Agricultural History Review, Volume 70 Part 2 (2022), pp. 269–292

The ‘St Kilda sheep’ kept in British landscape parks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries belonged to a race of primitive northern short-tails, probably dating back to the Iron Age. Exported from St Kilda in the mid-nineteenth century, they were bred to black by a coterie of rich and aristocratic owners, as the St Kilda name was becoming increasingly fashionable. From the 1880s, after the greater antiquity of ‘Bronze Age’ Soay sheep came to be recognized, authorities questioned the racial integrity of the St Kildas. Denying their specific provenance, they renamed them Hebrideans. The last part of this article discusses the selection pressures and modes of ‘management’ of St Kilda sheep on their native island. It is suggested that, in the Iron Age, sheep may have looked less like Soays, and more like St Kildas before they were bred to black, or perhaps Borerays. 

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