Hellsborough Exposed

Nobody has ever grabbed my sleeve in the Sportsman to tell me, white-faced, about a wooltard. It is a sheep: cream fleece gone grey with peat, a black face, legs fitted on with more optimism than engineering, and an expression suggesting it has never once had a thought worth finishing. I have counted six hundred head on Ronksley Moor without one of them so much as lifting its face at a barker running flat out across the same slope. The reason it is in the book at all is not the animal, it is arithmetic — stand at the edge of a flock and the gap narrows by degrees too small to notice one at a time, the way a tide comes in without ever appearing to move, and by the time you register that the nearest animal is a yard closer than it was ten minutes ago, that yard has been multiplied by every head grazing the hillside. Nobody has ever been killed by one wooltard. A shepherd on the Redmires side lost an afternoon and both hips to a flock she had counted at murkrise and stopped watching by midday, and she said what every account of this says: it never once felt like a rush.