A Shepherds Life | Page 5

wide
Wiltshire sky. As a naturalist I must also lament the loss of the old
Wiltshire breed of sheep, although so long gone. Once it was the only
breed known in Wilts, and extended over the entire county; it was a big
animal, the largest of the fine-woolled sheep in England, but for looks
it certainly compared badly with modern downland breeds and
possessed, it was said, all the points which the breeder, or improver,
was against. Thus, its head was big and clumsy, with a round nose, its
legs were long and thick, its belly without wool, and both sexes were
horned. Horns, even in a ram, are an abomination to the modern
sheep-farmer in Southern England. Finally, it was hard to fatten. On the
other hand it was a sheep which had been from of old on the bare open
downs and was modified to suit the conditions, the scanty feed, the
bleak, bare country, and the long distances it had to travel to and from
the pasture ground. It was a strong, healthy, intelligent animal, in
appearance and character like the old original breed of sheep on the
pampas of South America, which I knew as a boy, a coarse-woolled
sheep with naked belly, tall and hardy, a greatly modified variety of the
sheep introduced by the Spanish colonist three centuries ago. At all
events the old Wiltshire sheep had its merits, and when the Southdown
breed was introduced during the late eighteenth century the farmer
viewed it with disfavour; they liked their old native animal, and did not
want to lose it. But it had to go in time, just as in later times the
Southdown had to go when the Hampshire Down took its place--the
breed which is now universal, in South Wilts at all events.
A solitary flock of the pure-bred old Wiltshire sheep existed in the
county as late as 1840, but the breed has now so entirely disappeared
from the country that you find many shepherds who have never even
heard of it. Not many days ago I met with a curious instance of this
ignorance of the past. I was talking to a shepherd, a fine intelligent
fellow, keenly interested in the subjects of sheep and sheep-dogs, on
the high down above the village of Broad Chalk on the Ebble, and he
told me that his dog was of mixed breed, but on its mother's side came

from a Welsh sheep-dog, that his father had always had the Welsh dog,
once common in Wiltshire, and he wondered why it had gone out as it
was so good an animal. This led me to say something about the old
sheep having gone out too, and as he had never heard of the old breed I
described the animal to him.
What I told him, he said, explained something which had been a puzzle
to him for some years. There was a deep hollow in the down near the
spot where we were standing, and at the bottom he said there was an
old well which had been used in former times to water the sheep, but
masses of earth had fallen down from the sides, and in that condition it
had remained for no one knew how long--perhaps fifty, perhaps a
hundred years. Some years ago it came into his master's head to have
this old well cleaned out, and this was done with a good deal of labour,
the sides having first been boarded over to make it safe for the
workmen below. At the bottom of the well a vast store of rams' horns
was discovered and brought out; and it was a mystery to the fanner and
the men how so large a number of sheep's horns had been got together;
for rams are few and do not die often, and here there were hundreds of
horns. He understood it now, for if all the sheep, ewes as well as rams,
were horned in the old breed, a collection like this might easily have
been made.
The greatest change of the last hundred years is no doubt that which the
plough has wrought in the aspect of the downs. There is a certain
pleasure to the eye in the wide fields of golden corn, especially of
wheat, in July and August; but a ploughed down is a down made ugly,
and it strikes one as a mistake, even from a purely economic point of
view, that this old rich turf, the slow product of centuries, should be
ruined for ever as sheep-pasture when so great an extent of uncultivated
land exists elsewhere, especially the heavy clays of the Midlands, better
suited for corn. The effect of breaking up the turf on the high downs is
often disastrous; the thin soil