Galway Sheep - Ireland

The Galway sheep is a breed originating in County Galway, in the west of Ireland and at one point in history, Ireland probably had a fair number of native sheep breeds, but today the Galway is the only officially recognised native Irish breed. They were developed from the late 17th century onwards as a result of the importation of English Longwools into Ireland.  It has been written that in the 1776-1779 period English breeds were not in great favour by the Irish and some of these sheep were actually killed for political reasons.   

Then, in the middle of the 18th century, Lord Roscommon imported large quantities of Dishley Leicesters from his friend Robert Bakewell in England to his estate in County Roscommon.  He heavily crossed them with the old native sheep, yielding the Roscommon breed, which strongly resembled its Leicester roots.  The Roscommon got both very high praise and severe criticism depending on the particular time and the critic.  A flock book of Roscommon Long-Wool sheep was established in 1895, surviving until at least the 1920s.

The Roscommon was a large, white faced polled breed.  Although the sheep were classified as Longwool, they did not have the very long staple characteristic of breeds such as the Lincoln and Leicester Longwool.  It bore, as the modern Galway does, an almost uncanny resemblance to surviving prints and paintings of Bakewell's sheep, signifying it was perhaps more closely related to the Dishley breed than any of  the English breeds which were influenced by Bakewell's stock.

By the early 1920's the Roscommon's numbers had fallen significantly, so in 1923 and after the Roscommon Breed Society had vanished, a group of breeders gathered in the neighbouring county of Galway and selected a small handful of the finest animals from over 6,000 ewes and 200 rams of the Roscommon type to register in a new breed book and founded the Galway Sheep Breeders Society.  The older and less-refined Roscommon's became extinct.

Clearly this was taken on shearing day

The Galway are are large, polled, white-faced sheep, having a characteristic bob of wool on the head and legs.  The outer lips are of a dark colour and dark spots on the ears are common.  They mostly have single lambs but can have twins.  Most ewes weigh 80-85kg but there is a wide variation.  They are primarily raised for meat.  In 1999, there were less than 1,000 true to type Galway sheep in 39 pedigree flocks, a dramatic increase from 14 breeders in 1990, practically all of the breeders are west of the Shannon River. 

Following representations to the Department of Agriculture by the Irish Genetic Resources Conservation Trust, the pedigree Galway is now included in the provisions of the Rural Environment Protection Scheme, and breeders in Ireland receive an additional subsidy payment.  There are just a few hundred Galway ewes in the UK.

Because it is referred to as an Irish Longwool, you might think that the Galway might be like the English Longwools - sleek, lustrous, exceptionally long stapled, and with robust fibre diameters.  You would be wrong, they are more crisp than sleek, they are matte not lustrous and they have moderate staple lengths and fibre diameters.  However, the shape of the locks and the wavy crimp pattern that can be seen in the locks do resemble the more familiar English Longwools.  Locks have the length profile of a Longwool although in miniature, with pointed, slightly curled tips.  The crimp pattern is Longwool style and wavy.  All fleece are white.

This wool spins up more smoothly than many mid-range wools, producing yarns that have a pleasant, firm reliable-feeling character.  Keep the spin simple, like a straight forward 2ply yarn, and you will get good stitch definition in textured knitted patterns formed by using combinations of knit and purl stitches.  If you favour spinning novelty yarns, which are spun to have more texture, the designer effects like loops, feathery bits of loose surface fibre, slubs etc will have enough body not to be crushed into oblivion,  

Fleeces are white and generally weigh - 2.5kg-3.6kg and they have a staple length of 11.½cm -19cm (4½ - 7½ inches) with fibre diameters of 26-32 microns.  The obvious choice for preparation is to comb although spinning from loosened locks is an option. It can be carded if the fibre length is in your comfort zone for that technique.  The fibres draft easily into your choice or thick or thin singles.  Some are suitable for next-to-skin wear but some are slightly coarser.  If you are dyeing this fibre, it produces clear colours, with apparent depth due to the crimp profile rather than lustre.  It's not very well known but is a lovely white with more density and heft than more comparable wools.

I bought this breed in as a 100g bag of washed fleece back in May 2022 from a lady that I've been buying quite a few of the rarer breeds from.  From the information she gives on her sales page, she states that this was sourced from a member of the Galway Sheep Society but the sheep was raised here in England after they were introduced to Britain in 1990 from top flocks in the West of Ireland and they are considered to be the only native sheep from Ireland.

It felt very greasy and there was no way that I was going to attempt to comb this until I had washed it myself.  I'm glad I did, because the water turned milky white, indicating how much lanolin was still in this fleece.  

This one feels a little special to me as I have recently discovered that I have great-great-great-grandparents that both came from County Galway, although I've not yet discovered the name of the town or towns where they came from, and they would have left Ireland to come to England between 1848 and 1851 at around the time the original Roscommon sheep were being developed using the Dishley Leicesters.

Once it was dry, I combed it, and I got 56g of slightly crisp, hand-combed top ready to spin. 

I spun this over 15th and 16th September 2026. Some small sections of the fibre were quite soft, but for the most part it was fairly coarse wool. It is not for next-to-skin wear. My finished yarn as 55g/243m.

I knitted the majority of the sample piece on 8th October and finished it on 9th October 2026.

 

Pommersches Rauhwollschaf (Pomeranian) - Germany

Pommersches Rauhwollschaf is a breed of sheep that comes from Germany.  They were first called Grauwollschafe, which means "greywool sheep" but this changed to Rauwollschafe by dropping the first letter.  They are also known as the Rough-wooled Pomeranian Landschaf,  the Pomeranian Coarsewool, Pomeranian, Pommernschaf and Rauhwolliges Pommersches Landschaf. 

