What happened to wool?

Don't tell the other conservationists, but I'm rather fond of sheep. I sit with the sheep on Ilkley Moor, listening to them pull the grass. One comes to stand by me, looking at me and then at the view, as if to say "I can see why you like it here". Sheep are endearing and we share a long cultural heritage.

Since George Monbiot¹ coined the term "sheepwrecked" to describe our over-grazed countryside (witty, if incendiary), sheep have been a fiery topic. They eat pretty much everything, you see - wildflowers, tree saplings. It's why sheep fields are often flat and green; only grass can withstand intense grazing pressure. And that's the nuance often missed by (rightly) angry conservationists: intense grazing pressure. We didn't always farm sheep as intensively as we do now. The history of sheep farming is long and complex, with some harrowing episodes like the Highland Clearances, where people living in the Scottish Highlands and Islands were forcefully evicted to make way for sheep farming. Public policy played a large part in the expansion of sheep farming in Britain; after World War II, policy changes led to dramatic intensification of sheep farming which contributed to the harmful ecological impacts of sheep highlighted by Monbiot and others. But there's no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater - and certainly no need to disregard cultural heritage while we throw the bath water out.

Jeremy Clarkson (unlikely self-appointed spokesperson for the farming community after buying a farm to avoid inheritance tax²) said in Clarkson's Farm that shearing his sheep costs him more than he is paid for the wool. There's uncertainty around most of the numbers Clarkson gives on the show, but this reflects a general trend: sheep fleeces are cheap, and there's not much money in it (if any). Supply and demand in the sheep fleece market is out of kilter, making the price very low, but sheep farming is heavily subsidised.

So - I live in Yorkshire, surrounded by sheep, and sheep fleeces are dirt cheap (so cheap that some are burnt instead of sold³). Am I wearing enough wool? It strikes me that wearing local wool would be a lovely way to connect with this beautiful landscape, and would use this valuable natural product that we have such a long history with.

First, I checked my wardrobe. Hardly any wool - mostly synthetic fibres, like polyester. I look for months in shops in Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Cumbria. If I can't buy a woolly jumper in the Lake District, where can I?! During these months of checking clothing labels I felt mounting panic. Not only was I struggling to find anything made of wool, I was discovering how much is made of synthetic fibres like polyester and acrylic. Polyester and many other synthetic fibres are made from fossil fuels, like crude oil. They are, effectively, plastic. They're associated with environmentally damaging fossil fuel extraction and greenhouse gas emissions. They aren't biodegradable and they release microplastics, including when they're washed (one study⁴ found that for each kg of synthetic fabric washed 640,000 to 1.5 million microfibres are released). Microplastics are increasingly pervasive: they've been found in the human placenta⁵ and human blood.⁶ Fossil fuel-derived fibres are difficult to recycle and garments can be difficult to repair. They're not even comfortable to wear; they make us sweaty, trapping heat but not ventilating, like wearing a bin bag.

Decline: unshorn sheep on an abandoned slate quarry, Wales

Go and check your wardrobe. Here are some things I found: my beloved Tenby pullover (looks like cotton - 50% polyester); Calvin Klein pyjama bottoms (100% polyester - I'd been sleeping in plastic); an M&S jumper (100% polyester); bedding (52% polyester); Levi's jeans (8% polyester); my Skomer Island pullover (sold by the Wildlife Trusts to raise money to protect this puffin island - 20% polyester); and many synthetic dresses - including one that really takes the biscuit: a ~£400 "100% silk" LK Bennet dress (bought in the sale in a moment of madness), with a slip (i.e. the bit that touches your skin) of...you've guessed it, 100% polyester.

It's everywhere. Charity shops and retail shops alike are awash with it. It's uncomfortable to wear and terrible for the environment. It was starting to make me angry - it felt like cutting costs to accumulate wealth at the expense of planet and people. A waterproof coat, sure, synthetics are useful (although wool is water resistant and we can wax cotton to make it waterproof) but jumpers? Bedsheets? T-shirts?

I funnelled my rage into creativity: if shops aren't stocking wool jumpers, I'll knit one. I'd become fascinated with knitting after reading Esther Rutter's excellent This Golden Fleece. How hard could it be? I went to Boyes (the haberdashers) to get some wool - learning to knit was a hurdle I'd cross when I had the materials. I picked up skein after skein of yarn - all were polyester or acrylic or some blend of fossil-fuel derived synthetics. I glanced at the aisle sign - wool. So where was it?

All the skeins in view here are synthetic fibres

There were hundreds of yarns. Two full aisles. I was relieved when I found one called "Croftland Aran". The Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland are known for Aran jumpers, traditionally made from unscoured lambswool. Crofts are small agricultural landholdings associated with a traditional way of life, particularly in rural Ireland and Scotland. For good measure, the packaging bears a green landscape dotted with sheep. Then I saw the small print: 80% acrylic. It felt like cultural appropriation (or corruption) of centuries of sheep farming heritage on the Aran Islands.

"Croftland Aran" is 20% wool, 80% acrylic. The origin of the wool in the blend is not specified.

Eventually, I find six sad skeins of real wool at the back of a bottom shelf, in muddy brown and grey. The packaging doesn't say where the wool comes from. There aren't enough skeins of one colour to knit a jumper with. Even people who make their own clothes face an uphill battle to source natural fibres.

