We have so much to learn from sheep. For the last week, through the horizontal Scottish rain, I have been observing my little flock of sheep with profound admiration. These animals I inherited, along with the patch of floating Scottish bog and bare rock on which they live, more than a decade ago.

At first sight they are not much to celebrate. They are muddy, bedraggled, cantankerous and malodorous. They cost me a small fortune to feed, shear, medicate and keep alive, yet they contrive ever more complicated and expensive ways to die. Last year they contracted Orf (pronounced as in “get orrfff moy land”), a form of ovine venereal disease, the symptoms of which are too disgusting to be described in print. This year they have raging conjunctivitis, which means injecting their eyelids before they all go blind.

Yet my sheep have this going for them: they are hefted. After countless generations on the same land, they have an inbuilt, inbred knowledge of where they come from. A hefted flock knows where the natural salt lick is to be found, where the medicinal herbs grow and which valley offers the best protection from the snow, depending on the direction of the wind; hefted sheep take in a mental map of their own territory with their mother’s milk. Zoologists say that it takes at least three generation to erase those memories.

A hefted flock will never willingly leave its land. In the fell country, hefted sheep are left to roam without fences in the certainty that they will not wander beyond the frontiers of their hereditary mental map. Take them where they cannot wander home, and they are utterly lost.

No one is quite sure where the word “heft” comes from. It may be derived from the German heften, to fasten or attach, and the word “haft”, as in the handle connected to the blade of shovel, may be linked. Back in 1835, Anne Carlyle, wife of the Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle, wrote in a letter after moving house: “I am wonderfully well hefted here; the people are extravagantly kind to me.” The idea of being indelibly connected to a location has steadily declined over the past century. But there was a time when we were all hefted to a particular patch of the earth, when we each knew a place, rural or urban, intimately and instinctively, its landscape bred in the bone.

Some people are more hefted than others. Gordon Brown, it seems to me, is remarkably hefted: he comes from a very specific place, and the dour stone landscape of Kirkcaldy informs every word he utters and every thought he has. Tony Blair, on the other hand, seems hefted nowhere, and anywhere, being equally at home with Cliff Richard and the Bee Gees. But David Cameron’s geographical hinterland, if he has one, is far harder to discover.

So much nonsense is spoken and written about the countryside, but the vestigial urge to be hefted may be one of the most intense but least noticed features of modern life. We travel faster, more widely, move more often and settle for shorter periods than ever before, yet at the same time we seem to crave a place to stay and return to ever more intensely.

The glossy magazine about country life, the column of romantic ruralism, the news stories about people vying to live on a remote island, the allotment holder cultivating cabbages in the city, the spiralling prices for every rundown barn and derelict cottage: these are all, in the end, about a quest for heft, a closer association with somewhere, anywhere.

Richard Dawkins identifies the rise in religious belief in the US to the sense of anomie that comes in a society constantly and unhappily on the march from one place to another. This is what social dislocation really means: dis-location, to be taken from the place you know to somewhere you do not, but carrying always the internal desire to return to the place you were once hefted.

I have lived away from Scotland for far too long to be genuinely hefted here, although I know people who are; farmers who can hear the weather in the wind, fishermen who know the contours of the coast by inherited memory. This last week, I have watched my children sloshing in the same mud I sloshed in as a boy, and chasing the ragged descendants of the ragged sheep I once chased, and hoped that this other flock is also a little hefted.

I am certain that people grow into a landscape, and landscapes grow into the bone, leaving a permanent imprint that survives down the generations. If sheep carry a memory of place, so must every human, no matter how far we travel from our hefts. Place marks us all, and leaves its traces.

Last year I travelled to St Kilda, the outermost of the Hebridean islands. The last inhabitant left the island in the 1930s, but for countless centuries before that, the people of this lonely rock survived by clambering over the cliffs to harvest puffin and fulmar. It was said that the people of St Kilda were such agile climbers that over the centuries they developed a prehensile toe, the better to clasp the rocks. It sounded like myth: a genetic footprint, a toe passed down from one generation to the next, created by the shape of the land.

One of our fellow passengers on the Arctic rescue vessel that plies to St Kilda, was Tom, a Scottish businessman whose grandmother had been one of the last St Kildans to leave the island. Tom was visiting his ancestral home for the first time. One afternoon Tom was wearing sandals on deck, and I happened to notice the shape of his feet. His big toes were at least three inches long.

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