George's Meadow is the central landscape of the flock's life and investigation: a lush Irish pasture beside the sea where George Glenn's death turns familiar grazing ground into a crime scene. Its apparent abundance—green grass, a vegetable garden, and open views—does not make it a haven from conflict. The meadow is at once a place of shelter and routine, a valuable parcel coveted by humans, and the ground on which the flock must decide what its future will be.

Setting and geography

George Glenn's body lies in the grass beside the hay barn, not far from a path through the fields. A crow settles on his Norwegian sweater while a rabbit sits nearby; farther off, the flock holds a meeting close to the cliff edge. The separation matters: on the cliffs, between the blue sky and the blue sea, the sheep cannot smell the blood, even as they feel responsible for what has happened. The meadow's exposed edges and paths give the flock both a view of the surrounding human world and a sense of its own vulnerability.

The terrain becomes part of the flock's first response. Miss Maple assigns lookout posts according to each animal's abilities: Sir Ritchfield watches the paved road from a hill, with Mopple the Whale beside him to remember what the older ram sees; Heather takes the gate nearest the village, and Cloud watches where the meadow path sinks into a dip. Zora, confident on heights, keeps watch from a narrow rocky ledge over the beach below. Othello disappears into the shadow of the dolmen near George's body, while Miss Maple remains by the water trough, trying to wash blood from her nose. Paths, heights, and landmarks become a practical surveillance system.

The meadow as crime scene

The flock decides to solve George's murder itself. Miss Maple approaches the body reluctantly in the summer heat, circles it at a distance, then inspects the spade and sniffs George's clothes and face. She finally puts her nose into the wound and returns to the others with blood on her muzzle. The scene shifts the pasture from a place where the sheep had been kept and watched to one they must read for evidence.

The flock's calm is hard-won rather than natural. At first, some sheep panic about who will bring hay or cry that a wolf is near; Miss Maple quiets them by pointing out that midsummer grass is plentiful and that wolves do not attack with spades. The meadow's richness gives the flock immediate confidence that it can manage without a shepherd, but George's body makes that confidence inseparable from responsibility. They feel accountable even though they do not yet know who killed him.

Garden, caravan, and competing claims

Behind the hay barn stands George's shepherd's caravan, and behind it he has planted a small vegetable garden of lettuces, peas, radishes, cress, tomatoes, endives, buttercups, and chives. George fenced the beds and kept the flock out, although the fence itself would not have stopped them. After his death, Lane pushes back the bolt; Maude eats buttercups, Cloud takes the peas, and Heather the tomatoes. Within minutes the neatly planted beds are gone. The sheep fall silent, feel ashamed, and return to the meadow. Othello, who did not join the raid, draws Miss Maple's attention to the place where George's garden spade usually leaned: it is missing.

The pasture is also the focus of human plans for development and profit. Harry the Sinner argues that drugs found on the land would ruin proposals for a faerie attraction, pony rides, a Celtic cultural center, whiskey specialties, and a seaside hotel. Tom O'Malley claims that George had made money from nighttime boats bringing contraband to the beach, with the goods taken to the caravan and driven away in George's old car the next day. These are the villagers' claims, not a settled account of what happened, but they expose the competing meanings attached to the meadow: to the sheep it is home and grazing ground; to the developers it is a view and a commercial opportunity.

Pasture, labor, and inheritance

When Gabriel takes charge of the flock, he retrieves George's scythe from the little toolshed behind the caravan and cuts grass at the foot of the hill, on the side facing away from the sea. George had polished the blade with a red-and-white rag and said that people who kept sheep could spare themselves its use. Gabriel uses it anyway. To the flock, the iron blade passing through the grass is a gigantic claw; the cut blades lie flat, and the sound and smell make the work seem like senseless destruction. The episode unsettles the familiar pastoral image of a human tending a green field: from the sheep's view, the person who appears to be grazing is also cutting down the substance of their life.

George's will gives the meadow a future beyond immediate survival. His remaining fortune is left to the flock so that it can go to Europe as he promised. The lawyer is to administer the money, and an authorized representative must accompany the animals as their shepherd. The representative's duties include having stories read aloud to the flock for at least half an hour each day; no sheep may be sold or slaughtered, and dense fleece is to be the primary breeding concern. A third party—the lawyer—will check that these conditions are met. The provision makes the sheep beneficiaries of a legal arrangement, but their movement and care still depend on a human representative.

Rebecca and the meadow's meaning

No villager initially volunteers for the representative's position while Gabriel stands beside the lawyer. Rebecca then offers to do it. Othello steps forward, looks at Gabriel, turns, and trots to Rebecca; one by one, the flock gathers around her. Their choice gives visible form to a preference the legal process cannot infer on its own. The meadow is not simply the property from which the flock will depart: it is where the sheep collectively make that decision.

Later, beside the caravan in the dark, Rebecca tells the flock a story about a girl with a secret father and an unsecret father. The girl and the secret father quarrel, remain estranged, and fail to meet before he dies while waiting for her. The story carries the shape of Rebecca's own separation from George into the meadow's nighttime quiet, turning the pasture into a place where family history can be approached indirectly. Across these scenes, the landscape's green abundance is repeatedly shadowed by death, exclusion, and ownership. Yet the flock's investigation, its choice of Rebecca, and the promise of a journey to Europe also make the meadow a setting for collective judgment and self-determination.