Wiltshire Horn

The Wiltshire Horn is a short-wooled sheep from Wiltshire in southwest England, sometimes called the Western or Western Horn. It descends from the large white sheep that grazed Salisbury Plain for centuries, and the line is old enough that sheep found in a Romano-British farm excavation in the county stood only about two inches shorter than a modern one.

In the 1700s it was the dominant sheep across southern England, with an estimated 500,000 to 700,000 of them in the region.

Then the Southdown, the Ryeland and above all the Merino arrived in the 1800s, and the Wiltshire went into decline. It survived because a stubborn few kept their flocks. Producers formed the Wiltshire or Western Sheep Breeders Association on 13 January 1923 to hold the breed together.

Britain exported them to Australia, New Zealand, Kenya, Venezuela, Argentina and France through the 1950s and 1960s.