RURAL BUSINESS
Medical herbalist Kate Scott became a farmer almost by accident. Now, she makes sheep’s-milk soap from her own flock, infusing it with flowers
In her workshop on a farm near the south-east coast, Kate Scott rummages through a cupboard. Clinking glass bottles and Kilner jars, she lifts out a pot of dried calendula and measures the yellow petals, picked from her garden last summer, into a pan. They’ll infuse with other dried herbs, such as yarrow and camomile, in the oil that warms on a small electric burner.
Through the window, she can see some of the grazing ewes whose milk she’ll later add to create creamy, soothing bars of soap. “I use the coldprocess method,” she says, pointing to a rack of long, rectangular soap moulds filled with gently scented concoctions in natural shades of pale gold, blush pink and soft apricot. “These soaps will cure for six weeks to dry out and harden to the point where they become longlasting, mild and foamy.”
Kate’s business, The Drovers Daughter, is an intricate lattice of shepherding, herbalism and gentle manufacture. She started it in 2020 after discovering that the milk from her small flock of Poll Dorset and Herdwick sheep was the perfect base for soaps and candles that harnessed the healing power of plants. “It was a Eureka moment because I realised I could combine my knowledge of herbs and livestock,” says Kate, a medical herbalist and aromatherapist.
RAISING THE BAA
Spring is all about lambing, which makes this Kate’s busiest and favourite time of year. The Herdwicks are a hardy breed and lamb outside, but the Poll Dorsets give birth indoors. “I start at 6am with checks in the barns,” Kate says. The newborns live with their mothers until they’ve had all the milk they need. “Unlike most sheepmilking enterprises, they stay as a family unit until the ewes are ready to wean naturally,” she explains. “I don’t milk them until then. Just a few weeks of hand milking is enough to get and freeze all I need for a year of soap making.”
Kate became a shepherdess almost by accident after delivering her first lambs during a national emergency. It was 2001, the height of the foot-andmouth outbreak, and she was living in a rented farmhouse near Bannau Brycheiniog with her husband John, a forester, and their five children. “The farmers who rented the fields around our house couldn’t travel to check on their flocks during lambing because of movement restrictions,” says Kate, who, with John, stepped in to help. “It was a massive learning curve. John had been raised on a farm and understood the basics of
