Пасторка Хелен Перси расскажет о жизни скотовода на фестивале в Тейне

A shepherdess and author, whose new book is largely set in Sutherland, will give a talk this weekend as part of the St Duthac Book and Arts Festival. Helen Percy will discuss her latest work, Whistlebare,at the Collegiate Church in Tain on Sunday, September 13, from 11.30am to 12.30pm. This is her third book and follows on from her memoir Skirly Crag, the first instalment in the story of her life as a freelance, itinerant, contract shepherd. It has been described as “nature writing, humour and the reality of living on the land rolled into one”. Helen grew up in a farming community, with a cattle farm next to her family home, but initially she chose to follow a religious path. She graduated with an honours degree in theology from the University of St Andrews, after which she was ordained as a Church of Scotland Minister in 1991. She spent three years at Paisley’s Greenlaw Church before moving to Angus in 1994, where she managed six parishes. “I did a theology degree and I was ordained, but it was only seven or eight years after ordination that I saw the light and quit to become a shepherd,” she said. In her first book, Scandalous, Immoral and Improper, published by Argyll Publishing in 2011, Helen recounts her experiences of enduring and surviving both familial and ecclesiastical abuse. Since leaving the Church in 1997, she has worked with victims of child rape in South Africa and donkeys in the Kalahari Desert. Upon returning to the UK, she worked for a number of farmers throughout Scotland and northern England, often travelling in a small van with her sheepdogs, a tame duck and an epileptic hare. “One of my parishioners taught me much of what I know about sheep, but to start with I was just filling buckets and helping out, feeding lambs, and I’m still learning. I’ll be learning until I die,” she said. “I have been a shepherd for 30 years, apart from the three years I was a volunteer in South Africa, and then in Zimbabwe where I worked in a Quaker-funded agricultural college. One day I am going to write about these experiences too!” Both her shepherding memoirs have been published by Edinburgh-based Luath Press. Whistlebare picks up where Skirly Crag left off, chronicling her ongoing life as a contract shepherdess. Much of her employment has been in Sutherland, although she has not revealed exactly where. She said: “I grew to love that place and also its people. All of the characters are real, though their names have been altered, and they do know I have written about them.” Helen adds that her two best sheepdogs have come from Sutherland, ‘Boy’ was given to her a Rogart crofter and ‘Fig’ came from a croft near Loch Fiag and Loch Shin. At Sunday’s event she will reflect on the similarities and the differences between her previous career as a pastor of people and the last 30 years as a shepherd. She will also offer some top tips for dealing with awkward animals and cussed farmers. Helen Percy's memoirs are widely available from major online marketplaces and independent bookshops, including Dornoch Book Shop, as well as from her primary publisher Luath Press Ltd. The new hardback edition of Whistlebare retails at £14.99. To book tickets (£5) plus a booking fee) for Helen’s talk on Sunday, click here. Do you want to respond to this article? If so, click here to submit your thoughts and they may be published in print.