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@Jacqui
These sheep are a cross breed of Saxon Merino and Shetland. Starting in early 80s, it took the Macaulay Institute of Scotland 20 odd years to stabilise the breed. The ambition was to capture the brilliant fibre of the Saxon Merino with the hardy, wild instincts of the Shetland.
The finished Bowmont sheep is roughly 75% of the former and 25% the latter. It was intended to give the Scottish
hill farmers another type of sheep with increased value coming from the very fine wool. Unfortunately there was not
enough demand within the market place and the project was eventually given up.
The Bowmont flocks that had been bred were sold on with flocks still existing in Scotland, Wales and Devon.
Unfortunately many of the flocks that were sold have been either slaughtered or crossbred with Shetlands, thereby thus losing their pure Bowmont fibre quality.
It turns out that Lesley - the North Devon fibre fanatic – has now collected all the remaining pure Bowmonts and is the
only one to be breeding pure Bowmont; this was as the Macaulay institute had originally planned (her best ram has
been clocked at 15.8 microns). We are currently looking to trademark the breed in some way so that other people with
remnants of the breed can not claim to have purer Bowmont and dilute the true quality of the wool with there sub
quality sheep and fleece.
So Finisterre and Lesley are in bed together and hopefully with our market clout and passion for the project we can establish the breed over the coming years and hopefully a sustainable market for the wool. If successful, we might have saved and nurtured back to health what might become the next big UK breed of the century. What’s more it will be the finest wool sheep breed within Europe only being challenged by the assortment of Merino types around the world. The majority of these can be found with our antipodean cousins and the remainder owned in South America.