Bog Myrtle & Peat

Take a tough, thrifty hill ewe and run it with a big, productive leicester tup. The resulting crossbred lambs are called mules, and they represent the best of both worlds. They’re sensible and canny like their mothers, but they’re also big and productive enough to work with more commercial breeds.

The word “mule” carries connotations not only of stubbornness but also infertility – after all, the cross between a horse and a donkey is the most famous mule of all, and these animals are generally barren or blank. In sheep, mules are actually produced for their breeding potential – because while horses and donkeys are different species, all breeds of sheep are derived from the same ancestors. There’s no species-jump in the production of mule sheep, and nothing to inhibit the productive viability of their offspring. In fact, their viability is heightened by the cross, and it feels like the word “mule” actually refers to that first generation mixture which produces an extraordinary degree of hybrid vigour. 

Here in the middle third of Britain, mules represent a fantastic compromise between the hard north and the rosy south. They’re more productive than highland blackfaces, but they’re easier to manage than sleek, high maintenance lowlanders like suffolks and texels. It’s possible to keep a number of different sheep breeds in a county as diverse as Galloway; there are blackface sheep in the hills and beltex on the low ground, but on a national scale, we’re well placed to access both ends of a much bigger spectrum which runs from the slender north to the chubby south. In traditional terms, we’ve produced and sold a tremendous number of mule sheep in the south west of Scotland over the years, and those animals are an export we can be proud of – the females go on to make great mothers, and the males produce fat lamb for southern tables.

I needed sheep, but much as I love the curly old horns of my childhood, the best of my grazing is too good for purebred blackfaces. Almost without exception, my farming neighbours produce mules – so I decided to follow them. But I couldn’t resist a tweak of idiosyncracy in the mix, because mules come in all shapes and sizes according to local preference and availability. There are welsh mules, north country mules and scotch mules, and a range of different types and kinds to play with. Most mules are just variations on the same and central theme; hill ewe to blue-faced leicester tup – but this wasn’t always the case.

Even if you’re used to seeing sheep on your travels, blue-faced leicesters stand out like sore thumbs. They look more like camels than sheep, and at the market their stringy wool is  trimmed to accentuate points of desirability and style. But to my eye, these adjustments simply heighten the ugliness of the animal, giving them long necks and gross, ungainly arses. Their noses curve outwards in a bulge, but the effect falls short of aquiline dignity. Instead, the expression is one of sad, ponderous inefficacy, like an ovine rendition of Mervyn Peake’s Lord Sepulchrave. In fact, that’s precisely how I imagine the blue-faced leicester’s perpetual mental state; weary, morbid and bleakly sullen. As if to confirm this casting, blue-faced leicesters have an extraordinary reputation for dying. And even their deaths lack drama or intrigue; they don’t contract lurid or exciting diseases, and they lack the imagination to die by misadventure. They just turn up dead, often for no discernible reason at all. Perhaps they are more productive than other strains of leicester sheep, but I find it hard to see how that would outweigh the disadvantages of a breed which, even if it could speak, would only sigh.   

Fashions change, and if blue-faced leicesters are the standard tup in Galloway these days, they’ve only ridden a recent rise to prominence. Before blue-faced leicesters, the go-to tup of choice was the border leicester, and now you’re really talking tups. Since these animals fell out of fashion, they’ve largely disappeared from fields and farms across the county – but once seen, they’re never forgotten. White-faced and saucy, border leicesters are famous for their extraordinarily tall and expressive ears. They’re more like a hare’s ears than anything you’d expect to find on a sheep, and they’re forever flexing and turning those lugs in a confusion of fresh and expressive angles. Heavy, strong and powerful beasts, border leicesters drove the production of mule sheep for generations in this part of the world. When crossed with blackface sheep, the resulting lambs are called “greyface” mules, and these are what I’m after now. 

There’s a degree of obstinacy here in my decision to push against contemporary fashion. But in this (as in so many areas of my life), I’ve been presented with an opportunity to kick against the pricks – and given that I only want these sheep to eat ragwort and contribute towards the management of certain wader habitats, the margin I’ll lose by choosing border over blue-faced is so fine that it doesn’t matter. And it’s also worth noting that in all this talk of leicesters, it sounds like I’ve gone south, away from my native cattle and all the connotations of home. Border leicesters are thought to have originated in Northumberland, and they’re a good northern breed, notwithstanding their name. But there’s a point of order here that should not escape the detail of this blog. They’re called leicesters, right enough – but nobody in Galloway could look themselves in the eye using a standard English pronunciation. They’re not LESSters. They’re LEEsters.

Twenty blackface ewes came down to me from Crawfordjohn last month, and a border leicester tup followed them soon afterwards from a farm near Carluke. They’ve been kept apart these last few weeks, but now they’ve been cast together. Expect my first greyface lambs on the Fool’s Day, April 1^st.

Photo – my new border leicester tup, newly arrived and anxious to work.