Sarah "Granny" Aching (née Grizzel) was Tiffany Aching's grandmother and a shepherd; not a shepherdess since they wear big puffy dresses in pale pink or blue with cute little bonnets and crooks with bows on them like china figurines from Royal Doulton. 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. 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 (Tiffany remembered her Granny Aching whenever she smelled "Jolly Sailor" 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. Tiffany was clearly her favourite grandchild and the reader really only learns about Granny Aching through Tiffany's memories of her. She did not call herself a witch; she looked after sheep and The Chalk, where they grazed, and those who lived there, including the Nac Mac Feegles. To the inhabitants of the Chalk, Granny Aching was the Chalk; its best shepherd, its wisest woman and its memory, to the point that even the Chalk's Feegles say of her that she "[told] the hills what they are, every day. She [held] them in her bones. She [held] 'em in her heart". Granny Aching was "as if the green downland had a soul that walked about in old boots and a smocking apron and smoked a foul pipe and dosed sheep with turpentine." The residents of the Chalk called the thunder "Granny Aching cussin'", the vultures "Granny Aching's chickens", the fluffy little white clouds of summer "Granny Aching's little lambs" and said she cussed the sky blue. She never wore a witch's hat or cloak around her shoulders - the sky was her hat, the wind her cloak. However to the Nac Mac Feegles, she was their hag (witch) for many years. And the other witches like the famous ones from Lancre, knew she was a witch. 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 so she was left largely alone. 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 rivaled Nanny Ogg's Scumble. Sarah Aching died when Tiffany was seven, ca. 1986 UC a few years before the events of The Wee Free Men so information about her life is only gained through flashbacks and Tiffany's recollections. After her death, the locals left packets of Jolly Sailor tobacco where her hut used to be, with a wish. The Feegles dealt with the tobacco end of the business (after allowing a decent period for her to take it if she wished). She becomes a part of the Chalk though and her memories help Tiffany out regularly when she is in danger; in the dream world of the Queen of the Fairies, the image of Granny Aching, strangely blended with the china shepherdess Tiffany had once given her, helped wake Tiffany up. Similarly, when Tiffany was besieged by the Hiver which invaded her mind, the combined smell of turpentine, sheep's wool, and Jolly Sailor tobacco helped her find a self the Hiver could not touch or resist. In the novel, Wintersmith, when Tiffany could not run from the Wintersmith any more, and chose to act to save the sheep and her brother from the snow, she went out saying, "Thunder on my right hand, Lightning in my left hand," the names of Granny Aching's sheep dogs. After Granny Weatherwax dies, Granny Aching and Granny Weatherwax, who never knew each other when they were alive, are seen by Tiffany walking the Chalk, Thunder and Lightning by their sides.
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