II. I 



SHEEP IN SCOTLAND 



ALTHOUH a large-horned wild sheep (Ovis savini] was a 

 native of Eastern England in the early days of the Great 

 Ice Age, no remains of sheep have been found in the inter- 

 glacial deposits of Scotland, nor in the post-glacial beds 

 of clay, marl mosses and peat-hags which were formed 

 ere Neolithic man reached the northern confines of Britain. 

 This absence of remains may in part be accounted for by the 

 fact that sheep in a wild state prefer rocky fastnesses, and 

 are little likely to have been entrapped in the bogs which 

 yield so many skeletons of deer and wild oxen ; but so far as 

 fossil evidence goes, it seems probable that sheep were absent 

 from the host of animals which invaded Scotland when the 

 ice-fields of the Pleistocene Age disappeared, and were 

 unknown in the country until they were introduced by 

 herdsmen of Neolithic culture. Nevertheless the sheep of 

 Scotland present so many interesting and unique features, 

 and have been, even since the Middle Ages, so famous for 

 their wool, that, as Bishop Leslie said of them in the sixteenth 

 century, they may "nocht be slipit over with silence." 



The uniqueness of Scottish sheep lies in that in the 

 small compass of our northern kingdom there survive two 

 forms of outstanding interest types of the earliest known 

 domesticated stocks. In other countries these early races 

 have disappeared owing to improvement and continued cross- 

 breeding, so that the modern breeds give only the vaguest 

 hints as to their wild ancestors. But in the fastnesses of 

 Scotland, in the uninhabited isle of Soay in the North 

 Atlantic, and in the isolated Shetlands, there still exist two 

 breeds which are living links with the past that in the former 

 being a close relative of the Wild Mouflon of Corsica and 

 Sardinia, that in the latter representing the domesticated 

 "peat sheep" which the Neolithic peoples made familiar over 

 the greater part of Europe. 



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