Raped by a Kirk Elder and forced from her job by malicious rumour, how a former Church of Scotland minister found salvation in the unlikeliest of places

Daily Mail​

a day ago

Struggling up the ferry gangplank with her shepherd's crook, her dogs, a huge bag of filthy clothes and a rucksack on her back, Helen Percy was understandably on edge.
When you are staging an abduction, it is better to be less conspicuous than this.
As she handed over her ticket just inside the vessel, a plaintive cry seemed to come from her luggage. She pretended it had nothing to do with her.
Shortly afterwards, a fellow passenger asked if there might be a drink inside her rucksack that was leaking.
'No,' she replied. 'It's a small sheep and it's probably just peed.
'But thanks for telling me.'
The creature was in fact a day old – abandoned by her mother – and the island farm owners who entrusted Miss Percy with their flock did not know she had her.
Yes, she accepts, it was an abduction, but it was also a rescue mission. The grim reality of life on the farm where she had just completed a shepherding stint was the lamb would almost certainly have died.
Instead, it took the ferry to the mainland, sat on Miss Percy's knee on the bus to her home in Perthshire and curled up in the crook of her arm in her bed that night.
Decades ago, Essex-born Miss Percy was known as a most unorthodox minister. Now the St Andrews University graduate tends to a new flock with similar single-mindedness.
'Why do I do this job?' the 60-year-old asks herself in her new book, Skirly Crag. 'Why am I up at sparrow's fart each day, with no days off, a pitiful rate of pay and bosses who are variously cantankerous, cussed or crazy?'
Part of the reason is ministering to a human flock did not work out – infamously so.
During her late twenties, as an attractive young minister in rural Angus, she was pilloried following allegations of an affair between her and a married Kirk elder.
A senior church colleague branded her a witch. Congregation members gossiped that she had slept with every man in the parish.
Word went round that she took sermons in her nightie. In some regurgitations of the tale, the nightie was see-through.
Finally, she quit the ministry in despair.
The truth was, she was a childhood victim of sexual abuse by her father and, because of that trauma, was intent on a life of celibacy.
One further incident of sexual abuse occurred during adulthood – this time with the married elder who befriended and later raped her.
Yet their relationship was construed as an affair, and as the Church of Scotland sought to shield the perpetrator and his family, Miss Percy was hung out to dry in a media feeding frenzy.
Even when he agreed to write to the presbytery confirming there had been just one sexual encounter and that it was not consensual, the church did not make this public.
The elder was later interviewed by the police but not charged.
Almost a decade of legal action followed before a House of Lords ruling finally vindicated her and awarded her compensation. That unhappy tale is told in her first book, Scandalous, Immoral and Improper, published in 2011.
Her second published work is quite the contrast. 'Yes, this book comes from a happier place,' Miss Percy says. 'But I do still miss what I believed being a minister was really about – being with people in the depths of their pain, despair and grief, what I call the 'muck of humanness'.'
There is no shortage of muck in her current life.
'Forget beribboned Bo-Peep dresses,' she writes.
'Think instead of unbecoming waterproofs, the same shirt worn for a week, jeans smeared with globs of birthing fluid, blood and mustard-coloured skitter.'
And yet, it becomes clear, her years as a shepherdess are not so very different from those spent as a minister. She still devotes herself to her charges.
The little lamb she stole away on the CalMac ferry is not the only one to have lain beside her in bed. Unable to leave another severely ill one in a barn she tucked it in next to her and woke at dawn to find she was cradling a corpse.
In desperation, she has used her own bootlaces, her belt – even her bra – to tie a pregnant ewe's feet together to prevent her disappearing down a steep hill face where an all-terrain vehicle would not be able to rescue her.
Her memoir is perhaps as much about the dogs integral to the shepherd's work as the flock itself. Many feature in Skirly Crag, some scarred by abuse from previous owners and in need, above all, of understanding. Miss Percy can clearly identify.
She says: 'Many shepherds know that they could not do their job without their dogs and do care for them and value them. On the other hand, there are others who treat their dogs as tools and not as feeling, living creatures.'
An early dog, Jet, was sold to her by a conman, Nathan Smith, for £2,000. He advertised the sale with a video of the dog expertly rounding up sheep on a hillside.
However, when she arrived in the North of England to make the deal, he contrived to palm her off with a different one, which turned out to be useless.
Later, as she tried to return him and get her money back, she learned Smith had been in an 'accident' and would be hospitalised 'for months'. All part of the con, she later discovered.
Ultimately a judge at a court in Burnley, Lancashire, ruled it a scam – far from Smith's first – and ordered him to reimburse her. He has yet to do so.
'Exposing the conman, the charlatan, for what he was doing did bring me some satisfaction,' says Miss Percy.
The experience left her unable to afford another expensive sheepdog but she learned of a £500 one in Sutherland which was being rehomed.
This time the owner, named Grant, refused even to take a deposit from her until she had taken the dog home and put him on trial. He turned out to be
perfect, so she rang the seller to say she was sending the money but he declined, telling her 'bring me a bottle of whisky next time you're up in Rogart.'
