Cotswold

The Cotswold is a longwool sheep from the hills of western England. Sheep have grazed that country since the Roman conquest, and the breed may carry some of that Roman stock. The name is literal: cots were the folds the sheep were shut into at night, and a wold is bare hill country.

Cotswold wool built the region. By the 1400s the wool trade had made it rich enough to put up the churches still called wool churches, and Elizabethan wool money helped finance English expansion abroad. The Chancellor of the Exchequer still sits on a ceremonial Cotswold wool sack.

The breed in its modern form came together between 1780 and 1820. The first one reached America in 1832, a ram imported to Albany, New York, and American farmers took to it quickly.

It is a luster longwool, slow maturing, and it needs good forage to perform. That last point is the catch: this is not a breed for thin pasture.

The Conservancy moved the Cotswold to Critical in 2026 on falling numbers in its native UK.