North Yorkshire County Show: Bleu is the colour as supreme sheep champion is chosen

“It makes it really special”, said Mr Stables, who has a farm with 35 pedigree Bleu du Maine ewes it runs alongside 100 commercial Bleu du Maine or Beltex sheep 600ft above sea level at Esh, near Durham.

Judge and pedigree Charollais farmer Ralph Alderson, of Carthorpe, near Bedale, said the winner had a lot of style and a “very nice, smart correct shape”.

Mr Stables was attending his first show of the season with his daughters, a shearling ewe and an aged ewe.

The shearling was first in her class and first reserve in the Bleu du Maine section.

He said: "We were meant to bring three, but the ram lamb injured his ear the night before so we couldn’t bring him.”

Mr said he had been initially attracted to the breed due to its crossing abilities.

He said: “We used the Bleu du Maine rams on the Cheviot ewes to produce a cross-bred commercial female because they have plenty of milk, lots of lambs and good mothering abilities. Similar attributes to traditional mule breeding selection processes.

"I’m a dairyman and that takes up an awful lot of my time these days. We nearly didn’t come here. This year has been a year of ifs. The last thing we want is to find ourselves out of work. The sheep have been holding their own without costing the earth.”

Among those contributing to a display of vintage farm vehicles, former farmers Keith and Carol Bowe, of nearby Newby Wiske, were showing a grey 1952 Ferguson tractor, and said restoring it had “kept us sane” during Covid.

Mr Bowe said: “This was the next door neighbours and had been under a tarpaulin for ten years, never been started. I saw it when I was cutting his hedge and said to him ‘I know what I could do with that!”

The former committee member of the show, Mr Bowe had spent two days preparing the showground and had staffed the gate.

He said: “It’s something you have go to try and keep going. More and more of these shows, especially the vintage stuff, are forgetting about the roots of it all."

Carrying out a range of duties around the showground was Northallerton estate agent and former mayor John Prest, who was undertaking his second year as the show’s president.

He said: “One of the reasons I took the job was because my grandad was a secretary of the show in the 1930s and my dad always had something to do with it and we’ve always sponsored the show to help it along.

"We were secretaries of the local branch of the National Farmers Union for a lot of years, so we knew everybody who came. I thought it was only a natural progression for me to take it on and be president and try and do a good job of it."

Mr Prest said being show president was hard work at times, “trying to remain above everything”.

He added: “You can’t be seen to be favouring one or the other if you’re the president. One of the hardest things we’ve got to do is judge the trade stands and give a president’s prize for best in show, but everything is so different, where do you draw the line?”