40 THE DOMESTICATION OF ANIMALS 



wool grown in Scotland at the present time," though its 

 shortness makes it difficult to spin alone. The fleece is a 

 uniform pale brown or fawn instead of the patchy foxey-red 

 of the Mouflon, though Soay lambs still retain th^ ancestral 

 tint. Thus slight are the changes wrought on the characters 

 of the wild stock by an early stage in domestication, as shown 

 by Scotland's unique inheritance on the island of Soay. 



THE PEAT OR TURBARY SHEEP OF SHETLAND 



As Soay sheep represent, in the main, the influence 

 of Mouflon ancestry, so the rare examples of Peat Sheep, 

 which till recently occurred in Shetland, and which rank with 

 them as survivors of one of the two earliest domesticated 

 races of sheep, show the predominance of Urial blood. 



Of the two races, the Turbary or Peat Sheep (Fig. 7, 

 p. 42), with long slender limbs and erect goat-like horns in the 

 ewes, is the older, at least as regards central and north- 

 western Europe, for Professor Ewart has stated that the 

 Neolithic peoples of these parts seem to have had no other 

 domestic breed. 



In Scotland sheep bones occur in kitchen-middens asso- 

 ciated with dressed flints, and these bones, in the few cases 

 where they have been carefully examined, have been found 

 to belong to a "slender-legged variety." Bones of sheep 

 have also been found in the Neolithic chambered cairns of 

 Orkney; and in Caithness in similar structures there have 

 occurred remains attributed to " sheep or goat " a natural 

 alternative on the part of the excavator, if, as I suspect, he 

 had observed skulls bearing the erect goat-like horn-cores 

 which are typical of the " Turbary " race of sheep. There 

 is ground for believing, therefore, that even in Neolithic 

 times the Turbary or Peat Sheep (Ovis aries palustris] was 

 widely distributed in Scotland. 



In most of the excavated sites of later ages in Scotland, 

 these slender-limbed, goat-horned sheep have been repre- 

 sented. They occur in lake-dwellings or crannogs of Bronze 

 and subsequent periods, in underground "Eird" or "Picts"' 

 houses, in Roman camps, in hill-forts and in the brochs in- 

 habited well into the early centuries of our era. Probably 

 they contributed largely to the great flocks of small dun- 



