To understand why there are sheep on the high fells and not fields of vegetables, look at the land from the point of view of a tractor.
A tractor, and the arable farming it makes possible, needs:
- A slope shallow enough that it will not tip or slide. The fell is far steeper than that.
- Soil deep enough to plough and root a crop. Up there it is thin, sometimes only inches over rock.
- Ground dry enough to bear the weight of machinery. The fell is saturated for much of the year.
- A long, warm enough season to ripen a harvest. At altitude, that season barely exists.
Every one of those is a hard no on a Lakeland or Welsh fell. The land simply will not have it. A tractor on that gradient becomes a story they tell in the village afterwards.
Now look at what the sheep needs:
- Grass. That is the whole list.
The sheep walks the slope a tractor cannot, in the wet a tractor cannot, on soil too thin for a plough, and turns the one thing that does grow up there into meat and wool. It is the only food-producing technology that works on that ground at all.
People look at the fell and see wasted land waiting for a cleverer use. The cleverer use is already up there, on four legs, in the rain, doing the only job that hill will ever yield.