Meet Elizabeth Kneafsey, the Wild Wool Shepherdess
From N Magazine No.8. Words by Aoife Long. Images by Elizabeth Kneafsey
Hey hey hey! In 2024’s first edition of the N Magazine newsletter, we have a chat with the most extraordinary shepherdess, medicine woman and storyteller Elizabeth Kneafsey. Some of you may know her from UK TV documentaries or her Instagram account on which she shares the reality and magic of living in tune with nature.
Based in England’s East Midlands, Elizabeth is a shepherdess with a flock of 100 organic, heritage breed sheep.
Every season she creates unique, rugged rugs, collars, yarn and tanned leather hides from her flock.
She lives in a world of symbolism; hawks, thought foxes, feathers and flowers surround her. (A level of symbolism which extends to those who write and read her story, might I add. Look out for butterflies today.)
Elizabeth is an extraordinary artist, who teaches traditional, ancestral skills and lives every day in harmony with Nature.
Predictability is not a word in Elizabeth’s world.
You may find her driving around with an owl. You may see her dance in the meadows after a long day of shearing. You may hear stories of her son hiking in the Himalayas.
Every single day is different for Elizabeth, but living as close to nature as she does has created an enviable seasonal rhythm to her life as a shepherdess.
With family from Foxford, Co. Mayo, Elizabeth has a lineage of shepherds, but no immediate family involved in farming.
About twenty years ago, Elizabeth began to study countryside management and quickly built a name for herself as a shepherdess. After contract shepherding in the Yorkshire dales, she was employed to set up flocks across England, including a community flock on an eco farm in the South of England.
As part payment for helping out the eco farm, Elizabeth started her own flock with forty of the epic looking Icelandic/ Northern Shorthorn breed. This unique mix has yielded a highly intelligent, beautifully coloured flock, which produces the most beautiful wool and rugs each year.
It was a steep learning curve for Elizabeth to teach herself how to process and honour the wool and leather from each sheep; now she finds herself in high demand as a teacher of these ancient skills.
No better lady to learn from.
Thanks to her lifestyle and voracious quest for knowledge, Elizabeth is a walking pharmacopoeia of natural remedies.
She points out the obvious, that pharmaceutical remedies, though often plant derived at some stage, are in essence foreign objects to our body and often cause more trouble than they initially ‘cure’.
Usually blessed with good health, Elizabeth suffered an autoimmune attack several years ago. The prescribed remedies caused even more problems and Elizabeth quickly realised we have lost the ancient wisdom of plant healing. Determined to return to good health, Elizabeth’s intuition and deep research guided her body into remission with lemon balm, hawthorn and turkey tail mushrooms.
It’s a beautiful story that is badly needed in the midst of glyphosate and microplastic warnings; if allowed, nature will provide the answers.
Elizabeth often finds nature follows her wherever she goes, through symbol and synchronicity.
One repeated symbol in her own life, that of the wolf, became a little more tangible in recent years. Through a series of coincidences, Elizabeth adopted a tiny wolf dog pup and has hand reared her to the enormous size that even a 50% wolf achieves. Aeyla, as her wolf dog is known, is a magnificent creature, independent, clever and fiercely protective. Elizabeth credits the wolf for protecting her in many situations, which unfortunately arise as a woman in the countryside.
But the symbolism merely began at the wolf; birds of prey quickly followed. Some might say Elizabeth lives a charmed life, with owls in the kitchen and hawks in the bathroom, but her main message is that anyone can live in harmony with nature, no matter their background.
As Elizabeth will be the first to tell you though, it’s quite a whirlwind to attempt to farm without land.
Elizabeth often grazes her sheep on nature reserves or farms which must be kept cleared, but such arrangements eventually wear thin. She currently spends several hours a day tending to sheep on distant parcels of land, leading to a lengthy search for her own farm across the UK and Ireland. Ownership of land is not particularly important to Elizabeth but guardianship is of the utmost importance.
If any deity is watching, Elizabeth has proven herself an excellent guardian of resources.
Each year, Elizabeth produces beautiful yarn, collars and rugs from her flock; her seasonal offerings sell out extremely quickly.
In addition to woolcraft, she also tans hides using an endangered set of skills. Elizabeth has carried the fruits of these skills, which often cannot be compensated monetarily, to faraway lands like Turtle Island.
How exactly Elizabeth ended up in a longhouse outside of Montreal is best explained by a series of coincidences. Ever since she was a child, Elizabeth has been fascinated by the innate and increasingly rare connection between native people and the land.
A chance encounter online led to an invitation to visit a tribe in Canada; keenly aware of the importance of this invitation, Elizabeth tanned a buffalo hide and gifted it to the tribe when she arrived. A friendship developed between Elizabeth and one of the tribal elders, a man with an equally extraordinary set of stories. As one of the last people alive to speak his language, he gifted Elizabeth with the new name of Iekawehatie, meaning ‘she paddles along’.
She found a home away from home in Canada and when it was time to leave, she carried her new name and an even stronger commitment to protecting and guarding not just the earth, but the moon.
I’ll explain.
You see, like many other indigenous tribes, this tribe is matrilineal, with a deep connection to the sacred feminine and grandmother moon.
So within, so without; just as the feminine within us all is deeply threatened by the society in which we live, the moon, of all places, is now under threat of colonisation.
Elizabeth, like many others, has dire warnings about the downstream consequences for life on earth, should the moon be disturbed.
‘The moon is basically the beating heart of Mother Earth; she is responsible for the tides and the movement of water across the planet. The cycle of the tides makes a sound like a drum or a beating heart. Any impact from man upon the moon will massively disrupt life on Earth.’
The importance of our daily choices becomes more important every day.
Elizabeth feels the call to share her life story, to empower women, and particularly single mothers, to pursue farming and traditional skills.
With this aim in mind, Elizabeth dreams of running a shepherd school and tannery to preserve these ancient crafts for future generations.
Every day, Nature works her magic. The sun rises, the moon rises and more people choose to walk the path of harmony that is their birthright.
Elizabeth is waiting for you when you do.
You can find Elizabeth on Instagram @wildwoolshepherdess and at her website www.wildwoolshepherdess.com