A group of farmers, upset by falling market prices and by the high prices ruling at supermarkets, are selling Dales lamb direct to the customers.

Such is the state of the market, they reckon on getting more for their lamb. They believe the customer will pay less than if the lamb was available in a supermarket.

With commendable enterprise, the men are using the facilities of a local registered abattoir. The lamb will be made available either fresh or frozen. In this bureaucratic age, there will be a flurry of forms and, for some, a look back to the time when haggling over the price of farm stock was an ancient Dales custom.

Each verbal transaction was sealed by a hand-clasp. Nothing was written down but a farmer would never go back on a bargain. In the final stages of haggling, the hands of seller and buyer would come close together. One man would present a hand face upwards, willing the buyer to reach a decision.

Only when the palms of the proffered hands came together with a resounding thwack was the deal done. It was then up to the buyer to ask for "a bit o' luck". Originally this would be a silver coin. Later, it represented a good deal of "back pocket" money.

Such a way of trading was caught by BBC cameras many years ago when life on a Dales farm (Rainscar, back o' Penyghent) was recorded in a fine documentary. An anxious moment in every year was when a dealer turned up to buy some of the best sheep.

As the time for the handclasp drew nigh, the various spectators looked on anxiously. Even the Dales-bred sheep seemed to sense the drama of the situation.

When cattle and sheep were sold in the main streets of towns such as Hawes and Skipton, the dealing was in sovereigns. Each farmer needed extra strong braces to accommodate the extra weight in the trouser pockets.

For the townsfolk, the Victorian method of marketing was messy and, at times, dangerous, as when a lively beast broke loose and ran amok, looking for a china-shop to wreck.

A survival of that old-time trading is Appleby Fair, held at the sunniest time of the year. The travelling folk come together, trap harness is up for sale and spotted stallions are led up and down the road so that potential buyers can assess their quality before handslapping seals a bargain.

Dealing in horses was a chancy business. It was said of Brough Hill horse fair, which has been defunct for many a year, that the only one competent to trade here was someone who had already made every mistake in the book.

There are traps for the unwary. One seller remarked, just before the handclasp, that the animal did not look very good. The prospective purchaser said: "It looks aw reet to me." The horse, when purchased, turned out to be blind. The farmer said: "I telled thee it didn't look good."

A horse was returned to the seller with the doleful comment: "It's noa good. It wean't hold its head up". The seller remarked: "Yon horse is a proud animal, lad. Thee get it paid for."

The auction mart took the farm stock off the street and regularised the method of trading. The torrent of words which the auctioneer directs at the farmers would make a politician or a sports commentator green with envy.

Auctioneering is a unique business. The man at the rostrum is agent for the sale until the stick whacks down to terminate a sale, when he becomes agent for the buyer.

I am impressed by the way a farmer assesses the quality of a sheep on offer. In a swift, sure movement, he places his hand across the loin and then applies pressure to the tail root. He is determining the general condition of the animal and whether or not it has a good covering of flesh. For a thick fleece can cover a multitude of ills.

To an auctioneer who is selling stock, a nod is as good as a wink. Dales farmers, for some reason, do not like their friends to know they are bidding. A bid is indicated by the movement of a finger on the crook of a stick or on the wooden stem of a tobacco pipe.

The late Kit Calvert, of Hawes, became a farmer during the Depression years of the early 1930s. Like many farmers today, he found trading was difficult. "In 1931, my top lambs made £2 each; in the second year, the price was 30s and the price then dropped to 17s 3d."

Kit was an enterprising man who, when a farmer was in serious financial difficulties in 1933, arranged to take some lambs to the mart simply to get a valuation. The price offered was 16s each.

He arranged that the farmer would slaughter off the lambs, one at a time, and hawk the meat in a basket. Anything he made over 16 shillings a lamb would be split between them. The modern scheme under which five enterprising farmers are selling lamb direct to the public is an interesting variation on that devised by Kit Calvert over 60 years ago.

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