GALLOWAYS DISTINCTIVE CHARACTERISTICS 173 



usually gets red calves. The red colour being more in favour 

 than the black in the River Plate countries, an offshoot of the 

 Windmill House Herd has been established in Argentina by 

 Knight and Porteous, at Las Tres Lagunas. The cattle are 

 found to be hardy, and the bullocks feed to 1 500 Ibs. live-weight. 

 The difficulty about the quality of the bull occurs there also. 



The Galloway is one of the oldest, hardiest, and most 

 characteristic of all British breeds of cattle so old, that, with 

 the exception of the wild white cattle, no trace is left of the 

 breed or breeds which contributed to its formation. It 

 derived its name from a district in the south-west of Scotland, 

 comprising Wigtownshire and the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright. 

 At one time Galloway extended to nearly the whole area of 

 the six south-western counties, being bounded on the north- 

 east by an imaginary line drawn between Glasgow and 

 Carlisle ; and the Galloway was the most prevalent breed in 

 Scotland west of the Tweed and south of the Forth and 

 Clyde till the first decade of the nineteenth century. 

 Wilson's Record of Kirkbean says of the cattle of Dumfries 

 in 1811, that "the cows for breeding are principally of the 

 Galloway kind. The young two-year-old bullocks kept for 

 grazing are one-half Galloways, and the other half West 

 Highland, bought at Falkirk Tryst in October ; and after 

 being fed one year, they are sold to drovers to be forwarded 

 to the English markets." 



Distinctive Characteristics. Though Galloways are 

 now polled and of a black colour, with a brownish tinge on 

 the tips of the hair, particularly at that stage when it is long 

 and inclined to be somewhat woolly, yet, Youatt says, as late 

 as the middle of the eighteenth century, many animals of pure 

 blood had horns of considerable length, and not a few were 

 red-brown in colour. These characters every rarely appear in 

 pure-bred specimens, but the horns are loose scurs. White 

 patches on the udder and belly or thigh, also belted markings, 

 or a white hind foot, are not uncommon, and are seriously 

 objected to for export purposes only when they are 

 large or prominent. This tendency to revert to white, 

 which is most pronounced when two animals of very distinct 

 types are mated together, indicates the descent from the 

 ancient wild cattle, a condition similar to that already 



