Until the age of 11, I grew up in England, which meant I grew up with sheep in my life. By that, I don't mean like we had a flock of sheep in our back garden or anything (we didn't!), but sheep were out there. Somewhere. Somewhere close. Not that far away. If we took a drive to see my grandparents or went for a walk somewhere or even went on a family holiday (all too often to Wales in my grandma and grandpa's caravan), we were bound to find some sheep somewhere. You can't grow up English and not have sheep in your life.
Then we moved to the United States. All of a sudden...no sheep. Like none. Nowhere. Like lamb to eat was not a thing. No fluffy white animals baa-ing in the fields. No lambs gamboling in spring. Cows? Sure? Lots and lots and lots of cows and their chewing and their methane. But sheep? Nowhere to be found. Not a one.
That lack of sheep here in America sticks with me. So much so that when I go to Great Britain and leave a city, the first thing I do when I see sheep is turn to whomever I am traveling with (newsflash: it's my wife) and say "sheep!" (although admittedly, sometimes it's "sheeps" or "sheepies"...). It's a thing. Sheep = Britain = home. What can I say? And this year, on my first trip to Wales since I was a kid younger than 11 years old, when I saw my first sheep in Wales, I am sure I exclaimed "sheep!" or my wife said the same thing to me.
Or it might have been "sheeps" or "sheepies".
 |
| Sheep on Mount Snowdon. |
We expected that we would see a lot of sheep in Wales. And we were correct. There were sheep seemingly everywhere. In the fields. On the mountains. Around corners. Close. In the distance. Sometimes on the side of the road. Sometimes in the middle of the road. We figured maybe it would be worth spending a little time in Wales getting a little bit up close to some sheep and some sheep history.
Sheep history? Bear with me a little bit.
Invariably when we travel, we dig a little bit or a lot bit into the local history of the place where we are exploring. Wales was no exception to that rule. When we started to piece together some sites to explore Welsh history, we kept running into the Industrial Revolution.
Why the Industrial Revolution? Well, because there was a lot of industry in Wales that was at the epicenter of the transition away from an agrarian economy and into manufacturing, that's why. And with industry to remove those natural resources from the land, you also need an infrastructure to transport those materials to points of sale.
One of the first things that got inked into our agenda was a visit to the Pontcysysllte Aqueduct near Llangollen. We booked our passage over Thomas Telford's masterpiece of civil engineering early and it paid off with an amazing day puttering along in a narrow boat through part of the United Kingdom's vast canal network.
Then we explored visiting a coal mine but we kind of did that in 2014 when we paid a visit to an old coal mine in Yorkshire (and then sort of repeated it with a tin mine visit in Cornwall just two years ago). We looked at slate as a source of inspiration and found that the National Slate Museum was closed for renovation. Bummer!
So we decided to double down on sheep. Or wool. And if you are thinking that wool does not have any part in the Industrial Revolution, you'd be way wrong.
Now, there was a time when wool production in Great Britain looked a lot like the photograph above. Individual men and women with spinning wheels in their houses taking wool that had been cleaned and straightened by hand and then made into thread and spun onto bobbins all over the land. And yes, I did ask if it was OK for me to take a photograph but clearly the woman on the left is the only one who was interested enough to pose and smile. We'll come back to these ladies later.
I know what you are thinking...where on Earth did we find a group of women sitting around using spinning wheels? Well...the National Wool Museum, where else?
We journeyed through a lot of back roads and even more back, back roads that were one to one and half cars wide in our week plus in Wales. It took a lot of those sorts of roads to get to the National Wool Museum in Dre-fach Felindre. Don't know where that is in Wales? Neither did we. Apparently it's near Newcastle Emlyn Llandysul. Don't know where that is in Wales? Neither did we and neither do we still. But Google Maps knows. And despite a lot of very tight roads, we made it just in time for opening time at 10 a.m. on a Wednesday morning.
It was packed. I'm not kidding. The parking lot was at least half full. In the morning in the middle of nowhere. I told you wool was a big deal.
The National Wool Museum is housed in a pair of old textile mill buildings that used to be the Cambrian Mills. Industrialization makes a lot more sense, now, right? Mills I can get behind as a concept. They must have been chock full of looms making blankets or some other kind of large scale textile products, right?
And yes, that is what happened at the old Cambrian Mills, but it's not all that happened.
We started our tour of the Wool Museum by chatting to the four ladies above, then we moved past a quick history of sheep and wool and then walked into the first floor of one of the mills and found the willower and the carding engine. What's a willower, you might ask? It's a machine that disentangles wool. Pretty simple, right?
