It’s the last week of February. While optimists may convince themselves that spring is nigh, realists know that winter still has a few tricks to play. Hailstones beat tattoos on our windows; sights and sounds are muffled by flurries of snow. Days of rain have left the ground saturated. Farmers walk sodden fields and, in consequence, fill Dr Harris’s waiting room with pungent agricultural odours and bad cases of trenchfoot.

Not Les, though. People go to the doctors with a sniffle, and end up with pneumonia. A doctor’s waiting room may be fine for idle gossip, but it’s no place for people who aren’t feeling well. Les has remedies of his own back at the farm: a tatty old bandage for major lacerations, a shot of whisky for everything else.

Les is on the tops today, putting a new sheepdog through its paces. His language is the most colourful aspect of a scene overlaid with a cheerless wash of ‘Pennine Drizzle’ and ‘Sleet Grey’ - two of the less popular paints from Crown’s new ‘Depressive Collection’. If the darkest hour is just before dawn, then the gloomiest time of year is just before spring erupts with new life and colour and birdsong.

Les whistles, waves his stick and calls the dog. But he’s frustrated, and the name he calls the hapless dog isn’t the one that’s engraved on its collar (‘Prince’, the same name as the three other dogs he’s had; the same collar too, why waste money). So Prince gets confused, and runs around in circles. Instead of filing meekly into their pen, the sheep scatter like buckshot.

It would be a lot less hassle for Les if his sheep were cloned, like Dolly. They’d all look much the same, of course, but Les could live with that. Anyway, it’s not like his regular sheep would win prizes for distinctive personality. Cloned sheep might at least run in the same damn direction. Les would have fewer sleepless nights, and spend less time scouring the fells for lost sheep. Every year, at lambing time, there are always a few weaklings that need special attention. Hoisting them over his shoulders - the very image of the Good Shepherd - Les staggers back to the farmhouse. He’s getting too old for all this. The lambs need feeding by hand, with a baby’s bottle. Some nights he doesn’t get to bed at all. Too old and too tired.

The lambs that survive will soon be back in the fields again, fending for themselves. The lambs that don’t make it are... well, let’s just say they don’t get a state funeral. In the parable the sheep that was lost was worth more than the other ninety nine. That rings a little hollow for a hill farmer like Les, since all his sheep - lost or found, sound or sickly, dead or alive - are worth about the same when the time comes to take them to auction. Fuck all...

Les is a throwback to another age. He wears a suit - albeit a scruffy one, the kind that scarecrows wear - come rain or shine, and a hat pulled down tight over his ears. He lives alone, farming a hundred unproductive acres high up on Heartbreak Hill. There never seemed to be enough time to get around to marriage, what with so many jobs to do around the farm. In any case, he only ever had one chat-up line: "Would you like to come back to my place and do a little light dusting?" Most young women of marriageable age came to the unarguable conclusion that, no, they probably wouldn’t.

To visit Dale Head Farm is like going back fifty years. In fact it’s almost exactly like going back fifty years; the headline on the yellowed newspaper that doubles as a kitchen tablecloth suggests that time has stood still since the Coronation. Over the years Les has subjected household chores to a rigorous time and motion study, eventually dispensing with them altogether. What’s the point of washing up when you only have to do it all over again next month?

The working day (like there was any other kind...) begins early. As he slurps his tea from a chipped mug, Les turns the radio on. The farming programmes used to be worthy but dull: livestock prices, the weather forecast, some patronising guff about not drinking sheep dip on an empty stomach. But those days are gone, and the news from the countryside now seems like a never-ending catalogue of disasters.

The working day ends late. Les responds to every new farming crisis by working longer and harder. But if a man can’t make a half decent living by working ten hours a day, is he really going to turn things around by working twelve? It doesn’t make much sense, but farming’s in his blood. Farmers don’t go down to the job centre, to see if there might be some other line of work that will suit them better. Farming isn’t a job, it’s a way of life.

That doesn’t stop people from giving farmers the benefit of their advice. Diversify, they suggest glibly: convert a barn into a guest house, run a petting zoo, sell premium foods over the internet. But Les wouldn’t know a website from a hole in the ground, and any overnight guests would soon regret not having booked into somewhere more salubrious... like the Bates Motel.

Les is, in every sense, the last of the line. At one time he regretted not having a son to take over the farm. But not any more. If Les, with years of experience behind him, can’t make ends meet, what chance would a greenhorn have? If you are unwise enough to quiz him about the future of hill farming, as he perches morosely on a stool at the far end of the bar, all you will get for your trouble is a torrent of invective and abuse. Yes, anyone who thinks that farmers are slow to show their feelings should see Les in full flow.

He doesn’t suffer fools gladly, or anyone else for that matter. Even those who have taken the time to get to know him often wonder why they ever bothered. But his place in the affections of Milltown folk is not at the forefront of his mind right now; there are too many other things to worry about. The truth is that Les was quietly going broke even before foot and mouth swept across the country like one of the plagues of Egypt.

Cows don’t milk themselves, so he’s been out of the Pennines just once in the last twenty years: to a cousin’s wedding in London. "I didn’t like the sandwiches", Les reported later, reducing the rest of the world to the status of a finger buffet. Despite having been all around the world, Cousin Jack "still didn’t know that an empty glass needs filling". And "If that’s all you learn when you go abroad, then I’d just as soon stay here". Strange, to be so proud of having travelled so little. But a man can’t run a farm if he’s dreaming of faraway places.

The accountant dreads his annual pilgrimage up to Dale Head Farm almost as much as Les does. He has to tackle a shoe-box full of grubby receipts that appear to have been in the back pocket of Les’s trousers for months, while remembering to refuse every offer of tea. The figures don’t add up; they haven’t done for years. As he snaps his briefcase shut at the end of the longest day of his financial year, he offers a few words of advice. Les knows what’s coming. "I’ve done your books as best I can, Les, but I’d be neglecting my duty as a friend..." - there’s an arm around Les’s shoulder at this point in the familiar homily - "...if I didn’t point out that the only sensible way forward would be to sell up, bank the money and spend the rest of your days sunning yourself on the beach in Barbados." "Same time next year, then?", says Les, as he holds the door open.

He won’t be working on his tan, in the West Indies or anywhere else. It’s hard to imagine him straying far from Heartbreak Hill. It’s even harder to see him retiring. What the hell does a retired farmer do with his time? Dig an allotment? Collect first day covers? Sit in the old folks’ home, while some bearded loon with a guitar tries to get a bunch of incontinent codgers who can’t remember their own names to join in the chorus of ‘Old MacDonald’? The very thought makes Les shudder. There’s nothing wrong with his memory: he remembers where his shotgun’s hanging.

Les will carry on farming until he himself is planted in good Pennine earth. What will become of Dale Head Farm when he’s gone? Well, it could be transformed into a weekend cottage for a commodities broker from Leeds or Bradford or Manchester. With a few additions of no architectural merit it could be the clubhouse of yet another golf course. It could fall down stone by stone, slate by slate, year by year: a fate that’s befallen so many other Pennine farms. If it’s still a working farm in ten years time, I’ll eat my hat. If it’s still a farm and actually spins a profit, I’ll eat Les’s hat too.