She writes: 'I find that I am welling up and I put down the telephone. I write Grant a letter telling him that the reason I cried was not just because £500 would have broken the bank but because his generosity restored my faith in human nature.
'Grant says my letter brought tears to his eyes too.'
Tears flow regularly throughout Skirly Crag for two main reasons: in lambing season much can go wrong and often does – and this shepherdess is at least as emotionally invested in her flock as the farmers she contracts for are financially invested.
And yet, as she accepts, 'most of my charges will end up on a plate as Sunday roast'.
How does she square her devotion to them with their ultimate destiny?
'My job is to make animals' lives as good and as stress free as possible while they are on the farm. Yes, it does worry me what happens after they leave the farm, particularly the stress of being transported and delivered to the end place.'
A farm is a factory, she admits in the book, but adds: 'I am thankful that I am paid to look after the sheep while they are alive and my wage does not depend directly on the meat trade. The days when I have to weigh fattened lambs and load them onto a lorry are the closest I come to shaking hands with the butcher.'
Not everyone sees the job the same way. She compares notes with 'Eeyore', a grouchy shepherding mentor, on what they like best about working with sheep.
'Me, I love the welfare aspect,' she says. 'I enjoy helping the ones that are ill or injured and making them better. And you?'
'Selling the b*ggers,' he replies.
Should there, then, be more female shepherds?
She does, after all, observe that men in livestock farming are 'more liable to use brute force than psychology' in dealing with animals – and she is not afraid of haranguing some when she witnesses cruelty.
'That's a hard one as I do know very caring, competent male shepherds who have far more experience than I do, and I've learned from them.
'But yes, working for women farmers is often a quite different experience as women do tend to have more empathy, particularly with animals giving birth.'
As for hygiene, what is it with these male farmers who offer you breakfast with arms covered in God knows what from don't even ask where?
Farmhouse meals, she says, lost their appeal on one posting when she found the farmer slicing a loaf with globs of birthing fluid on his hands.
'Don't worry, I haven't birthed a sheep this morning,' he told her. 'It dried on since last night.'
It's a curious afterlife, then, for a minister forced from her job by a tide of malicious rumour and gossip. Some might consider it purgatory.
'I am slaving in the lambing field and in the sheds hours after most folk are indoors watching television, or snoring in their beds.'
Indeed, she admits, her cottage does not even have a TV.
A working day can start at 4am and end at 11.30pm, with little more than heated beans eaten straight out of the pot for sustenance. Yet she clearly loves it.
She lives alone on top of a hill, can see no other inhabited house from her front door, and likes it that way.
Speaking to me in 2011, she said celibacy was a necessity for her and she was 'quite happy about it'. She added: 'I love living on my own. I have lots of friends, I like them coming to visit and I like when they go away again.'
Little, it seems, has changed in a decade and a half.
Has she found her true calling in shepherding then – or does she dwell on the events that led to the career change?
'It's not that ministering was not also a 'true calling', just that the church was a very hard place to be for a woman whom some of my friends described as being 'ahead of my time' or unorthodox.'
There is some justification for the description.
She really did give a church talk to children one Sunday with a calf-length Snoopy nightie visible underneath her cassock.
It was to illustrate that: 'God looks on the things of the heart, not the outer garment.'
One minister used to criticise her for sitting beside parishioners on their settees when she visited them in times of grief or trauma.
Men and women of the cloth were supposed to establish personal space by choosing a chair.
That is not her style at all – either in ministering or shepherding.
Is she still religious? Her answer is an unexpected one for a former minister: 'I do still take funerals if I'm asked to, and occasionally weddings or baptisms.
'But I'm not sure I would ever have described myself as 'religious'.
'I don't go to church, if that's what you mean by being 'religious', but I never did think that God had anything to do with church.'
She adds: 'The church is a human institution and often a very flawed one.
'I always clung to the belief, and still do still believe, that goodness is stronger than evil, love is stronger than hate, and life is stronger than death.
'It's really important to hang onto that belief, especially in this truly terrifying world where there is so much hatred, inequality and warmongering.'
Miss Percy's abducted lamb began life at her home assuming she was a dog.
She skipped along beside the collies every time their owner took them for a walk and joined in with them at playtime.
Gradually she introduced it to an elderly member of her own species and, over days, she and 'granny' grazed together in a field.
The day came when she called the lamb for her walk with the dogs but found the animal less keen than usual: 'A few yards from me she halts, then turns away with her nose in the air.
'I can almost hear the melodramatic sniff of disdain. From now on, she wishes to be a sheep, not a poodle.'
It could almost be a metaphor for Miss Percy's own life.
For a time she was a minister, drawn to the pastoral values of the church but repulsed by what she saw as its institutional bias.
It turned out she was a shepherd all along.
■ Skirly Crag: the Shepherd, Her Dogs, the Hill and the Hare, is published by Luath Press, priced £14.99 hardback.