What rams get up to

In November there's a special glint in the eye of a Blackface ram - once you can find a way to meet its gaze through those massive spirals of horn. Years ago, I wrote of a neighbour's autumn rams that they had "curly-haired bollocks, plump as wineskins" and found the image censored. Times have changed, but I shall stick to "tupping" as a tasteful term for what the rams are up to with the ewes in the fields around.

It is harder now to revive my original bucolic enthusiasm about sheep, having chronicled their mass devastation of so many western hillsides. But the overgrazing has scarcely been their fault, and, kept to some sensible balance with peatland vegetation, the Blackface may still have a place in the ecology of the hills. Of all the animals in Irish farming, it seems the best-adapted to a half-way-natural mode of life.

Certainly the ram of the breed, with its rough, spiky mane and wary stance, its readiness to battle for sole rights to the harem, gives the feel of close descent from the wild Asiatic mouflon, the ancestor of all domestic sheep. Kurdistan seems a likely point of origin, around 9000 B.C. From there, migration with pastoralist herders brought sheep as far as the Pyrenees, then to upland England in medieval times, and a slow spread northward to the Borders.

With selection over many millennia, the dark, coarse fleece of the mouflon was changed to softer, paler wools good for dyeing. But the animal's mountain hardiness and weather-repellent coat were a continuing asset for the Blackface. By the mid-1700s, its type was spreading through the Scottish Highlands and the first flocks were planted in the north-east of Ulster. An early introduction to the west of Ireland was on the mountains behind me in Mayo - Mweelrea and the Sheeffrys - in about 1850, when a Scottish rancher, Captain Boswell Houston, sent flocks of Scottish "hornies" thronging out along the skyline. At one shearing, his Scottish shepherds marked 23,000 animals.

The sheep the local people had then were probably the native Cladore (cladoir: of the shore), a small, fine-boned animal nourished substantially on seaweed. Their appearance is echoed in the lean Soay sheep, descended from a feral flock on an island in the St Kilda group, furthermost of the Outer Hebrides, and a favourite today with the guardians of rare breeds. But how far back do domesticated animals go in Ireland? I wrote recently about the radiocarbon dating of fossil bones of extinct Irish mammals - woolly mammoth, giant deer and so on - by the Irish Quaternary Fauna Project, led by Prof Peter Woodman, the UCC archaeologist. Another part of the project has dated bones from man's early animal companions.

It was accepted by Ireland's prehistoric archaeologists that only the domesticated dog occurs earlier than the Neolithic, one certain dog bone being found at Mount Sandel, Coleraine, a settlement of Mesolithic hunters. Sheep and cattle have usually been associated with the beginnings of Neolithic farming. A sheep-bone from a midden on Dalkey Island, for example, has been dated to 5,050 years ago.

A long shaft of limb-bone from a shell midden at Sutton, on Dublin Bay, however, has, as Professor Woodman puts it, "presented a conundrum". Identified originally as a cattle bone, it dates to some 6,500 years ago, a time when domesticated cattle did not exist in western Europe. And their precursor, the aurochs or wild ox, Bos primigenius, seems never to have reached Ireland from Britain. The shank of fossil bone may eventually be allotted to a bear or even a red deer.

Otherwise, the earliest domesticated cattle bones were found in 1992 beneath 4 metres of sand at Ferriter's Cove in Co Kerry. Dated at about 5,500 years ago they suggest, in Woodman's cautious estimate, "that Late Mesolithic communities had some knowledge of domesticated animals".

The wild pig appears in the bone records at more than 8,000 years ago, so that was a ready candidate for domestication. Wild horses were numerous enough 28,000 years ago, before the last peak of ice, to leave the bones of half-a-dozen animals in the mouth of a large cave at Shandon, but they mysteriously failed to recolonise Ireland after the glaciers retreated. There is no evidence, as yet, of the horse occurring in Ireland again before about 2,000 BC (at Newgrange) and even then its bones were few.

AFTER the minimal evidence of bones from caves and archaeological digs, the story of Ireland's domesticated animals comes to life more fully in early Irish documents. Law texts from the 7th and 8th centuries enabled Dr Fergus Kelly to write his wonderfully informative book, Early Irish Farming, published by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in 1997.

Here we learn, for example, that Ireland's early sheep were not, in general, viewed as animals of the hills, and that much more value was placed on their fleece and skin than on their meat, even though selection had still not produced many white fleeces. The Old Irish term for shepherd, augaire, had the basic meaning of "sheepcaller". He led, rather than drove, his flock, which learned to follow his special call, and the dog's job was to protect the sheep rather than to round them up.

In nearly all species of mammal, domestication leads initially to a much smaller animal. The consensus among chaeologists is that early Irish cattle were similar in size and build to the modern Kerry cattle and the early texts agree that they were "black as a blackbird".

It is salutary to note that experiments today in the Killarney National Park seem to show that Kerry and Kerry-cross cattle are far more compatible with our mountains than flocks of Blackface sheep.