What's going on in Swaledale?
This picture seems to have caused some discomfort to either the UK’s Yorkshire Post newspaper or to Dr Graham Bottley PhD (aka Swaledale Mutton aka Incytometry). The repost below is unaltered with the best resolution available from its source1.
[For those still unfamiliar with Graham, he features in this previous article].
The picture is interesting for two reasons:
(1) It seems to be photoshopped
(2) The Yorkshire Post appear to have removed it (and a similar image) from their article the day after publishing it.
So let’s have a look
(1) It seems to be photoshopped
What do I mean by this? Well there are a number of anomalies in this particular photograph that suggest that it has been manipulated from any organic photograph. Obviously only Tony Johnson really knows whether that is the picture that he took (and hopefully will volunteer the original .raw image format to confirm that this is an organic image). One of the obvious hints is the overclarity of the edge of the main character against the background. The other is the odd shadows that should be resulting from lighting from the left of the picture but include shadows that appear to be from lighting coming from the mid-right. In fact the shadows are all over the place. If this picture is facing North in January this should be sometime around 3pm yet the big tree in the background seems to be producing a Southern shadow. It’s possible there is an explanation but without Tony Johnson coming forward it’s unlikely to see the light of day (forgive the pun)…
Note as well that the area seen in the photos is quite distinct. It is typically Yorkshire as seen from the dry stone wall but whether it is Middle Farm, Swithinthwaite (where Swaledale Mutton is supposed to have its flock) is not so obvious.
(2) The Yorkshire Post removed the identifying pictures from their article
There are two versions of the article, both of which are still online as of the date of this post. The earliest dated version is actually 29th January 2022 and is found at Pressreader.com. The link to the article is here (check archive.is for the archive if it disappears) and looks like this (note the headline “Why more people are flocking to Dr Bottley’s sheep handling course” - with Dr Bottley specifically mentioned):
You’ll note that this is pressreader.com’s archive (scrape) of the Yorkshire post taken on Jan 29th, but the actual Yorkshire Post article is now dated the next day - Jan 30th 2022 and has a different title. “Dr Bottley” has been dropped in favour of a more generic “have-a-go farmers are flocking to sheep keeping courses”. It appears that Alexandra Wood got up early on Sunday morning to make the changes.
What is more bizarre is that the Yorkshire Post version removed both the above image and another image taken of “Graham in the field with his sheep” (from a slightly different angle).
This one has some more anomalies - like the sheep front left who doesn’t cast a shadow and the rather headless looking sheep third from the left in the front row. Not just that but some of the sheep seem pasted in with hooves not quite touching the ground and then there is the unfortunate looking emu front right.
[Just as an aside the emu reminds me of this picture of Bill Clinton sitting on a chair with only two legs. Can you see it?2]
Of more curiosity regarding the first Shepherding image (without the emu) is that Graham himself promoted it. Here is his own tweet (archived here) and you can clearly see that twitter embedded the image when the tweet was posted. As of today, if you repost the Yorkshire post weblink you will still get the picture embedded even though it does not appear in the article at all.
So this now begs two questions:
(1) Is Graham really a sheep farmer, or is it some sort of role play?
(2) Why did the Yorkshire post consider it essential to remove the sheep farming pictures from the article whilst retaining the main picture in the social media metadata?
(1) Is Graham Bottley really a sheep farmer?
Well, he says he is. And a viral immunologist. It’s difficult to believe that both can be true but if so he would be a very busy man. As at the time of writing I am not aware of any university affiliations that would support the claim of “being” a viral immunologist (as opposed to “was”) and as his lab-based specialty is flow cytometry it’s difficult to believe this claim, although I suppose it depends on the definition.
[Note if anyone has further information on this with supportive evidence of an institutional affiliation as a viral immunologist we’ll happily update the record here].
Putting aside for a moment the viral immunologist (and full time flow cytometry trainer) careers, and the time spent running a games company you wouldn’t think there would be much time to be a farmer. In fact, any current farmer will know how difficult and time consuming it to start a sheep farm. It’s another full-time job.
But Graham has one more job. Full-time tweetmaster. And no, I’m not kidding. Here is the output from twitonomy.com3…
And similar output for @incytometry
Note that both accounts tweet fully from the twitter web app, which usually (but not always) means from a desktop computer - presumably not out in a rainy & cold Yorkshire field.
The incytometry account averages 20 tweets per day and the swaledalemutton account over 100. That’s 120 tweets a day - all day between 8am and 8pm. Wow.
Admittedly the content of the tweets is minimal and they do seem to be used only to recruit the real workers who swarm any account that Graham targets.
Usually within minutes of Graham interacting with a perceived “anti-vaxxer” account a stonehead or 77th account will turn up to join the swarm…
So, is it possible that Graham is a flow cytometrist, viral immunologist, social media influencer, extraordinary tweeter, gamer, game designer4/business owner and a sheep farmer but there are just not enough hours in the day for all that. In fact, it appears that he doesn’t even break for tea (the Yorkshire word for the 5-7pm family meal commonly known as “dinner”)5. So then we have our other question…
(2) Why did the Yorkshire post consider it essential to remove the sheep farming pictures from the article whilst retaining the main picture in the social media metadata?
This is going to be short - we will likely never know. The only explanation that makes logical sense is that someone told the Yorkshire Post to remove those pictures. Why otherwise pay Tony Johnson to go to the effort of standing for hours on a Yorkshire Moor on a cold afternoon in January, only to remove the article’s biggest and most central picture(s)? And why do that particularly if time was spent photoshopping the pictures?
Maybe the Yorkshire Post didn’t like Tony’s original pictures and they preferred the one they added the next day showing Graham taking a well earned break from his twitter account to do something with an unsuspecting and perplexed-looking sheep
So if you’d like to sign up to the sheep keeping course and find out for yourself how Graham juggles so many balls in 12 hours do drop a note in the comments, we’d love to know!
In accordance with CC use, all photos reproduced from the Yorkshire Post in this article are attributed in both versions of the article to Tony Johnson
Twitonomy analyses approximately the last 3000 tweets. For @swaledalemutton this only takes 3 weeks, averaging 108 tweets per day. For @incytometry this takes 5 months averaging 19 tweets per day.
According to RPGGeek.com Graham’s son writes some of the the AFF series of Arion game’s books
Interestingly his compatriot in the twitter “nudge” space, Viki Male, has a similar tweet pattern to Graham (but spread over more hours - 6am to 10pm). She also doesn’t break for “tea” (“dinner” in London). Which raises the possibility that somebody else (or a bot) is tweeting the “get vaccinated, person of pregnancy!” message 16 hours a day.
.
What an excellent investigative work Dr Syed!
Graham is also a parish councillor, a school governor, coaches & plays both rugby & cricket. As well as an expert in longbow archery, takes regular wildlife surveys, reviews environmental impact of live stock at regional & national level. These are all claims he has made on twitter.
I guess he must also be pretty good with quantum, because to fit everything in he claims, he must also have time traveling ability..