Things have really changed in the last ten years,” said Dorthea Joensen from the Faroese Agricultural Agency. “Now people are talking wool up rather than talking it down.”
In early September, standing next to a display reflecting the knitting traditions and contemporary designs of the Faroes, Dorthea spoke about efforts to find value for native breed wool to fellow textile enthusiasts at the Wool’s New Horizons event, part of the 2025 Orkney International Science Festival. Travelling with her colleague, agricultural researcher Jens Ivan í Gerðinum, she had been invited to Orkney by Helga Scott to participate in a package of events on Island Sheep and Island Futures, organised by the North Ronaldsay Trust and supported by Orkney Islands Council’s Nordic Atlantic Fund.
Participants came from across the North Atlantic region – including Iceland, the Faroes, the Outer Hebrides and Northern Ireland – where crofters, farmers, wool and meat industry professionals share what Meg Rodger, of the Berneray-based Birlinn Yarn Company, described as an “understanding of resilience and resourcefulness” that creates the “common bond of island-ness”. If sheep farming is the glue in many rural communities, a central question was: How can the economic viability of the practice be bolstered to support community resilience and preserve heritage without being environmentally destructive or detrimental to animal welfare? This question was at the forefront of the four-day gathering, which began in Kirkwall with a series of talks, events, and site visits on the management and use of native rare breed sheep, before the participants boarded the plane to North Ronaldsay.
Images from the event Wool’s New Horizons by Charlotte Linton & Selena S Kuzman
Wool mill and sheep dyke
On arrival in North Ronaldsay the group were given a tour of the wool mill, developed in 2001 by the island to tackle the low prices that the North Ronaldsay wool clip was getting on the open market. The mill’s manager Jane Donnelly went with her husband Peter to Prince Edward Island in Canada to source machinery developed by Belfast Mini Mills to spin quantities of wool on a local scale. The resulting mill was one of the first of its kind to be set up in the UK. Today, Jane and her colleague Helen process fleeces from many of the island’s 1,800 North Ronaldsay sheep, turning them into lustrous, naturally coloured yarn that is shipped worldwide.
Images by Charlotte Linton
The visitors’ next stop was the site of the £2 million Trebb project, which on completion will house a new wool mill, shop, community facilities, and meat larder. It will also host the Tiny Trailer Abattoir, a visionary project developed by Jane Cooper with the Orkney Boreray community, who are hoping to provide a mobile solution towards desperately needed small-scale slaughtering facilities across Orkney. The North Ronaldsay flock has now mostly returned to the shoreline after this year’s lambing, where they await the winter storms that will supply their diet of kelp (“tangles”) and restore them to peak condition after time spent on grass. It was here on the following day that the visitors got the best views of the semi-feral sheep, when joining the organisers of the North Ronaldsay Sheep Festival – one of Orkney’s “premier voluntourism events” – to repair a section of the island’s Category A-listed “living” Sheep Dyke.
Images by Charlotte Linton
In the evening the community enjoyed a delicious meal of lamb and mutton prepared by chef and managing director of Icelandic Lamb Hafliði Halldórsson and assisted by local residents who contributed produce from their gardens and bakes from their kitchens. The meal was followed by a ceilidh and the teaching of a traditional chain dance and ballad by the Faroese visitors, with the gathering making their best efforts to join in the chorus!
Images by Charlotte Linton
“The eye of the guest is sharper”
The visitors were keen to stress how legendary the seaweed-eating North Ronaldsay sheep are outside of Orkney, where, they said, there is great potential for the marketing of the meat and wool from the island sheep; and they quoted the Icelandic and Faroese saying: Glöggt er gests augað – “The eye of the guest is sharper.” There was a consensus on the importance of “image building through storytelling”, with Prof. Alison Gault from the Belfast School of Art stressing the “voices [of the participants] highlighted the deep connections between tradition, science, creativity, and community” that converge around native sheep.
What became apparent during the event was the responsibility felt by the residents of North Ronaldsay as custodians of an ancient breed and communal ways of working. Because of decisions made by the laird in the 1830s to develop the sheep around a diet of seaweed alone, the breed became tidal, hefted to the island’s shoreline. Without the community to maintain the dyke, take part in punds (when the sheep are gathered for lambing and shearing), and watch over the flock’s well-being, the breed’s survival would be vulnerable – so too the rare birds, flora and insects that rely on the stone wall for protection from the wind. People, sheep, land and sea are intimately connected here, and that is a story worth telling.
You can see above a short video from the event Wool’s New Horizons in the Old Library, Kirkwall. These highlights can also be accessed from the Festival’s Facebook page.
