Counting Sheep

by Philip Walling

  The paradox is that Scarth’s scheme was not intended to benefit the flock, which was considered something of a nuisance, and of marginal value to the island’s economy. Had the flock not been banished to the foreshore it is unlikely it would have survived because the crofters would probably have sacrificed the sheep to grow the crops which they desperately needed to sustain the population. Although it was not a new experience for them to eat seaweed, forcing the flock to subsist on it most of the year was a unique experiment, and not certain to succeed. It is probable that there were many sheep unable to adapt to the new regime which simply died, and the current flock is descended from the survivors.

  Scarth established the Sheep Court to regulate the management of the flock according to rules agreed between the laird and the crofters. Each of the five ‘toonships’ elects two Sheepmen to the Court to enforce the Regulations, and the Court appoints a secretary. In Scarth’s time there were seventyone crofts, keeping 2,250 sheep. Now the flock is between 2,500 and 3,000, because there is an abundance of seaweed, which is no longer used for anything other than feeding sheep, but there are far fewer crofts.

  As with all the short-tailed types, these little sheep are very prolific: three-quarters have twins, triplets are common and even quads not uncommon. The lambs are nearly all born within four weeks in April and May, and are very small at birth, little bigger than kittens, so there are hardly ever any lambing problems. But despite their prolificacy, it is traditional on North Ronaldsay to allow ewes to rear only one lamb each. The rest are killed shortly after birth. They prefer to kill the gimmer (female) lambs unless they are wanted for replacements, because the wethers (castrated males) make a bigger carcase – about 15–20 kg deadweight. So for every 100 ewes, they keep about fifteen gimmer lambs and kill all the rest.

  This sinister business is never mentioned in any of the books or travel articles. The National Sheep Association handbook on British Sheep is silent on the subject, as was nearly everybody I spoke to. Even nineteenth-century writers do not refer to it. It is possible that the killing was not as extensive as it is now, although I doubt it. Shepherds usually go round the lambing fields trying to save lambs’ lives. Here they go round with an iron bar. Far more lambs are killed than reared because it is commonly believed that each ewe is only capable of rearing a single lamb. This is curious because the North Ronaldsay’s short-tailed cousin, the Shetland, can rear multiple lambs. It might simply be the crofters’ prejudice, or the sheep’s diet, or poor milk supply, but it can’t have anything to do with the size of the island because even if they kept half the number of sheep, the crofters would still believe each ewe only capable of rearing one lamb.

  As the propensity for multiple births is inherited and most of the island’s sheep are twins and triplets, these will tend to breed twins and triplets themselves. If the crofters were to breed only from ewe lambs that were singles it might be possible to breed out the fecundity, but that would require either a communal effort recording and marking the sheep, or individual owners managing their own sheep separately from the rest, which is impossible under the present system.

  Individual owners cannot even select rams for breeding with their own ewes, because all the sheep run together on the shore. The only control over breeding is to castrate all the ram lambs except the few kept for breeding. The rams left entire and running with the flock all year have a very narrow window of breeding opportunity, because the ewes only come into season for a few weeks each November and December; otherwise they are unreceptive to the males, which tend to keep away from them in a separate group.

  One result of this breeding free-for-all is that the sheep carry a remarkable range of wool colour, from the chocolate tones of moorit, to steel-grey, black, cream and white. Every animal is an individual, and for modern commercial farmers, who strive for standardisation, this would be anathema. But the crofters delight in their sheep’s individuality and do not want animals that all look the same. They have a fine inner fleece for warmth, and an outer protective layer of wool to keep out the weather. Ancient Iron Age sheep would have had a similarly wide range of fleece colour and would have looked like these sheep before weaving began to demand white wool that would hold a dye.

  Shearing is done with hand shears that leave an inch or so of new wool, impregnated with lanolin, which repels the weather and protects the sheep. The machine hasn’t caught on because it leaves the skin too bare for them to withstand a salt-water drenching soon after clipping. Shearing is done at the first new moon at the end of July or beginning of August. It was once common practice in agricultural and pastoral societies to work with the movement of the planets and wait for the most propitious celestial time to carry out important annual tasks. In the West we have largely abandoned what we have come to believe is superstition. But not on North Ronaldsay.

