Northern European short-tailed sheep

• 1. Introduction

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  Northern European short-tailed sheep carry a secret that most people walk past without ever knowing. On the island of Soay, off the remote western coast of Scotland, a small, brown, horned flock grazes as it has for thousands of years. These animals are not a novelty or a curiosity. Scientists believe they may be the closest living thing we have to the very first sheep that early farmers brought into Europe. Their tails are short and broad at the base, tapering to a hair-covered tip, shaped something like the fluke of a whale. They have thirteen vertebrae in that tail, against more than twenty in the familiar sheep of farm country. And on North Ronaldsay, in the Orkney archipelago, a related flock feeds almost entirely on seaweed, kept outside a stone wall that runs just above the high-tide line. How did sheep that may trace back to the Neolithic Age survive into the twenty-first century? Why did they nearly vanish? And what does a Finnsheep in Finland, giving birth to up to nine live lambs at once, have in common with a dwarf sheep on an island off the Brittany coast of France? Those questions run through the whole story of the Northern European short-tailed sheep.

• 2. Ancient Roots

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  In the Neolithic Age, the earliest farmers who reached Europe brought with them small, double-coated, naturally moulting, brown sheep. The Soay is believed to be a relict of that original type. By the Iron Age, a somewhat larger variety had spread through northern and western Europe. These Iron Age sheep were still short-tailed, but their fleece was more uniform in texture and came in a range of colours. They were not the Neolithic animal, yet they still bore the characteristic short fluke-shaped tail that would define the whole group. Long-tailed sheep, white-fleeced and larger, arrived later from southern Europe. They were better suited to the economies that valued big fleeces and heavier carcasses, and they pushed the short-tailed breeds out of most of their range. By the early nineteenth century, short-tailed types held on only in remoter corners: Scandinavia, the area around the Baltic, Ireland, Cornwall, the Highlands of Scotland, and various islands. By the early twentieth century, even those pockets had largely given way, and short-tailed sheep were restricted to very remote islands and mountains. From the mid-nineteenth century, and especially after the middle of the twentieth century, the surviving breeds began to attract attention as animals worth keeping alive, prized for curiosity, cultural identity, ornamental value, and the genetic diversity they preserved.

• 3. Built for Hardship

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  Thirteen vertebrae in the tail is one of the most telling physical markers of this group, but the biology goes further. Their faces and legs carry no wool, leaving the skin bare where ice or mud would otherwise mat a fleece. The horns vary enormously, sometimes within a single breed: some animals are horned in both sexes, others only in the male, and still others are polled entirely. The Manx Loaghtan, from the Isle of Man, may carry as many as three pairs of horns on a single head, though two pairs is the usual count. Coat colours range from solid white and solid black to moorit, the reddish-brown shade now fixed as the permanent colour of the Castlemilk Moorit breed. Shetland and Icelandic sheep offer a particularly wide palette, running through many colours and patterns. Some types moult naturally each spring, which means their fleece can be rooed, or plucked by hand, rather than cut with shears. Most of these breeds are agile and hardy, well fitted to wet and cool climates, and they tend to prefer browsing trees and shrubs over grazing short pasture. The North Ronaldsay takes this edge-living further than any other breed, spending much of the year foraging on seaweed.

• 4. Extraordinary Fertility

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  Twin births are frequent across the whole group, but some breeds push fertility to a remarkable extreme. The Finnsheep, from Finland, regularly gives birth to litters of three, four, or more lambs, and the upper recorded figure reaches seven or even nine live lambs in a single birth. The Romanov, from the Volga Valley northwest of Moscow, also produces multiple births as a normal event. The Icelandic breed, from Iceland, is another frequent producer of litters of three or more. Breeding across the group tends to be strongly seasonal, with lambs arriving in spring or early summer. Within the Icelandic breed there is also a specific strain called the Leader Sheep, selected over generations to guide flocks between their pastures, a behavioural quality bred deliberately rather than left to chance.

• 5. A Scattered Archipelago of Breeds

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  More than thirty of these breeds survive today, distributed across islands, coastlines, and uplands from the Faroe Islands to northwestern Russia. The Boreray lives now only on the island of Boreray in the St Kilda archipelago off the west coast of Scotland, descended from earlier short-tailed Hebridean sheep crossed with Scottish Blackface. The Hebridean breed itself became extinct in the Hebrides but survived after being established as an ornamental animal in northern England in the late nineteenth century. The Castlemilk Moorit was bred on the Castlemilk estate in Dumfriesshire in Scotland, produced by crossing Manx Loaghtan, Shetland, and wild Mouflon specifically as a parkland ornament. The Ouessant, sometimes called the Breton Dwarf, comes from the island of Ouessant off the Brittany coast of France and is one of the smallest of all. The Estonian Ruhnu, from the Estonian island of Ruhnu, occasionally grows one or two wattles beneath the head, an unusual physical feature not common in the broader group. The Ålandsfår originated on the Åland archipelago, part of Finland, and was originally brought from the Swedish island of Gotland, demonstrating the maritime trade routes that carried these animals across the Baltic. Among the extinct breeds, the Lítla Dímun lived feral on the island of Lítla Dímun in the Faroe Islands until the mid-nineteenth century. Scientists believe it may have descended from the very earliest European sheep. The Cladagh, from Ireland, survived longest in the Aran Islands, with a few individuals still living in the early 1970s before the breed disappeared entirely.

• 6. The Scottish Dunface Legacy

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  The Scottish Dunface, also called the Old Scottish Short-wool, once ranged across the Highlands and Islands and is thought to have resembled the sheep kept earlier throughout the British Isles. Its coat included coloured streaks in a short, fine wool, and it was horned in the male throughout some areas and in both sexes in others, where it sometimes grew more than one pair. The Shetland, the North Ronaldsay, the Hebridean, and the Boreray are all thought to descend from it, which means a single vanished mainland breed connects some of the most distinct-looking animals in the whole group. The Gotland sheep from the Swedish island of Gotland is itself descended from the horned Gute breed, also from Gotland, and both survive today as separate recognised breeds. The Greenland breed descends mainly from Icelandic and Faroes sheep transported to Greenland in the early twentieth century, carrying the ancient short-tailed lineage to the far edge of the North Atlantic.