The first records of similar sheep in Pomerania can be traced to more than 3,000 years ago.  It is a landrace sheep that used to be kept in small flocks along the Baltic Sea in Pommern and Mecklenburg for its wool, meat and milk. The owners ate the meat, the dung fertilized gardens and fields and the wool was made into clothing.  Fishermen especially appreciated the weatherproof wool products.

In the middle of the 19th century, agricultural production was intensified and the existing landrace breeds were modified. The rise of the textile industry meant that there was a high demand for fine wool and the breeders crossbred and kept imported Spanish Merino instead of the landrace sheep and this caused the decline of the Pomeranian.  To give an idea of why so many made the switch from keeping the landrace sheep in favour of the fine-woolled sheep. In 1825 the price of very fine wool paid the shepherd twice as much money as half-fine wool, which in turn paid the shepherd twice as much money as landrace wool so by switching from keeping landrace sheep to keeping very fine wool sheep the shepherd earned 4 times as much money and so the landrace sheep was replaced almost entirely, except for a few small farmers along the Baltic Sea who continued to keep and breed the Pommersches Rauhwollschaf because they loved them so much and thank goodness they did else it may have become extinct.

The Pommersches Rauhwollschaf breed became increasingly rare after the WWII and threatened to fall victim to the trend toward standardisation.  The breed almost completely disappeared.  In 1982, breeders on the island of Ruegen, which was in Communist East Germany at that time, scraped together the remnants of the sheep and created a gene pool with 7 rams and 46 ewes to keep this hardy breed alive.  They had survived because the shepherds appreciated the hardy, easy to keep sheep the grew the perfect hand spinners fleece.  East Germany's Communist regime did not permit the export of ewes into West Germany. The first West Germans to breed Pomeranian sheep had to start with a Pomeranian ram and another landrace - in one case the Rhoenschaf.  Once the East German Communist regime realised that they could make a lot of money with the sale of Pomeranian ewes, they asked for astronomical prices, which nobody paid.  When the Berlin Wall was dismantled in November 1989 and the two Germany's were once again reunited, it was easier to obtain the proper sheep for breeding.  Literally at the last minute, the UN placed this ancient breed on the Red List of endangered domestic animal breeds.  This was achieved in no small part due to the persistent efforts of the displaced Pomeranians, who had found a new home in West Germany.

The Society for the Preservation of Old and Endangered Domestic Animal Breeds (GEH) has classified this breed in Category III (Endangered) of the Red List (as of May 2024).  It has also been appointed a breed supervisor.

They are a medium sized fine boned sheep and both sexes are polled. Rams weigh around 65kg-70kg and ewes weigh around 50kg-55kg.  They have sturdy long legs and hard hoofs.  They have black wedge-shaped heads which should be consistently dark, although a lighter shade of hair is often present around the muzzle, which is not considered a fault.  The head should be free of wool up to the ears which are generally pert.  The legs are also free of wool and almost jet black. The tongue is also black and they have long woolly tails.  They are very hardy and able to live outside all year, even raising lambs in the snow and are perfectly adapted to the harsh coastal climate. They are highly resistant against parasites, have a low susceptibility to lungworms and suffer from very little heart disease.  They are not fussy eaters, being able to thrive on poor forage and can be kept alone or in flocks. They attach themselves to people and are not demanding.  

Ewes lamb by themselves in the pasture without help and can be bred three times in two years.  Lambs are born black and turn steel-grey, blue-grey, grey brown or light grey.  White, brown and black fleece are not permitted.  Fleece become lighter in colour as the sheep age so a silver-grey lamb will become white and should be culled.  As they age, Rams develop manes on the neck, chest, withers or flanks.  In old rams, the mane sometimes reaches down to the forechest.

The fleece are double-coated with an outer coat of 5½ - 8¾ inches (14-22cm) of long wool and a fine undercoat.  Fleeces weigh between 3kg-7kg.  Average fibre diameters are 30-40 microns.  The undercoat wool is soft to medium, like Romney to Shetland. Hand spinners love the wool with its interesting shades of grey and they turn the yarn into rugged, indestructible weatherproof sweaters and jackets.  The hand spun wool turns out softer than the same fleece spun by machine.  It can be felted but takes a lot more work. 

I brought this breed in as 100g of pre-washed lambs fleece in May 2022 but as I have been discovering "washed" isn't necessary washed to my standards so I have automatically been washing them again to ensure that they are not still full of grease, which clogs up my preparation tools.

After washing and drying it weighed 93g.  I combed this on 18th December 2022 and I got 59g of soft hand combed top from it and I don't recall there being any coarse hairs in this, I certainly haven't made any notes to say that there were coarse hairs in the fleece. It is a lambs fleece, so there is less likely to be any coarse hairs in it until it reaches adulthood and is sheared again.

I started spinning this on 15th September 2026. It was a pleasure to spin, very soft with just a slight prickle factor. There are many shades of grey within the hand-combed nests, and each nest appears dark on one end and light on the other. For the first single I pre-drafted the nests all from the same end, starting with the dark end, ending with the light. For the second single, I pre-drafted the nests from the light end to the dark. With luck, the dark fibres will be plied to light fibres and vice versa, and thus evening out the shades of grey in the yarn, at least to some degree. I achieved a yarn that was 59g/191m. It is soft with just a hint of prickliness.

For the knitted sample, I started on 29th September and finished on 5th October 2026, using most of the yarn and only having 16g/51m left to play with.  Because of the width of the knitted piece, the photos taken to show the lettering are taken in sections along the sample.