  They only recently gave up the ancient practice of removing the fleece by rooing, which involved pulling off the sheep’s wool by hand. Even in the past many thought it a cruel practice, but now it seems positively barbaric. Professor Low of Edinburgh University was not impressed when he wrote 200 years ago in Fauna Orcadensis (1813, p. 7) that ‘about midsummer all the men in the parish attended with their dogs and gathered up the whole flock … into narrow pens, and from thence I may say to the place of execution, where the wool is torn off their backs; an operation which brings their whole blood into their skin, and is not only disgusting, but, if the season proves harsh, is the cause of great destruction. But however cruel it may seem, it is almost the only notice that is taken of these useful animals by their unfeeling masters until that time twelvemonth.’ But it may not be as cruel as it seems, because there is a natural annual break in growth between the old wool and the new, and at the right time the old fleece will come away fairly easily from the inch or two of new growth underneath. In fact it is the only way of removing all last year’s growth without taking any of the new wool. I imagine it must be less painful than waxing, or even ripping off an Elastoplast.

  When on the shore the sheep naturally divide themselves into ‘clowgangs’, separate family groups that have claimed a piece of the beach-head and foreshore as their territory and which they defend from interlopers by ‘doosing’ (butting) them off. They are perpetually restless, like the sea, moving endlessly up and down the shore, combing the rocks and shore; seaweed will not sustain them entirely and an exclusive diet of grass poisons them. The wethers in particular are affected by ingesting the minerals in seaweed, which causes stones to block their urinary tract and nearly all the wethers on the shore seem to dribble urine continuously, like an old man with prostate trouble. They instinctively know the state of the tide and, as if summoned by an alarm, within a few minutes of it turning they rise to their feet, stretch and begin to follow the retreating sea down the rocks, competing with one another to be the first to reach the crisp clean blades of ware as they are exposed.

  Six times a year the flock is punded. This is a communal gathering of the clowgangs into one of the nine punds, or sheepfolds (English ‘pound’, as in police pound), built at intervals round the island beside the wall. The pundings are done at high water while the sheep are confined to the beachhead. The two at Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve are to draw out the 200 or so three- or four-year-old wether sheep for sale for slaughter. In the days when they didn’t sell so many wethers, the crofters used to get their dogs to catch each one on the shore, by grabbing the wool at the back of the neck and holding on. The February punding is to ‘score’, or count, the sheep to make sure nobody has exceeded his quota. There is one at midsummer and another a fortnight later for rooing – now shearing. The last one of the year is for dipping in the autumn.

  The wethers are not ready to slaughter until they are three years old. By which time their meat is really mutton, dark, pungent and too sheepy for many modern palates. Some attempt has been made to sell it as a gastronomic delicacy through two outlets, Orkney Meats and a butcher in Kirkwall, with the evocative name of T
horfin Craigie. And they have had some help from Mey Selections, Prince Charles’s marketing company run from the Castle of Mey, across the Pentland Firth. But 200 carcases a year is hardly enough to create a market. If this were France the meat would be given an appellation contrôlée and sold as a gourmet product, available for only a short time in the winter, like Vacherin Mont-d’Or.

  To find a living example of the Celtic type that came into Britain by the southern route, we have to go to another island, at the opposite end of the country. Here a breed whose lineage reaches back into the Iron Age survived into the last century. Its forebears once grazed across the heaths and downs of south-west England in a great family of tan-faced, horned sheep, whose modern descendants are the Dorset and Wiltshire Horn. Long after this type had disappeared from the mainland it survived on the Isle of Portland, living on sparse pasture, and was renowned for its sweet, delicate mutton, rich cheese and fine wool.

