Black Sheep Brewery Theakston left in 1988, and after a hiatus of more than a year purchased the North Yorkshire Malt Roasting Company, originally part of the former Lightfoot's brewery site, from an animal feed company, in order to start a new brewery in Masham. Theakston wanted to use the Lightfoot name to bring back an old brewing tradition, but Scottish and Newcastle had already trademarked the name. The association of Masham with sheep led Theakston to come up with the name "Sheep Brewery" which rapidly became "Black Sheep" at his wife's suggestion. The first and original Black Sheep Best Bitter was sold
Black Sheep (Hill novel) reveals the book was inspired by "a black and white photograph of a 19th-century engraving she found online". The village was, she says, "exactly as I describe. It was essentially an amphitheatre with all the mine workings in the bottom with the great gantry thing, and terraces of houses going up, and a little path with a gate through which people went down to work, and you could just see at the top where the houses petered out, farmland, country. You couldn't think of a more closed community than this bowl." Black Sheep (Hill novel) Black Sheep, is a novella