CATTLE IN SCOTLAND 55 



Forest may have been direct descendants of the Urus, 

 though the weight of evidence seems to show that their 

 relationship is more distant, and that they are rather the 

 offspring, which have run wild, of a breed domesticated from 

 the Urus. Whether or not the blood of the indigenous cattle 

 of Scotland may still linger in direct lineage in our modern 

 stock through cross-breeding with the Celtic Shorthorn, it 

 is generally allowed that the Urus, domesticated perhaps 

 on the plains of Europe, is the ancestral form of the larger 

 breeds of cattle in Britain at the present day. 



THE EARLIEST DOMESTICATED CATTLE OF SCOTLAND THE 

 CELTIC SHORTHORN 



Not until the Ice Age had passed away did there appear 

 on the plains of Europe a small race of cattle which formed 

 the nucleus of the earliest domesticated breed. There is 

 no evidence that this small race, the Longfronted Ox, or, 

 as it is commonly called, the Celtic Shorthorn (Bos taitrus 

 longifrons], existed in Scotland at any period before the 

 time of man's arrival. Its remains have been found in river 

 gravel of doubtful age, near Currie at the northern end of 

 the Pentland Hills, and in 1870 there' were discovered 

 bones of several of these oxen, which, before cities and 

 villages were dreamt of, had been entrapped and engulfed 

 in the shell-marl of the Nor' Loch which formerly lay in the 

 hollow now occupied by the Princes Street Gardens, 

 Edinburgh. Even in the later peat deposits remains are 

 exceedingly scanty, though they are distributed in bogs from 

 Roxburghshire to Ross. Indeed, in Scotland the history of 

 the Celtic Shorthorn traces a course exactly the reverse of 

 that of the Great Wild Ox, for while the latter is abundantly 

 represented in the early deposits and decreases with the 

 coming of man until it disappears, the former is absent from 

 the early deposits and increases with the spread of Neolithic 

 man until it occurs throughout the length and breadth of the 

 land. 



The Celtic Shorthorn does not appear to have been 

 known to the earliest settlers in Scotland, who, as we have 

 seen, left traces of no domestic animals, yet it appears in 

 the deposits of very early Neolithic times. Horns character- 

 istic of the Celtic Shorthorn were discovered in 1816 near' 



