about Barnstaple on the north coast: the district in which the modern North Devon breed originated. The polled Devons were described to Lawrence as "coloured, middle-sized, thick-set, and apt to make fat, but coarser than the true-bred Devon."[1] Their colour is not recorded, but, in the "Annals of Agriculture" for 1792, a writer called Treby mentions both yellow and hornless cattle in South Devon.'[2]
The Somerset Polls.—These are also extinct. Low wrote of them: "The Sheeted Breed of Somerset … has existed in the same parts of of England from time immemorial. The red colour of the hair has a slight yellow tinge, and the white colour passes like a sheet over the body. The individuals are sometimes horned, but more frequently they are hornless."[3] There is a portrait of two sheeted Somerset cows, a horned and a hornless, in the Low collection of paintings in Edinburgh University.
The Irish Maoiles.—Hornless cattle of the old Irish race are found here and there chiefly in the west and in the north: from the level of Roscommon to Donegal and Antrim. Their numbers are now small, and there being no
- ↑ "General Treatise on Cattle," etc., 1805, p. 71.
- ↑ The presence of these hornless cattle at Barnstaple raises several unusually interesting questions, viz. Did they impart their shortness of leg to the North Devon breed, and did the short legs of the Dexter which came from Devon cattle come originally from Scandinavians?
- ↑ "Domesticated Animals," p. 350.
