Imagine in your mind’s eye a quintessential rural Scottish landscape. What do you see? I’d wager that high, craggy peaks loom over it, and perhaps a cascading burn runs along the dappled floor of a glen. Heather colours the foreground, and on upon a distant hillside the outline of a kilted figure tends his flock – that flock, of course, being sheep.
So engrained are sheep in the classic imagery of Scotland that it is hard to imagine the place without them. Yet, it wasn’t always so. This is the story of how sheep conquered Scotland. The very first sheep to graze on Scottish grass arrived in the Neolithic, roughly 4,100-2,500BC. They came with a new type of people – farmers – who also brought new styles of pottery and created permanent settlements. Their sheep were much smaller than those of today, often described as ‘dog-like’ and with dark brown-black wool and large horns. A living relic of these Neolithic sheep survives in the Soay breed still found in St Kilda. In fact, when the Norse arrived in St Kilda they called Hirta, the largest island in the archipelago, Saudaey, meaning ‘Island of the Sheep’.
The very first large-scale sheep farms in Scotland emerged in the late thirteenth century AD from what at first may seem an unlikely source – monks and their abbeys. The enterprising monks of Melrose Abbey in the Scottish Borders acquired parcels of land throughout the south of Scotland and used much of them as pasture. In the 1280s their flock was 13,000 strong, the largest in the country by far. The monks’ logic was that by accumulating wealth they could better serve God’s will – a slippery slope if ever there was one.
While the monks may have increased their numbers, sheep remained very marginal to the Highland economy until well into modernity. The quantities of wool and mutton each provided was very modest. Far more important were black cattle, which stood at the centre of rural life, economy, and food production. There was no sheep equivalent in scale to the trysts, where tens of thousands of cattle were guided south from the Highlands to the bustling market towns of Crieff and Falkirk.
Evermore sheep
The levees broke with the introduction of the Blackface breed in the eighteenth century. Their yields were far higher than the native sheep, and their hardiness helped them endure life in the marginal uplands. Landowners soon realised that they could profit far more from flocks of Blackface sheep than they could from rent-paying tenants. This profit motive, along with the violent de-peopling of the Highlands in the wake of the Battle of Culloden, gave rise to the countryside we see throughout much of Scotland today – relatively few people where once there were many, a handful of large farms where once there were dozens of smallholdings, and sheep galore where once there were black cattle.
From the 1790s onwards the Blackface sheep were, in turn, usurped by the kings of modern pastures – the Cheviot breed. Both breeds were known to the Gaels as Na Caoraich Mora, ‘the big sheep’. It was not just their size that was big, but their appetites and demands for land. Their need for access to low-lying ground during winter pushed out the black cattle which once vastly outnumbered them. Cheviot sheep especially require far more ground for grazing than their predecessors, leading to an economy of scale: large landowners reared large flocks, while small and middling landowners were squeezed out. Immense amounts of capital were required for large-scale sheep farming, and the industry remains heavily subsidised to this day.
It is no exaggeration to say that Cheviot sheep changed both the landscapes and culture of Scotland. For example, from the 1770s the Marquis of Breadalbane in Perthshire, one of the largest and wealthiest landowners in Scotland, mass-converted his deer forests into sheep farms. Not only were the new, southern breeds of sheep introduced, but so too were new, southern farmhands, many of them coming from Scots and English-speaking areas like the Lothians into an area which was otherwise almost universally Gaelic-speaking.
A linguistic gulf emerged between those tending to the laird’s sheep and the majority of people living on their estates. When clearances were enacted, these Lowland managers had little sympathy for the Gaels they evicted to make way for evermore sheep. This was also the case on the lands of the 1st Duke of Sutherland, whose clearances were notoriously brutal.
Year of the Sheep
The Gaels fought back as best they could. 1792 was Bliadhna Nan Caorach, the ‘Year of the Sheep’. Skyrocketing wool prices, partially driven by demand for clothing for the millions of enslaved people in the Caribbean labouring and dying under Scottish whips, accelerated landowners’ clearance efforts. Armed insurrections emerged across the Highlands and Islands, notably in Easter Ross, Skye, and the Outer Hebrides. On several occasions, impoverished tenant farmers fought bodily against squads of police sent to quash them.
One of the best and latest examples of resistance was in Barra and Vatersay. In 1835 all the people living in Vatersay and the Bishop’s Isles to the south were evicted on the order of General Gordon of Cluny explicitly to make way for sheep farms. Lady Gordon Cathcart, Barra and Vatersay’s callous and absentee landlord, consolidated all of Vatersay into a single sheep farm. This spurred on the ‘Vatersay Raiders’, who landed in Vatersay from Barra to resettle cleared settlements and establish new ones. Their court case, heard in Edinburgh, was ultimately victorious, though many in the Tory press fomented hostility towards them.
The reality is that the landscape you see in much of Scotland today, of sprawling fields surrounding a single farmhouse and hundreds of sheep grazing all throughout, has only existed for a little over two centuries. Before, the countryside was far more populous and patchwork, with smoke from farmtouns and homesteads rising up at every turn and the land itself absent of many of the hedges and enclosures that now parcel it out. Far more than any conquering army or ambitious king, sheep transformed the very face and character of Scotland.
Two starkly opposed quotes speak to how sheep are viewed, and by whom. Inside the inn in Kenmore on the Marquis of Breadalbane’s estate, Robert Burns scribbled a poem waxing lyrical about the romance of the countryside:
“Admiring Nature I her wildest grace,
These northern scenes with weary feet I trace;
O’er many a winding dale and painful step,
Th’ abodes of covey’d grouse and timid sheep”
To Burns, sheep were synonymous with the land and ranked among the prize possessions of the aristocracy alongside grouse. For Ian MacCodrum, a Gaelic-speaking Highlander who watched his people be drained away, sheep had a very different legacy. In his poem Òran do na Fògarraich (A Song to the Exiles), he lamented:
“It’s sad to reflect
How the land’s being enslaved –
Our people suddenly went
And sheep came in their place”
Text and photos: David C. Weinczok