No. No, it is not. This machine is massive. I'd guess (and I'm going from memory a bit here), it is about five to six feet wide and maybe 15 feet long. It's absolutely enormous. It's as complicated as a bunch of rollers with teeth through which cleaned wool is fed into from a large hopper of sorts. This machine is gigantic. And all it does is disentangle wool that people used to have to do by hand.
So what's a carding engine then? It's a machine that combs the wool after it's been willowed and gets it ready for spinning. It effectively converts wool fibers into almost wool thread. How big is this machine? Slightly bigger than the willower. Put these two machines end to end and it's about 30 to 35 feet long. All these two things do is take cleaned wool and make it into thread. Almost. They occupied an entire length of a giant mill building.
Industrial Revolution? Wool? Yes. Very much so.
 |
| The carding engine (top) and the spinning mule (bottom). |
After the spinning mule? Some looms and some machines to dry and finish the final products woven on the looms. The scale and size of the machines in the Museum is staggering. I can't imagine how revolutionary these would have seemed to people back in the 18th century when some of these contraptions were rolled out. We think we are scared by Artificial Intelligence today? Try seeing one of these giants for the first time. It must have been astounding.
Some of these things are absolutely gorgeous, by the way. These are old school machines. Large mechanisms made up of giant pieces of iron that move and interlock and work together precisely to make what once seemed impossible into very real possibilities. I cannot imagine the noise and the heat coming off these machines. We were told they were originally coal-fueled and steam-powered, although there is an operational water wheel outside one of the two mill buildings. I am sure at some point water was used as some sort of power for the whole process.
Mills, with an abundance of natural materials from all the sheep in the country, proliferated in Wales. In the late 1800s there were 23 mills in the area around Dre-fach Felindre alone. If we thought this was in the middle of nowhere today, I can't imagine how it would have been 140 or so years ago. There must have been mills and nothing else. And it must have been noisy and dirty.
 |
| The absolutely gorgeous teasel gig (top) and the old water wheel (bottom). |
Wool comes from sheep, right?
Not a trick question. It does come from sheep.
Earlier in this post I wrote that we doubled down on sheep and then all I've done since that sentence is write about the National Wool Museum. But we did do something else sheep-related before we went to the Wool Museum. And it wasn't about history or learning or the Industrial Revolution. It was about chilling with some sheep for a bit.
What exactly does that mean? We took a sheep for a walk. That's what that means.
Say hi to Biscuit. She's a nine year old Ouessant sheep, which apparently is pretty old for a Ouessant. Ouessants are often called Breton dwarfs; they are the smallest naturally-occurring breed of sheep in the entire world and they originated (maybe not surprisingly given their alternate moniker) in Brittany, France. On an island name Ouessant, if you must know. They tend to top out at about 19 or 20 inches tall. That's a pretty small sheep.
We didn't meet Biscuit in Brittany. We met Biscuit in Wales in a town called Crai, which is somewhere in the vicinity of the Brecon Beacons National Park. And if you thought the National Wool Museum was in the middle of nowhere, Dre-fach Felindre has nothing on Crai. It took us the better part of 3-1/2 to 4 hours to get there from Llandudno. Not a quick trip.
Biscuit lives on the Aberhyddnant Organic Farm in Crai along with a number of other sheep of various species. Pretty much all of those other sheep, including some April born lambs, are bigger than Biscuit. We were there to walk one of the sheep on the farm for about 45 minutes to an hour.
And no, I'm not kidding. We went to the middle of nowhere to walk a sheep. So did six other people who we'd never met before. Sheep trekking is a thing in Wales, I guess.
 |
| Introduction to the flock (top) and those sheep not eligible for selection on the move (bottom). |
First activity? Sheep selection. Socks. Fluffy. Patches. Jacob. Benji. And of course Biscuit. Maybe there was a Bo in there. Some others that I can't remember. I picked Biscuit because she was absolutely the smallest adult sheep I had ever seen in my life and I figured if there was any chance of a sheep bolting or getting out of control under my care, better that I have a 35 pound or so sheep to deal with than something larger.
Rookie sheep walker. What can I say?
Next up? Rules of the road. Keep the lead (that's leash in American) on the same side of the sheep's head as you are standing; if you lose control of your sheep, it will go find other sheep to be with and chasing it won't make things any better; and sheep have absolutely no spatial awareness so beware those horns because they don't register as being there to a sheep.
