Forrest: British ' Wild' Cattle. 



363 



The onh' trace of Highland ancestry noticeable in the 

 Vaynol cattle is a certain shagginess about the forehead, and a 

 sturdy look about the limbs, especially the forelegs. 



The fact that all white Park Cattle exhibit a tendency to 

 drop black calves occasionally, indicates that the ancestral 

 stock was black. On the other hand, as showing the tendency 

 of cattle generally to produce white calves occasionally, I may 

 mention that, at the time of writing, amongst a lot of ' mongrel ' 

 cattle in a field near my house are three cows of a pure creamy 

 white ; the rest are red and whit-€. 



I append an extract from Pennant's ' History of Quad- 

 rupeds ' (17Q3. T. 17), interesting to North-countrymen for its 

 local allusions and quaint diction. Of the cattle at Drumlanrig 

 and Chillingham he writes thus : — ' That amiable and worthy 

 man, my respected friend, the late Marmaduke Tunstall, Esq., 

 of Wycliff, Yorkshire, collected several curious particulars 

 respecting this rare breed, which are published in 1790 in a 

 general Historj^ of Quadrupeds, illustrated with wooden [szV r\ 

 plates, cut with uncommon neatness by Thomas Bewick, of 

 Newcastle-upon-Tyne. His ingenuity deserves every encourage- 

 ment, as his essay is the first attempt to revive with any success 

 that long disused art which was first begun about the year 

 1448. 1 take the liberty of inserting here a more ample account 

 of the Bisontes Scotici extracted from p. 2'S of that little elegant 

 work.' Then follow two pages of desoiptions of the cattle, 

 concluding thus : — ' Those at Burton Constable, in the County 

 of York, were all destroyed by a distemper a few years since. 

 They varied slightly from those at Chillingham., having black 

 ears and muzzles, and the tips of their tails of the same colour. 

 They were also much larger, many of them weighing sixty 

 stone, probably owing to the richness of the pasturage in Holder- 

 ness, but generally attributed to the difference of kind 

 between those with black and with red ears, the former of which 

 they studiously endeavoured to preserve. The breed which was 

 at Drumlanrig in Scotland also had black ear*^. ' 



I may remark that even in the Chillingham cattle the colour 

 of the ears has not always been constant. At one time many 

 of them had black ears. Uniformity was obtained only by 

 killing all those of the wrong colour. 



Local tradition avers that wild cattle formerly inhabited 

 the unenclosed moorland hill district called the Mynydd Bach 

 in mid-Cardiganshire. They were killed by being driven from 



1908 October i. 



