It's Time To Go Primitive

The hardy, multi-talented sheep from the Scottish isles, whose wool once kept royal legs warm, are coming into their own again as their conservation credentials and flavoursome, lean meat are being rediscovered. Kate Green reports

- Kate Green

IN 1791, Sir Joseph Banks wrote to Scottish agriculturalist and statistician Sir John Sinclair requesting a lifetime’s supply of hosiery made from the wool of Shetland sheep: ‘Since I have had the Gout I have dealt much in warm Stockings. Pray buy me a good Lot.’

Banks famously brought back to England a kangaroo skin and numerous exotic plants; what is less well known is that he was charged by George III to produce a sheep that could compete against the Spanish Merino in the crucial currency of wool— a challenge, given that Charles of Spain had banned the export of his valuable sheep.

At the same time that Banks was smuggling Merinos through Portugal and France, he was being pestered by Sinclair, who proclaimed that Shetland wool was ‘perhaps the completest article of the kind in the universe, possessing at the same time, the gloss and softness of silk, the strength of cotton, the whiteness of linen and the warmth of wool’.

Banks stalled, demanding proof of wool free of coarse stichel hairs, and Sinclair, who had started a society to improve British wool, eventually came round to the merits of the contraband Merinos and bought thousands of them; a paper by American sheep breeder George Benedict suggests that today’s single-coated Shetlands may be the result of their subsequent experiments.

How pleased would Sinclair be, therefore, to hear that his beloved Shetland, like the Hebridean, is no longer of concern on the Rare Breed Survival Trust’s (RBST) watchlist; primitive sheep are back in fashion as lightfooted, grass-fed livestock are deemed key to achieving net-zero emissions in UK agriculture (Town & Country, July 17).