Until the late eighteenth century, the domesticated sheep throughout the Scottish Highlands and Islands belonged to a type called the Scottish Dunface or Old Scottish Shortwool, which was probably similar to the sheep kept in the whole of northern and western Europe up to the Iron Age.
In the late nineteenth century the crofters' sheep were cross-bred with Scottish Blackface sheep,[REF] which by then had replaced the Dunface throughout mainland Scotland [REF].