Southdown sheep

ONE of the most charming passages in Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne is his letter to Daines Barrington of December 1773, reflecting on how, despite having travelled the Sussex Downs for more than 30 years, he still investigated ‘that chain of majestic mountains with fresh admiration year by year’.

- John Ellman

White was writing from Ringmer, where he often stayed with his aunt and her ancient tortoise, Timothy, the long-suffering recipient of various experiments by the inquisitive Hampshire vicar.

The visits also facilitated his observations on the distinctive hornless (or polled) sheep, black-faced and with a white tuft of wool on their foreheads, that grazed the eastern ranges of the Downs across East and West Sussex. Different from the coarser, horned animals further west, these were Southdown sheep, later famous around the world.

As his walks took him up Mount Caburn, the striking, wedge-shaped hill that rises above the Lewes brooks, White almost certainly saw the Southdown flocks of the Ellman family, shortly to be inherited by the breed’s great improver, John Ellman (1753–1832), on succeeding his father to his Glynde farm tenancy in East Sussex in 1780.

The Southdowns were the linear descendants of sheep that had been grazing the Downs since Neolithic times. Even in the 13th century, the flocks on the hills running from Lewes eastwards to Eastbourne were noted for the quality of their wool. Ellman, however, whose farm complex was in a fold of the hills directly west of Glynde Place, also wanted to improve it as a sweet mutton animal. His selective breeding programme focused on using rams and ewes noted for the quality of their wool and carcass shape.