  Portland has been a royal manor since before the Conquest and a considerable sheep-run for much longer, famous throughout the kingdom for its unique breed. Although it has not been an island proper for 10,000 years or more, it is only tied to the Dorset mainland by the shingle bank of Chesil Beach, and has been enough of an island to keep its sheep from any surrounding influence. This ensured that the Portland breed remained pure through many centuries, during which those who could afford it esteemed its flesh ‘as fine flavoured as any in the kingdom’ and paid nearly twice the price that they paid for mutton from other breeds. For many years the Queen’s Own Yeomanry held its annual summer camp at the Gloucester Hotel in Weymouth just so that the officers could dine on Portland lamb and Portland new potatoes.

  The conventional view is that this tan-faced type descends from similar Northern European stock to the Orkney and the Hebridean, but I am not so sure. They have a number of traits that are hard to square with their being of northern provenance. The ewes possess the unusual capacity (inherited by the Dorset and Wiltshire Horn) to lamb out of season, when the northern types only take the ram in the autumn and lamb in the spring. All-year-round breeding is an inherited trait of Mediterranean sheep, as is the almost complete absence of multiple births. This was noted by writers in the eighteenth century and has not changed, even when the ewes are moved to better going just before conception – a process known as ‘flushing’.

  As fecundity is inherited, pure-bred sheep from single lambs tend only to produce single lambs. The fact is that if ewes are kept in hard conditions they usually only have single lambs because when they ovulate either only one egg is presented for fertilisation or more than one egg is either reabsorbed or dies during gestation. This is considered to be an example of natural selection because in hard conditions single lambs have a better chance of survival. Then, over generations of breeding from single lambs, the tendency to have only one lamb becomes fixed in the breed. But the northern short-tails have endured almost perpetual hardship and they still produce an average of two and a half lambs per ewe. The Portland’s poor lambing rate is slightly mitigated by its capacity to have three lambs in two years, but this is not enough to make it fit into the northern type – not least because it is not short-tailed.

  Folk memory says Portlands swam ashore from a shipwreck – possibly the Armada. But then so many of our sheep breeds are credited with a similar origin – the Herdwick and the Jacob being examples – that, as was noted in an article in Country Life in May 1953, ‘one begins to wonder if Noah had not passed by [the coast of Britain] in his Ark’.

  Sir Henry Harpur, sixth baronet, visited one Farmer Lowman in 1770, to buy a troupe of Portlands to graze his newly extended park at Calke Abbey in Derbyshire. He had tried the New Leicesters because they were the height of fashion at the time, and their creator, Robert Bakewell’s farm at Dishley, was only twelve miles away, but the Leicesters were high-maintenance, demanding sheep, used to better feeding from the heavy clays of the Trent and Soar valleys, and not at all what was needed on the thin calcareous soils at Calke.

  Doubts were expressed at the time about the wisdom of removing sheep to Derbyshire from their coastal territory. It was considered that flocks naturally adapted to their terrain would not easily thrive away from it. This is probably right generally, but the fundamental nature of the land plays a part, and the underlying limestone at Calke is not dissimilar to that of Portland, even though the winters are colder away from the softening influence of the sea. Anyway, Sir Henry’s choice was vindicated because the Portlands adapted so well to their new home in Derbyshire that his grandson, Sir George Harpur Crewe, returned to the Isle in 1835 to buy some more from Farmer Lowman’s grandson. He records in his journal that when he arrived, there had been no rain for six weeks, there was hardly a blade of grass to be seen and the Isle’s 3,000 sheep appeared to be living on thistles, ‘of which there was as fine a crop as ever I saw’.

  In her 1911 book Shepherds of Britain, Adelaide Gossett remarks on the Portland’s remarkable resilience, despite ‘being roughly attended to’. They roamed the Isle by day, with the leading animals wearing bells to keep the flock together and so the shepherds could find them amongst the cliffs and rocks in the evening. And although primitive breeds are distinguished by their strong resistance to disease and parasites, the Portlands were in a class of their own. This strength of constitution tends to diminish as sheep become improved and more productive.

