The intensity of
the frost wind often cut them off when in that state quite
instantaneously. About the ninth and tenth days, the shepherds began to
build up huge semicircular walls of their dead, in order to afford some
shelter for the remainder of the living; but they availed but little,
for about the same time they were frequently seen tearing at one
another's wool with their teeth. When the storm abated on the fourteenth
day from its commencement, there was, on many a high-lying farm, not a
living sheep to be seen. Large misshapen walls of dead, surrounding a
small prostrate flock, likewise all dead, and frozen stiff in their
lairs, was all that remained to cheer the forlorn shepherd and his
master."
As a matter of fact, something like nine-tenths of all the sheep in the
south of Scotland perished in this one storm, or if they did not then
actually perish, their vitality was so lowered, their constitutions so
wrecked, by the intense cold and the long deprivation of food, that they
never again picked up condition, but died like flies when the spring was
further advanced. Hogg says that in Eskdalemuir, out of 20,000 sheep
"none were left alive but forty young wedders on one farm, and five old
ewes on another. The farm of Phaup remained without a stock and without
a tenant for twenty years subsequent to the storm.
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