Transcript for

Episode 70: Breed Spotlight—North Ronaldsay 

You’re listening to The Sheepspot Podcast, a show for handspinners about making yarn we love.

Hello there, my darling Sheepspotters! Welcome to episode 70 of The Sheepspot Podcast. 

I’m Sasha, from sheepspot.com, where we are laser-focused on helping you make yarns you love, with beautiful fibers and top-notch instruction. 
Have you ever heard of sheep that survive on seaweed? Believe it or not, there are such sheep, and I’m going to tell you all about them today.

As I’ve been writing this podcast, it’s been hard to decide exactly when this story started. In some ways, it started 6000 years ago, when neolithic peoples began moving the ancestors of the sheep we now know as the Northern European short-tailed breeds around Northern Europe. These ancient breeds of sheep, which are found across the northern UK, Scandinavia, and the Baltics, are small, independent, and extremely well-adapted to the harsh climates in which they are found. 

Some of these ancient sheep found their way to North Ronaldsay, the northernmost island in the Orkney archipelago, north of Scotland. And, thrifty and adaptable as they were, they made seaweed part of their diet. We know this, based on a scientific analysis of a sheep’s tooth from that period, which contained elements only found in marine plants.

There’s a lot of seaweed on North Ronaldsay. So much, in fact, that some of the humans on North Ronaldsay began to, in the eighteenth century make their living harvesting kelp, which was then burned to produce potash (used in the making of soap, dyes, and glass). At that time, England was rapidly industrializing and needed a lot of potash, most of which it got from Spain and North America. Then, from about 1750-1830, the American revolution and the Napoleonic wars disrupted the flow of potash into England. There was a massive boom in kelp, and North Ronaldsay, with the rest of Orkney, benefitted. The island’s population nearly doubled in those years. According to the (marvelous) website of the Orkney Sheep Foundation, “everyone possible was deployed on the task of harvesting seaweed and making kelp.” 

But the wars ended, and in 1830, England lifted the tariff on Spanish potash and the Orkney kelp industry collapsed. North Ronaldsay, with its newly enlarged population, was devastated. The then-laird of North Ronaldsay, John Traill, proposed a radical solution: agriculture. So the people of North Ronaldsay embarked on building a massive dry-stone dyke around the perimeter of the island, to protect the newly-cultivated land from the island’s native sheep. (You knew I was getting back to sheep, didn’t you?) 13 miles long, the North Ronaldsay sheep dyke is thought to be the largest dry-stone construction project ever attempted. 

You see, the people of North Ronaldsay knew that the sheep were already eating seaweed. Faced with impending starvation, they were willing to gamble that the sheep, now confined to the island’s foreshore, could make the transition to an all seaweed-diet. And they did. They developed special digestive enzymes that enable them to digest the seaweed. And their population on the island has remained at around 2000 since then. A “sheep court” (and yes, I did just say “sheep court”) gathers the sheep together several times a year to count, shear, and otherwise care for them. Though North Ronaldsays need special care when taken off the island, the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, fearing an oil spill in the North Sea, has established reserve flocks off the island.

I’ve said that the population of North Ronaldsay sheep has been stable, but now these sheep are threatened in new ways. Because of climate change, storms in the North Sea have been getting bigger. The sheep dyke was severely damaged by massive storms in 2012 and 13, and the now tiny, ageing human population of the island (60) is no longer able to maintain it. Without the dyke, there’s the chance that the sheep on the foreshore might interbreed with others inland. 
Enter the Orkney Sheep Foundation, which was founded in 2015, “with the objective of securing the future of the native seaweed-eating sheep on the foreshore of North Ronaldsay,” and which is trying to raise funds to repair the dyke. There’s an annual two-week North Ronaldsay Sheep Festival, which brings volunteers to the island to help. 

I’ve talked before on the podcast about the importance of rare sheep breeds in ensuring the future of all sheep, as well as about the special qualities of their wools. North Ronaldsay wool is very special indeed. They have a surprisingly fine undercoat peppered with long guard hairs. There is some kemp, but not very much. There is now a small fiber mill on North Ronaldsay that processes the wool into undyed yarn, roving, and felt; I’ll link to it in the show notes. They ship worldwide. I encourage you to check them out. I also have some dyed North Ronaldsay in my shop.

Based on my experience spinning the roving, my best advice on spinning it would be to go with the flow. Like most machine-processed rovings of multi-coated wools, this roving contains all the different fibers found in the fleece. It’s a nicely-made roving, open and easy to draft, but if you try to spin a perfectly smooth yarn you’ll be frustrated. You can pluck out the longer guard hairs as you spin if you choose. I would describe the resulting yarn as wonderfully rustic. 

I hope you’ve enjoyed this story about remarkable sheep from this remarkable place, and that it inspires you to seek out some of this rare wool, and to support those who are trying to secure the future of these sheep. If you’d like to chat with other listeners about these and other things woolly, you can do so in the Sheepspot Community Facebook group. That’s it for me this week. I’ll be back soon with another episode. In the meantime, go spin something!