  Miss Gossett tells us they were not afraid of sheep dogs; they resented the collie and would butt him, so the shepherds used what she calls the ‘English sheepdog’ (presumably the rougher hairier type of dog from which the Old English has been bred). Like many of the other ancient breeds, these are proud sheep, independent and not easily intimidated, with a sense of their own dignity, and a bearing that demands respect. They are not the slaves of commercial farming, to be used and abused to produce meat, but come from an earlier time when relations between people and their animals were regulated by a greater respect for the servitude that domestic animals give their human keepers.

  Portlands eventually disappeared from their island because it was gradually being eroded by the commercial quarrying of its eponymous and valuable stone. Sir Christopher Wren was MP for nearby Weymouth when he caused over 6 million tons of Portland stone to be used in the rebuilding of St Paul’s Cathedral after the Great Fire. The eastern façade of Buckingham Palace, innumerable public buildings across London, and the Cenotaph are all made from the stone, as are the headstones and memorials to two world wars.

  The last ‘scraggy miserable lot’ from the Isle was sold at Dorchester market in 1913 and even the persuasion of the auctioneer, says the newspaper report, ‘did not avail much to make the final bid anything but derisive’. By 1953 only a few small flocks remained, scattered around the country and mostly kept by eccentrics. Few commercial farmers would countenance a breed, no matter how sweet and delicate their flesh, that barely averaged more than one lamb from each birth and whose carcase, even after two years, hardly reached 50 lb dead weight. Calke Abbey was the largest remaining flock, but not considered pure because over the years it had received infusions of blood from other breeds, notably the Exmoor Horn (a near relative).

  Across the bay from Portland there is a little flock of twenty ewes and followers kept by Norman and Michelle Jones at Hogchester Farm near Lyme Regis. I was struck by how small they were, and square, with wide-set legs and impressive horns, heavily spiralled in the rams and curled into a delicate half-circle in the ewes, with a characteristic black line running through the leading edge of each horn. They were not in the least timid, and I thought I saw a flash of ancient pride in the way the ewes stood their ground, and in the way the rams will run at you and try to knock you down if you get too close. Their remarkable little lambs are born foxy-ginger and, as they mature, gradually grow a creamy-white fleece of very fine wool. But they never lose a gingery tannish hue on the hair of their faces and legs.

  There is something wistful about the modern interest in rare breeds of l
ivestock. None of the commercial breeders in the past cared a jot for retaining breeds that had outlived their usefulness; nor do they much care now – that’s largely why there are hardly any accurate records of what the early types looked like or how they were transformed into modern breeds. Sheep breeders produced what would satisfy demand and were not concerned to keep types that had outlived their usefulness, unless nothing else could survive on their land. And that is the reason why the Portlands held out on their rock where few other breeds could have lived. The thin soils, the salty influence of the sea on their sparse pastures, and a system of common grazing that had died out much earlier on the mainland would have done for most modern breeds.

  Most sheep are either polled or grow two horns; in many breeds, the males are horned and the females polled. But there are primitive breeds that grow four, six, even eight – and occasionally odd numbers of horns, three or five. We see this in the Hebridean, which has only just survived through to the modern age on the edge of the British Isles. It is part of the same northern short-tailed tribe as the North Ronaldsay and the Orkney, and was once found all along the western seaboard of Scotland from the Hebrides, into south-west Scotland, down to the Isle of Man and into the Channel Islands. They are double-fleeced like all the northern short-tails, with a fine inner coat and a harsher weather-proof outer coat, usually of black or dark brown, becoming grey (particularly round the muzzle) as they age. Multiple-horned rams are hard to keep alive because when they fight (and these rams find it irresistible) they easily split open their skulls. For this reason it is common practice to castrate males in park flocks.

  They are now ornamental sheep, because apart from the superior quality (but small quantity) of their wool, modern breeds grow quicker, rear heavier lambs and respond to better feeding and more intensive management. The great value of all the primitive breeds is that they are superbly self-sufficient, hardly ever having trouble lambing, and are very hardy, with natural resistance to parasites and diseases. And have a remarkable capacity, which most improved breeds have lost, of extracting from the coarsest grasses and vegetation whatever goodness they contain. They actually seem to prefer grazing purple moor grass (Molinia caerulea), which other breeds won’t touch, and birch scrub, in preference to heather.