NORTH RONALDSAY SHEEP: Fairly small, short-tailed and with variable fleece colour, these sheep are confined to the beach and foreshore by a sheep-dyke built around the Orkney island in 1832. Their diet, apart from the ewes at lam
bing time, consists almost entirely of seaweed, especially plentiful in winter when gales uproot tangles of laminaria from their moorings. The sheep's digestive systems have evolved to utilise the sugars in the weed.
MAILIE: Mailie was owned by Burns, his "only pet yowe". She died in a ditch after entanglement in her tether. In The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie, the fading ewe asks the herder Hughoc to tell the Bard of her death and pleads for her lambs to be cared for. This was followed by Poor Mailie's Elegy: "A friend mair faithfu' ne'er cam nigh him". The poems are both ludicrous and dignified, preposterous and poignant.
ISLAND OF SHEEP: Fifth and last of John Buchan's thrillers, featuring Richard Hannay, hero of The Thirty-Nine Steps. The climax takes place on the Island of Sheep in the Norlands, a fictionalised Faroes. The novel, like other later Buchan works, is concerned with the search for an earthly paradise, a place where man is safe and feels he belongs. What better than a Ewetopia?
WILLIAM HOGG: A hogg is an unshorn yearling sheep. William Hogg, author of The Private Confessions and Memoirs of a Justified Sinner, was a shepherd by profession. In 1807 he wrote The Shepherd's Guide, being a Practical Treatise on the Diseases of Sheep, where you learn how to deal with braxy, and staggers and how to geld a sheep by biting off its testicles.
The full article contains 361 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
