Crossing of sheep offers hair instead of wool

ANOTHER LIFE:BY ARRANGEMENT with the rams, yeaning comes late on this side of the hill – we wait to be sure of the spring.

To "yean" (this for decultured Dubs) is to give birth to a lamb (archaic, says my Concise Oxford Dictionarysnootily, from Middle English, perhaps representing an Old English verb related to eanian, "to lamb"). And the lamb's mother is a "yo" (no lift of the hand necessary necessary).

There they lie in the sun, two ewes with single lambs prostrate beside them, soaking up warmth instead of the rain and wind that lashed them all the previous day. Clumps of the surrounding rushes are still bleached blond and brassy, but the frame through which I watch them, a gap in the hawthorn hedge, already sings with green.

Blackface sheep were made for rough weather, their fleece a tough thatch of coarse “kempy” fibres, greasy with lanolin. After heavy rain, the wool hangs in vertical folds, like our runnelled Connacht hillsides, but there’s dry, curly warmth next to the skin. There’s something fitting in the hope that wool, rather than polystyrene in all its indestructible forms, will come to be the natural insulation of our homes.

In the warmer, even wetter winters of climate change, the rain-proofing of the Blackface could be tested even further, but it has had to adapt (if perhaps not so quickly) to a good many changes in a long and circuitous journey from somewhere in Central Asia, probably Kurdistan. From there, a vast migration with pastoralist herders took the breed as far as the Pyrenees, then on to upland England in medieval times, with a slow spread north to the Scottish Borders.

By the mid-1700s the Blackface was climbing through the Highlands and becoming synonymous with Scotland. The first flocks in Ireland came with Scottish planters to Ulster and eventually spread west to Donegal.

One of the first introductions to the west of Ireland was to the mountains behind me, Mweelrea and the Sheeffrys, in about 1850. The local Mayo sheep then were probably the native Cladore ( cladoir, of the shore), a small animal nourished substantially on seaweed. Today it is the Blackface that browse the dark wrack on the calm inner shores of Killary Harbour.

The breed has needed its heavy insulation – never more so than during this winter – but it, too, will moult its old fleece in summer if left alone, shredding most of it off on briars and thorns: a sorry sight. The farmer’s main concern in shearing is to reduce the risk of attack by blow-flies (don’t ask) and of the sheep being “cast” on its back in a hollow by the weight of the fleece.

Synthetic fibres for clothes took the proper value out of wool, but coarse Blackface fleeces always fetched low prices: half the Irish crop ends up in China’s carpet factories. In years past, a big lorry used to pull up near our gate and a red-painted weighing machine was set up at the side of the road. The townland’s sheep farmers came from all sides, their trailers stuffed with huge, bulging woolpacks. Even then, the price had been stuck for years at derisory levels.

Today, a Mayo farmer may be paid as little as 50 cent for a fleece that a contractor charged €2.50 or more to shear. This is a legacy, perhaps, of the years of “Tiger” construction, in which well-earning part-time farmers could afford such rates for the job. In Co Antrim, at another scale, a farmer with more than 2,000 ewes on high ground is crossing Blackface with Wiltshire Horn, a sheep with hair instead of wool, that needs no shearing or dipping and moults naturally in spring. A Wiltshire ram on a Blackface ewe, by report, will produce about one-third of lambs with hair.

To what extent wool for house insulation – such a simple, logical use – will create a more satisfying price remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, there’s always the good idea. A farming family, the Kissanes, at Moll’s Gap in Co Kerry’s Black Valley, with 1,000 Blackface sheep on the hills, have a website inviting people to help save the hill-farming heritage by “adopting” one of the ewes for €45 a year, to cover the costs of winter feed and medicine. You can give the sheep a name and get a certificate with its tag number, and for €75 you get visiting rights. Hundreds of people, it seems, have responded.

Or there’s been the offer on eBay of 500g packs of Blackface wool from Scotland’s “semi-wild” Highland sheep for €4.74 (with twice that for postage). This offer was aimed at home enthusiasts, who use the wool for rug-making and other domestic arts and crafts. (They might like to know about the old do-it-yourself way with making blankets: the whole family trample the wool barefoot, with a periodic sprinkling of urine to help the felting process.)

Some 400 people responded to the offer, nearly all of them German, Dutch or American.

Eye on nature

I awoke to the sight of a stunningly beautiful cock-pheasant strutting his stuff in the early morning sunshine, on a heathery tussock, just 50 metres from our front door. The exotic plumage, the piercing eyes and sharp yellow beak on his proud red head, the totally decadent shades of purple, orange, blue, black, gold and white on his neck and wings contrasted with the dull dun of the still-hibernating bog.

His mating call, akin to a rusty gate on a windy night, was a sure sign that spring has finally come.

Brian Nolan, Barna, Co Galway

Over the past couple of months, and for the first time ever, we have had regular visits to our garden of blackcaps, both male and female. Have we just got lucky or is their presence a result of the severe winter?

Barry McConville, Dublin, 18

Although usually summer visitors a small number of blackcaps, believed to be autumn immigrants, winter in Ireland mainly in the east of the country. Their number increases in severe winters.

A sparrowhawk has been raiding my garden for several weeks. After initial ambivalence, I welcomed his occasional forays. Today he crashed into my kitchen window, killing himself instantly. Guiltily, I have removed my window-mounted feeder.

Gerry McCarthy, Ballinasloe, Co Galway

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo. E-mail: viney@anu.ie. Include a postal address.