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Sarah Grizzel "Granny" Aching would never have called herself a witch. She was a shepherd; not a shepherdess, either, they wore big puffy dresses in pale pink or blue with cute little bonnets and crooks with bows on them. Granny wore plain farm-worker's clothes, with a sack for a slicker if it rained; her crook would pull a big ram out of a mud-hole. No, she would say she was a shepherd. She took care of sheep, and The Chalk, where they grazed, and others who lived there, including the Nac Mac Feegle. The Feegles knew she was a witch; she was their hag for many years. she never wore a witch's hat or cloak around her shoulders - the sky was her hat, the wind her cloak. Other witches knew, including famous ones from Lancre, but Granny Aching lived out on The Chalk, with sheep and dogs and Feegles who didn't need the usual skills of a witch, and didn't talk about her, either. She could, of course, bring back lambs from the mostly-dead, and her Special Sheep Liniment was greatly prized by the locals and the Feegles. It may have rivalled Nanny Ogg's Scumble.

Most people thought she was a bit dour and solitary. Much of the time she lived in her little covered cart, which could be pulled wherever the sheep went, and even when others were around she wouldn't say much. She was, however, very fond of a few things: The Chalk, her fabulously efficient sheepdogs, Thunder and Lightning, Jolly Sailor pipe tobacco, and her little granddaughter, Tiffany. She called Tiffany "little jiggit" (twenty in the old sheep-counting language left behind by some wandering Überwaldean shepherds), because Tiffany was her twentieth grandchild. Sarah Aching died when Tiffany was seven, ca. 1986 UC.

Tiffany often remembers Granny Aching whenever she smells "Jolly Sailor" tobacco, her grandmother's favorite type.

Perspicacia Tick, travelling witch and expert, initally didn't believe that a witch could be found on The Chalk, because they came mostly from the mountains: craggy, hard-rock places like Lancre. That was because she had just met Tiffany, and never met Sarah. Granny Weatherwax knew that within the soft chalk there were lumps of flint, the hardest and sharpest of stone, and on its turf, some of the harder and sharper witches.

Annotation

The sheep-counting language is still used on Roundworld and may be heard to this day on the English-Scottish border. It is thought to be a relic of the old Celtic language spoken before the advent and linguistic dominance of English (even today, Welsh and the Gaelic languages have a "default setting" where the favoured number-base is multiples of twenty, although both languages have also "decimalised" to suit the needs of modern Europe).

Other interesting stations on the way to "jiggit" (20) are bumfit (15) and dock (10). The nursery rhyme "hickory dickory dock" also preserves the old numbers - in this case, eight, nine and ten.