FOLLOWING A dreary summer, hopefully autumn will be better - and, as the leaves begin to turn, harvest and ram sales make September my favourite month of all.

Unlike the pedigree cattle business where I am first generation, my family have been involved in the tup trade for a century or more. My great grandfather expanded from owning a medium-sized upland farm to owning or tenanting around 200,000 acres, so his advice was worth listening to.

Of the advice which has come down through the generations, the most noteworthy was 'never to write to the papers, never keep pigs and avoid the tup trade'.

Three of his four sons, as sons do, disregarded his advice and did well selling Blackie and Cheviot rams. As a boy, I was brought up on tales of Dignity, my grandfather's record priced Cheviot. He made the huge sum of £1200, which in buying power would probably match record breakers today.

Dignity was sold at Hawick Tup Fair in 1920. This was the apex of the short boom after The First World War.

That same year, the Blackface record was also broken by a sheep from Borland which made £800. Within a decade, the economy had collapsed and sheep prices had dropped by 75%, so Dignity's record wasn't broken until 1948 when better times returned.

An old shepherd who remembered pre-war days told me that the next great Cheviot after Dignity was Santa Claus, from Upper Hindhope. He was sold at Hawick, in 1936, during the depths of The Depression, and he made £200, the top price of the year. The top priced Blackie, from Woolfords, made £320.

Alas Dignity's luck ran out after his triumph. He went to Callands, where the ewe stock was only ordinary and he sired nothing of note and died of a scour the following spring - not much 'dignity' in that!

Record breakers have come and gone since then, with a high price no guarantee of success in the pasture. In times of yore, prices for top sheep reflected the economic state of the sheep industry. Now records tumble whether sheep are selling well or not.

At the time of writing the only ram sale that I have attended and then only for a short time, was the Texel sale at Lanark. I counted 246 of the 561 ram lambs catalogued (although not all were forward) had performance figures.

This is highly commendable and as it should be for a terminal breed. Indeed, it is essential that buyers desiring to put growth and muscle into their lambs should have all possible information on which rams will do that best.

Maybe there is some way to go before all rams, like bulls at the sales today, have EBVs. However, it is easy to forget that that has only happened in the past 20 years.

Mostly I agree with my son about rams we like. This time our opinions differed about wool cover. The trend in the Texels is for the sheep to get increasingly barer.

For long periods of my youth I spent time with a handpiece chiselling dirty wool off sticky bellies, so I agree wholeheartedly with the trend to breed bare bellies.

As always happens in the world of pedigree, a beneficial trend is carried on past the point of economic benefit and perversely becomes almost regarded as a point of beauty. Texels have wool of the highest quality which, even if it isn't worth very much, keeps them warm and contributes to the hardiness of the breed.

To see bare shoulders, ragged flanks and peeled necks is too much.

Leaving aside the fact that breeds which were popular in his time and have since fallen by the wayside and others, such as the Texel, which were unknown to him, I wonder what my grandfather would make of our sheep today.

He would certainly be impressed with the improved muscularity of today's breeds, with reservations about the positive relationship between muscle and lambing problems. He would recognise that the difference in wool cover reflects its reduction in value.

But, he would have been very critical of the structural correctness, an obsession of his, of the rams at the Texel sale. Too many had twisted feet or bowed fore legs, although these faults seem, both in sheep and cattle, to be a side effect of breeding for extreme muscularity.

My grandfather would have spotted two things immediately. Now, as in 1920, the real point of difference between record breakers and their brethren is still the head and the point of difference between those who do well in the tup trade and those who don't are that the former are obsessive - the very thing his father warned him against.

The other of my great grandfather's four sons, Walter, was well respected as a good farmer. However, apart from in a small way, he never bothered with the tup trade.

Instead, he studied the stock market, often late into the night, invested wisely and made as much or more than any of his brothers.

On one occasion some well known Cheviot breeders paid a call. They were taken to see the tup hoggs.

"What's that yin off, Walter?" one asked. "Er, Silver Cloud," uncle Walter replied. The next one, too, according to Uncle Walter, was sired by Silver Cloud as were any others pointed out.

No doubt the visitors quickly surmised that uncle Walter really had no idea what the rams were by. "Aye Walter," one of his guests cracked, "he must be some breeder, that Silver Cloud."