innocuous thought, was the start of something completely new.