360 Mountain Breeds of Sheep. 



who are ensfaged in the business, and would not do so if it did 

 not pay. Mr. C. Sewell Read tells us of "a little farmer at 

 Bierton, Bucks, who had at one time nearly 2000 ducklings." 

 The author of ' Poultry as a Meat Supply,' speaking of certain 

 parts of Ireland, says : " There, in the vicinity of any cottage, 

 you will see turkeys in scores, nay, in hundreds, picking up 

 a living in the fields, on the hills, on the commons, on the 

 roadsides even. The small farmers rear them in large numbers, 

 they share the children's breakfast of oatmeal or Indian corn, and 

 so profitable are they that the landlord's rent is almost paid by 

 the sums that they realize." And 1 conclude by repeating that 

 only an extension of the taste for poultry is required in order to 

 make quite common the profits which a few of our countrymen 

 already realize by not "despising small things," but, on the 

 contrary, installing domestic birds in their right position among 

 the live stock of the farm. 



Long Sutton, Lincolnshire, July, 1866. 



XXIV. — Mountain Breeds of Sheep. By Henry H. Dixon. 



Prize Essay. 



Cheviots — Crosses with Leicester — Blackfaces — " Mules " — Herdwicks — 

 Lonks — North Wales Sheep — Crossing with Cheviots — South Wales 

 Sheep — Exmoors — Dartmoors — Increase of Cross-breeding — Merits of 

 l)ure races — Their chances of extinction — Where improvement necessary. 



Scotland — to which our hill flockmasters naturally turn when 

 they wish to change their breed or try the effects of a cross — 

 has, so to speak, only two breeds of mountain sheep. The tiny 

 *' natives" of the West coast and the islands from Islay north- 

 wards, with their horns and brown-chesnut face and legs, have 

 been nearly " improved " away ; and, except at Earl Cawdor's 

 in Nairnshire, where care and fine feeding can bring the wethers 

 up to 13 lbs. a quarter at four years old, a man must take many 

 a long day's journey to find them. The old breed from Brae 

 Moray, with roan face and legs, hairy wool, and as wild as a 

 roedeer, and whose lambs were always yeaned with a red spot on 

 the shoulder and the tip of the tail, live only in story and the 

 council-chamber canvases of the Highland Society. In short. 

 Cheviots and Blackfaces hold the heights alone from the Ord of 

 Caithness to Hindhope, and there is scarcely a spot, save the 

 peaks of Ben Nevis, where the latter cannot get its living. 



It is to the Robsons of Belford, who were flourishing when 

 the century began, that the earliest improvement of Cheviots 



