Wallace's whirlwind romance with the proprietor of the local wool shop puts his head in a spin, and Gromit is framed for sheep-rustling in a fiendish criminal plot.

In a family of sheep rustlers, a 15-year-old must go up against his domineering father to help his younger brother keep the lamb left orphaned by their latest slaughter. Rustling touchingly presents an alternative masculinity instilled not with machismo, but with empathy.

Set in a small farming community in mid Wales, a place where Koppel's parents - both refugees - found a home. This is a landscape and population that is changing rapidly as small scale agriculture is disappearing and the generation who inhabited a pre-mechanised world is dying out. Much influenced by his conversations with the writer Peter Handke, the film maker leads us on a poetic and profound journey into a world of endings and beginnings; a world of stuffed owls, sheep and fire.

Despite past friendliness, cattle ranchers Tom and Jim Bledsoe, father and son, fence off their range to prevent its use by neighboring sheep ranchers Tug Wilson and Buck Rankin, suggesting that they hope to end their recent loss of cattle. Rankin (not Rankins) shoots Tug, who is unaware of Rankin's lawless activities, in an argument and Jim is accused of murder and also stampeding the sheep. Believing Jim is guilty, Tug's daughter, Ruth, aids Buck in capturing Jim, but he escapes. Ruth gets help from Sheriff Hank Bosley, and a sheepherder, Sanchez, reveals Rankin's responsibility for both the rustling of Bledsoe's cattle and the killing of Wilson.