Biscuit had no horns. I'm good with that last rule. Or so I thought.
What comes next? Take your sheep by the lead and let's go! Walking time!
 |
| Let's go, Biscuit! |
If this isn't one of the silliest and most self-indulgent things I have ever done in my life, I don't know what beats it. I mean, we drove almost 4 hours to get to a farm and paid someone to let me walk one of their sheep for an hour (to clarify...Sophia also had her own sheep). But when am I ever going to have the opportunity to do this again? And why NOT do this? There's no answer to that last question by the way because there is no acceptable answer. This was a can't miss experience.
What's it like walking a sheep? It's pretty relaxing. There's absolutely no stress involved in leading a fluffy sheep around through fields both empty of other sheep and full of other sheep. It's actually kind of peaceful. If the sheep want to walk, let them walk. If the sheep want to eat, let them eat. If they just decide to stand still, you can generally get them going with a tug of the lead. They are very inclined to be led. They are, after all, sheep.
Biscuit, by the way, is all sheep. And by that I mean a natural born follower. I was told at the beginning of our sheep trek that Biscuit is pretty docile and that she is happy just following a "big white bottom" (not my words). That description of Biscuit is spot on. Give her a couple of other sheep to follow and she's all in! She's motoring as fast as those little Breton legs can carry her. Third or fourth or even second in a pack and she's off!
But get to the front of the pack and she stopped dead in her tracks. Not interested in being out front in any way. Not Biscuit. Not this tiny sheep.
 |
| Biscuit following other sheep. |
She's also a talker and not much of an eater. All of the other sheep seemed to be stopping regularly to munch of some leaves. Biscuit? Not interested. She was all about the walk except for one spot where she did actually stop for a snack until like three or four other larger (because ALL sheep are larger than Biscuit) piled over and on top of her and pushed her aside to get to whatever she had found to eat. Poor Biscuit.
This is the point in the walk when sheep having no spatial awareness kicked in for me. In the process of knocking my sheep out of the way, one sheep also managed to get his or her horns into my waist area on the way to the greenery. "I have horns? Didn't notice. Needed a bite to eat. If my horns get in the way, who cares." Yes, that's my made up dialog from the sheep that horned me.
But when it came to voice and volume, Biscuit was the champ. She was making way more noise than any of the other sheep which also endeared her to me. We managed to get a video of her looking over to her left before she turned towards the camera, let out a giant "baaaa" and then turned back away, her cameo for the camera done for the day.
Yes, I got attached to a sheep in Wales. I'm telling you...I got the best one.
 |
| Larger sheep moving Biscuit (center) out of the way. |
It is amazing to think that at one time, sheep like Biscuit were part of a giant economic engine that drove trade between countries and caused men to invent huge contraptions to maximize the return on the power of their precious natural resources that just happened to have four feet. Before sheep were domesticated and wool was sourced and converted to thread, mankind relied on plants and skins for clothing, I guess. Imagine having a predictable product that could be reliable made into intentional garments when you had no such option before. It must have been revolutionary.
I did have one question about this whole thing though: what did sheep do with all this wool before humans were around? Did it just grow and grow and grow because there were no men and women with shears around to cut it off?
The answer from the farm? Apparently sheep were bred over time to produce the maximum amount of wool, which of course required frequent shearings from humans.
What does the Wool Museum think about that? Pretty accurate, I guess. The Wool Museum did acknowledge that breeding is a factor in how modern sheep produce wool. But it also mentioned that before sheep were domesticated (that would be more than 5,000 years ago in Wales), sheep would shed their wool in the summer. Makes sense. I mean we sort of saw the same thing happening to wild bighorn sheep in Rocky Mountain National Park six years ago.
Sheep? Industrial Revolution? Yes, it's a thing.
Two last wool thoughts.
First, if it wasn't obvious already, I loved the National Wool Museum. The place completely fascinated me and it started before I even set foot inside the old Cambrian Mills. Outside the Museum, there's a natural dye garden. Who knew that the roots of the madder plant were used to dye wool red? Certainly not me, who had never even heard of a madder plant.
Second and lastly, the woman on the left spinning and smiling at us and who was so gracious to walk us through a lot of the mechanics of using a spinning wheel? She was spinning thread from the very same farm where Biscuit lives. Connections. I'm telling you. The things we connect to each other when we travel.
You know the next time I'm in England or Wales and I see sheep, I'm saying "sheeps!". It just has way more meaning now.
