Obituaries: Eleanor Harper

ELEANOR HARPER will be remembered as a Welsh mountain sheep farmer, though for most of her working life she was an English nurse. She was not the sort of woman to let such facts get in the way of her destiny. She had an aura of indomitability; a queenly presence, which could be daunting but which drew people to her, not just because she made their battles appear winnable, but because she did it with a bracing sense of fun.

It was more than a sense of fun, however bracing, which drove her in 1990, at the age of 50, to end her work as a nursing sister in a Wirral school for mentally and physically handicapped children and service as a magistrate at Ellesmere Port, and to reinvent herself as a farmer in one of the toughest, least lucrative and most male-dominated sectors of agriculture, in a district where English is not the first language, in one of the harshest climates, on one of the highest-altitude farms in Britain.

That was an act of wilful passion, of obstinate disregard to facts and frailties. The second she set her eye on the run-down Mount Snowdon farm Clogwyn y Gwin (Welsh for Precipice of Wine - a reference to the claret colour of light reflected off the granite walls of the valley on certain evenings), she had to have it; a desire coloured by her sense of spiritual inheritance: her father, Lord Woolley, was a farmer and President of the National Farmers' Union, her mother, Hazel (nee Jones), was Welsh.

Eleanor had planned to retire with her husband David to a 10-acre farm with 20 sheep. Clogwyn y Gwin was a 1,100-acre farm with 1,000 sheep. It would have challenged an experienced livestock farmer, let alone someone who had never lambed a sheep. A tour of the bounds could begin in balmy tranquillity in the valley on Snowdon's west flank and end in ice-laced wind a few feet from its summit. Here, by the cwm, where glaciers were formed, was Eleanor Harper's favourite place.

She took the farm over alone in 1990 (the housing recession had rendered the old home in the Wirral unsaleable, so David, a GP, was forced to stay behind and continue working to service interest on a bridging loan). Dead sheep were in the drive. There was a power cut. There was no heating fuel. She had no sheepdogs, knew nothing about sheep. Later she wrote:

Torrential rain accompanied our February arrival on Snowdon and the next day we met the neighbours. Along they came to offer practical help, moral support and a great deal of good-humour . . . We were immediately welcomed into the close-knit community and almost before we could turn around we felt as if we had been born and bred here. This was of particular comfort to me, as I was to be left on my own for the next four years.

Not always on her own, as it happens. Her younger son, James, took a year out of university to help her. Still, she depended acutely on those neighbours, not just on the farm but also in the Welsh-speaking market at Anglesey. They had seen her out in the mud and rain grafting and respected her commitment. One day at market, while she was working among her animals, a local farmer said, "I wouldn't give you much for the sheep but I'll give you pounds 20 for the old sow in the middle."

Two years into this Claire Powell, a journalist working for BBC Wales, was idly reading a promotional article for a feed block supplier, when she came across a photograph of "a chubby little nurse on a four-wheel motorbike, tackling Snowdon". At once Powell set about making a programme about her for the series Farming in Wales.

Harper had learnt a lot by this point, but rejected out of hand those bits of the farming creed she didn't care for. "Anything that is poorly on a hill farm does not survive," said Powell. "But Eleanor was a carer. When I first met her I found her sitting in the kitchen with her back to the Aga with Vic, an unruly orphaned wether, taking his bottle of milk. He should have been weaned at 12 weeks but here he was at 12 months still getting his daily bottle." It was the nursing ethic coming through. "He came into the living room and crapped on the sofa. She had all sorts of dead-beats. She reared them all on; gave them all names. In the evening, six or seven fully grown sheep which should have been eaten years ago would follow her around the farm like dogs."

But even as Harper was coaxing sheep back from the dead with love and watered-down Weetabix, and painting large blue crosses on her patients' backs so she could keep a special eye on them ("I was told Debenhams have a `blue cross sale'," she said, "20 per cent off the goods - so it seems rather an appropriate marking!"), she was sickening herself.

At one point in the filming she was asked about her routine on a typical day, say tomorrow. She replied that tomorrow was an exceptional day, as she had just heard that she had breast cancer and would be going to go to hospital for an operation. She said she knew she would die at Clogwyn y Gwin.

A series followed for HTV, called The Snowdon Shepherd (1997), and Harper found herself something of a celebrity within the farming community. She received dinner speaking engagements and the national weekly paper Farming News gave her a regular column, in which, with characteristic brio, she laid into the big supermarkets, the National Trust, scientists, agricultural ministers, prime ministers, red tape, public indifference . . . "Eleanor pounced on farming injustices like a terrier on a rat," said Claire Powell.

She reserved a special ferocity for the Welsh Highland Railway plan to drive a line linking Caernarfon and Porthmadog through her valley, and for the Chairman of the Oxford Farming Conference, David Harden, who once dared to wonder aloud what it was Welsh hill farmers did all day. She was an educated woman who had no fear of authority or inhibitions about speaking her mind. She struck a chord in the hearts of farmers. When Farming News replaced her briefly with an MEP there was an outcry among the readers.

If Harper depended on her Snowdon neighbours, they quickly realised they could depend on her too. Before long they had installed the chubby little nurse from England who didn't speak Welsh as president of the Welsh Highland Shepherd Council.

Cancer was a fight Harper was bound to lose, though she fought it ferociously. At no time did she ever feel herself anything less than privileged and when someone asked her "Why you?" she replied "Why not me?"

She said she had been born with two silver spoons in her mouth, a reference to an idyllic early childhood on a Cheshire farm with dogs, horses, cats, a sister and four adored elder brothers to play with. She was snatched away from this bounty at the age of seven, when she was sent to board at Malvern Girls' College. She loathed it and ran away, and though she was brought back, she was always a rebel. Her headmistress wrote: "Eleanor makes a very good leader, it's a pity she doesn't lead in the right direction."

Harper made enemies without much trouble, but charmed even these. There was a fierce altercation recently with a helicopter pilot who had been landing tourists on the hillside, frightening the sheep. Eleanor tracked down his number and gave him hell. In her last weeks, when the cancer rendered her unable to move on rough ground, that same pilot flew her up to the cwm at the top of the mountain, to see it for the last time.

Typically, in her last months, she achieved a tremendous amount, fitting in a trip to Canada to visit her brothers, seeing two of her three children married, being present at the birth of her first grandchild and establishing her daughter Katharine and her Scottish sheep-farmer husband, Ian Elwis, at Clogwyn y Gwin.

The grand reception she threw for their wedding, in a meadow at the farm, the profound speech she made and the firework display that drew the claret from the valley cliffs, the hog roast she threw next day for a marquee of sonorous Welsh hill farmers (the hog donated by a reader from Worcestershire), all bore the regal imprint of a ritual goodbye.

She died as she had predicted, at Clogwyn y Gwin, surrounded by her family, with the window open to the mountain. Somewhere, on the hillside, Vic, grizzled beneficiary of her passion, is still going strong.

Eleanor Woolley, nurse and sheep farmer: born Hatton Heath, Cheshire 11 December 1938; married 1961 Dr David Harper (two sons, one daughter); died Rhyd-dhu, Gwynedd 15 July 1999.