After unsuccessfully sourcing real wool in several other shops, I gave up. Months later, I took a trip to Robin Hood's Bay, a steep smuggling village on the Yorkshire coast and, mercifully, found Berties of Bay. Berties sell British-made heritage clothing, and are famed for their woolly fisherman ganseys. Ganseys are dense, tightly knitted jumpers and have been worn for hundreds of years. Traditionally, women and children would card and spin wool from their own sheep to knit into ganseys, until the Industrial Revolution brought about machine-spun worsted wool, a tightly-piled, near-waterproof yarn. Ganseys are serious undertakings - knitting one takes an experienced knitter over a hundred hours.⁷ Gansey patterns were passed down through the female line in fishing families, with one woman often knitting multiple patterns.⁸ Sometimes, a pattern became associated with a place, and my first Berties gansey is a Whitby gansey. The sales assistant talks me through the pattern: an interwinding cable up the middle, symbolising the 199 steps to Whitby Abbey; columns of moss stitch, a delicate pattern with star-like crosses, representing sea spray or shingle; curls of fishing rope; and a series of triangles, representing the Scottish flag. On season, fish curers would come to Whitby from Scotland, following the Herring, including Herring Girls - women who are memorialised today in sculptures on Whitby's harbour. Herring Girls gutted fish and knitted, their knitting sitting at their hip on a knitting belt. The ganseys went with them: they shared patterns, knitted the jumpers, and wore them.

Wearing my Whitby gansey in Appledore, Devon

I felt very happy walking up the steps to Whitby Abbey in my gansey. And very itchy. There are lots of breeds of sheep in Britain, but much of their wool is pretty scratchy compared to, say, Alpaca or Merino. You have to break British wool jumpers in, like leather shoes. After a few weeks, the itchiness was gone and my gansey felt like a sturdy bastion against the cold of the North. It smells gloriously sheepy - like a field - and rainwater rolls off it because of the lanolin in the wool. It has natural antibacterial properties, and never needs to be washed, just aired out occasionally. And, my God, it's warm.

Wool gansey vest from Berties and the fishing heritage that inspired it (the fisherman in the portrait is also wearing a gansey), Whitby Lifeboat Museum

Slowly, I started spotting more wool products, but I'm still sad about how few there are. There's a lot of woolly heritage in Yorkshire, like the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Saltaire, a town built by Titus Salt, a textile mill owner in Bradford who pioneered soft Alpaca blends and had a paternalistic view of how to look after his workers. Bradford at one time had hundreds of textile mills, and today it's home to British Wool, which grades and sells certified British Wool. In Whitby, Deb Gillanders coined 'Propagansey', a celebration of the history of ganseys, and sells hand knitted wool ganseys in her shop. At a Christmas market I admire blankets by Curlew Fabric Designs made from Swaledale wool (from the characteristic Yorkshire sheep), blended with Cheviot and Jacob wool. These are encouraging signs. Beware, though, products that claim some of this heritage but muddy it with synthetic fibres, like the "Croftlands Aran" we saw earlier, or "Sirdar Saltaire Aran Alpaca blend" yarn which, unlike Salt's famous Alpaca fabric, is 55% acrylic and 25% nylon.

Traps abound, but if you find 100% wool, you're in luck - it's warm, water resistant, biodegradable, comfortable, hardwearing, and it feels great. I don't want over-grazing to continue to decimate our land, but I do want us to return to wearing natural fibres, and I have great appreciation and respect for thousands of years of sheep farming heritage.

Some great books to read:

• This Golden Fleece, Esther Rutter

• The History of the World According to Sheep, Sally Coulthard

• Feral, George Monbiot

• Rebirding, Benedict Macdonald

• Wilding, Isabella Tree

This post is not sponsored and I'm not affiliated with any of the shops, brands, or authors mentioned here.

References:

¹ In Feral (2013)

² Clarkson told the Times in 2021 that he bought the farm to avoid inheritance tax

³ 'Sheep wool torched in protest over 'measly' prices'

⁴ De Falco, F., Di Pace, E., Cocca, M. et al. The contribution of washing processes of synthetic clothes to microplastic pollution. Sci Rep 9, 6633 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-43023-x

⁵ Marcus A Garcia, Rui Liu, Alex Nihart, Eliane El Hayek, Eliseo Castillo, Enrico R Barrozo, Melissa A Suter, Barry Bleske, Justin Scott, Kyle Forsythe, Jorge Gonzalez-Estrella, Kjersti M Aagaard, Matthew J Campen, Quantitation and identification of microplastics accumulation in human placental specimens using pyrolysis gas chromatography mass spectrometry, Toxicological Sciences, Volume 199, Issue 1, May 2024, Pages 81–88, https://doi.org/10.1093/toxsci/kfae021 (useful summary here)

⁶ Heather A. Leslie, Martin J.M. van Velzen, Sicco H. Brandsma, A. Dick Vethaak, Juan J. Garcia-Vallejo, Marja H. Lamoree, Discovery and quantification of plastic particle pollution in human blood, Environment International, Volume 163, 2022, 107199, ISSN 0160-4120, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2022.107199

^{7, 8} This Golden Fleece, Esther Rutter