A lesser spotted flock

“Very quiet” is how Conor Morrow describes his Dutch Spotted sheep as he arranges his ram for a photo on their front garden. The fleece of the Crossdoney teenager’s relatively unusual breed are adorned with eye-catching spots. While most of his flock have brown spots, this ram is graced with black markings.

Conor expertly cajoles it into position, but as soon as the formality is completed the ram behaves almost like a pet dog.

Affectionate, he’s not in the slightest bit alarmed by a stranger in his pen and nuzzles his head in for a scratch behind his ear.

“He’ll get a lot bigger,” says Conor admiringly. “He’ll have another good few years of growing.”

Conor was drawn to the breed by the markings.

The 15 year old previously kept Jacobs - which look like a bigger, badder versions of Dutch Spotted with horns to back up the mean image. Conor laughingly recalls them as “wild”.

The Ricehill home, which has seven acres of land around enables the Morrow family to dabble in sheep, and they have quite a few varieties.

Like his brother Ryan and sister Fiona before him, Conor helps his Dad Peter tend to his flock; a mix of Galway crosses, Charollais crosses, Dorset crosses, and a handful of Zwartbles.

Having bought his first purebred Dutch Spotteds last year from his uncle Clive Morrow, who farms in Monaghan, Conor is eager to focus on this breed for the time being. In that brief time he’s already expanded his young flock to 10 and has joined the Irish Dutch Spotted Sheep Association whose ranks number over 50 members.

It’s not been handed to the diligent teenager. When the Celt called to the Morrow house, the summer was drawing to a close, and Conor, who attends Breifne College had spent it working in Richard Allison’s piggery.

“I convinced Dad to let me go to the first sale, and then it took a bit more convincing to let me go to the second, and now I have to try to convince him to let me go to the third,” he says, raising a laugh from his mam Eileen, which maybe suggestive of Conor’s powers of persuasion.

“If I didn’t have my job I wouldn’t be fit to go to any of the shows - wouldn’t have had the money,” says Conor whose other passion is playing football for Cornafean.

Noting “some breeds are harder than others”, he doesn’t dwell on the effort involved in caring for sheep, and dismissed any notion that maggots are a frequent problem.

“We’ve barely had problems with maggots here and we don’t dip.

“We shear the ewes and put Ecofly on the lambs and we get very few maggots.

We haven’t had a case of maggots at all this year,” he reports.

He’s hopeful the effort will be rewarded when the lambs come.

“It depends on the year, some years can be better than others,” he observes.

To take it to the next stage Conor will have to show stock at one of the four big Dutch Spotted sales - the nearest is at Carnaross Mart.

“This is the first year that I really have enough to show, but I haven’t got the right equipment to get them ready - to style them up, to cut the wool to show them off.”

Much of that would soon be sorted however as he was set to collect a headgate that very evening, to have them ready for sales “probably next year”.

Demand for Dutch Spotted is determined by their quality and breeding, and a good performance in shows helps too.

To Conor’s mind a pair of ewe lambs, born at the start of this year, he bought at the last sale he attended are his best. However, with his black and white ram lamb to hand, Conor indicates the features sought in the breed.

“The more spots on them the better,” he says, and moves on to physique.

“His flat back, and his back end should be wider, then skinnier, then bigger with the belly and wide shoulders.”

Conor plans to “keep breeding them on” and attend the shows.

“Sell a few, keep a few,” he says.

“I’d like to go full time with Dutch Spotted and see how it goes from now on.”